A multimodal analysis of spoken medical English in expert-to-expert interaction in TV programmes

Abstract

The present paper intends to investigate oral communication between professionals in medical contexts. Apparently, this is quite a neglected area of research in the abundant literature on spoken medical English, which mainly focuses on doctor-patient encounters. Due to the difficulty in finding available data on real sequences in this domain, this study aims to analyse this type of specialised discourse, within the Multimodal Analysis framework and with a holistic approach, in two different American TV products, namely the medical drama Code Black (M. Seitzman, 2015-present), well known for its plausibility and verisimilitude as far as medical procedures are concerned, and the medical docuseries Boston Med (2010). On the verbal level, special attention will be paid to vocabulary, speech acts, register variation according to the participants’ role and to the level of emergency of the situation. Moreover, and most importantly, analysis will be carried out also on the non-verbal level through the multimodal annotator software ELAN (Wittenburg, Brugman, Russel, Klassmann & Sloetjes, 2006), thus integrating verbal and non-verbal cues (e.g. gaze direction, hand/arm gestures, etc.) to show how a multimodal approach can actually help to interpret a message, especially in situated communicative and specialised contexts