Abstract
Audiovisual material, such as movies and series, give the teacher the opportunity to point out different types of the target language speakers: native speakers (commonly taken as example) and intercultural speakers (House 2007). Such non-native speakers are the ones who take proper use of the foreign language to communicate. Introducing non-native speakers to the student is importante so they can break the concept of the native speaker as an ideal learning model (Rajagopalan 2012); due to this reason it’s indispensable to have this kind of character properly represented in series and movies. Bearing this in mind, we aim to analyze, in this paper, the series Erste Wege in Deutschland and Jojo sucht das Glück, regarding their main characters (both supposedly intercultural speakers). Two and five episodes from these series respectively have been analyzed, in order to reflect on the main characters, based on the characterization of intercultural speaker from related studies (Byram, Gribkova and Starkey 2002; House 2007; Oliveira 2012). The results point out to a superficial representation of these characters, once they reproduce, in general, typical characteristics of an ideal speaker, which creates stereotyped images of the target language.
Keywords:
teaching and learning of german; intercultural learning; intercultural speaker; audiovisual materials