A Stylistic Analysis of John Keating’s Teacher Talk in Dead Poets Society

Abstract

This study presents a stylistic analysis of John Keating's teacher talk in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society, applying Leech and Short's (2007) three-level analytical framework as the primary theoretical instrument. The study was motivated by the absence of systematic linguistic analysis of scripted cinematic teacher talk in existing scholarship. Two research questions guided the study: (1) what stylistic features at the lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical levels are found in John Keating's teacher talk; and (2) how do these features collectively shape his pedagogical speech style. A qualitative descriptive design was employed, with a corpus of 140 utterances drawn from thirteen pedagogically framed scenes, verified against the official movie script. The analysis identifies 26 stylistic sub-features: eight lexical features, eight syntactic features, and ten rhetorical devices. These features construct a distinctive multiregistral pedagogical voice through lexical deviation from institutional norms, syntactic deviation and regularisation, and rhetorical foregrounding through schemes and tropes. The three analytical levels converge at the most pedagogically intense moments in the corpus, generating cumulative foregrounding effects that constitute the defining formal property of Keating's style. This study contributes by extending Leech and Short's framework to scripted cinematic teacher talk and providing a replicable analytical model for the study of teacher figures in educational cinema.