Beyond What Meets the Eye: Using Intralingual Glosses as Instances of Authentic Discourse in Korean L2 Pedagogy

This article presents an in-depth, multilevel discourse analysis of intralingual glosses in Korean reality television programing. Intralingual glossing is the practice of representing spoken discourse as readable text. The analysis is based on 88 minutes of reality television programing across nine different shows. The programs feature participants from a variety of backgrounds and ages, hailing from Seoul and other geographic regions of South Korea. This study focuses on the pervasive (and at times subtle) mismatches between what the participants (interviewees, hosts, guests, featured citizens) actually say and how (and why) their utterances are altered in the intralingual glosses. This article takes a three-tiered multilevel approach to the analysis of the discourse, whereby patterns of micro-level speech-to-text mismatches (i.e., additions, deletions, enunciation tweaks, and lexical substitutions/rephrasings) reveal the meso-level themes of depersonalizing, tidying, and calibrating for accuracy, the whole of which elucidates macro-level ideological values of what is considered standard, correct, appropriate, and suitable for audience consumption. Pedagogical application of this subgenre of authentic discourse includes detailed listening comprehension exercises in addition to feature-specific tasks to make salient to teachers and learners alike the dynamic nature of language use and the various semantic, pragmatic, and ideological meanings that underlie linguistic choice.¹