The objective of this work is to analyse how the Brazilian people show or express acts of thanking and also to bring a contribuition to the description of the Portuguese language so as to contribute to its approach as a second language (PL2), thus helping the teachers in their task of giving lesson to foreigner. In the Brazilian Portuguese the act of thanking is a kind of ritual that involves a variety of verbal and non-verbal resources, which are employed by the native speaker in order to realize it adequately. However, we have to consider as well that multiple factors interfere in the social and linguistic behavior of the Brazilian people at the time they realize this act of communication . This research is theorelically based on the Sociolinguistic Interactional, on the Intercultural Communication and also on the Cultural Anthropology. The corpus of this work was formed from the analysis of scenes of a TV sit-com named A grande família presented by Rede Globo de Televisão during the years of 2003 and 2004. The presented scenes reproduce the common behavior of a regular family in Rio de Janeiro. The study observing the use of thanks among the characters was complemented with the analysis of three textbooks for the teaching of Portuguese as second language. Based on these two sources, we decided to investigate the main expressions of thanking used by Brazilians, as well as the factors that interfere in the choices of the speakers in this type of interaction.