Intuition suggests that movie dialogues are more interesting, lively, natural and emotionally-fertile than model dialogues found in ready-made EFL textbooks. Metaphorically, the former are "fresh raw fish" and the latter are" canned fish." As an attempt to demonstrate the validity of our intuition, this paper will closely examine a sample dialogue from The Bodyguard and another sample from a typical English conversation textbook, by applying methods of discourse analysis, especially in light of conversational norms and items of discourse grammar such as reference, ellipsis, substitution and cohesion. Constant attention will be paid to the point that in movie dialogues meanings are heavily context-dependent. In addition, suggestions derived from such analysis to teaching English through movies will be briefly discussed.
