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Conference programme and book of abstracts

4-6 June, 2014Santiago de Compostela (Spain)

Spokenenglish

ICSE 2014International Conference on

Descriptive and Applied Perspectives

Conference programme and book of abstracts

Spokenenglish

ICSE 2014International Conference on

Descriptive and Applied Perspectives

1

Organizing committee

Chairs: F. Javier Fernández Polo Mario Cal Varela Secretaries: Ignacio Palacios Martínez M Luisa Roca Varela

Treasurers: Lidia Gómez García Yolanda J. Calvo Benzies Committee members: Rosa Alonso Begoña Jamardo Paula López Rúa Paloma Núñez Pertejo

Student assistants

Cristina Blanco García Zeltia Blanco Suárez Tamara Bouso Rivas Eduardo Coto Villalibre Iria de Dios Flores Tania de Dios Miguéns Aleksandra Kaverina

Tamilla Mammadova Paula Márquez Caamaño Beatriz Mato Míguez Alba Pérez González Iria Gael Romay Fernández Mario Serrano Losada Iván Tamaredo Meira

Scientific committee

Carlos Acuña Fariña Marian Amengual Gisle Andersen Isabel Balteiro Sally Burgess Jenny Cheshire María Luisa Diez Arroyo Teresa Fanego Lema Ana Fernández Dobao Inmaculada Fortanet Pilar García Mayo Maurizio Gotti Gäetanelle Gilquin Elise Karkkainen María José López Couso

Rosa Lorés Anna Mauranen Ana Martínez Insua Belén Méndez Naya Javier Pérez Guerra Esperanza Rama Sagrario Salaberri Elena Seoane Posse Sali Tagliamonte Cristina Suárez Gómez Scott Thornbury Eivind Torgensen Roberto Valdeón Eduardo Varela Ignacio Vázquez Orta

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

FLOOR PLAN OF CONFERENCE VENUE .......................................... 7 CONFERENCE PROGRAMME .............................................................. 9

CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS

(Listed in alphabetical order, according to the surname of the first author)

PLENARIES .............................................................................................. 13

Epistemic legitimisation, commitment and evasion in discourse: The case of Tony Blair. Juana Marín Arrese ........................................................ 15

Academic dialogue: Co-constructing knowledge in English as a lingua franca. Anna Mauranen ............................................................................... 18

Features of discourse foreign language teachers live by. Sagrario Salaberri ................................................................................................. 18

So like you know what? Spoken English entering the 21st century. Sali Tagliamonte .................................................................................................... 19

FULL PAPERS .......................................................................................... 23

The teaching of spoken English in secondary education and state language schools. Rosa Alonso & Patricia Argibay Suárez .................................. 25

An exploration of the varieties of the ESL Speakers’ Pronunciation. Hmoud Alotaibi ...................................................................................................... 26

Improving students’ oral competence through the reform of high-stakes tests. Marian Amengual & Jesús García Laborda ...................................... 27

Pronunciation in Spanish EFL materials for advanced learners: An evaluation of activities and a remedial programme. Yolanda Joy Calvo Benzies .................................................................................... 29

Starting Skype conversations: Pragmatic features and strategies in an ELF context. Stefan Diemer, Marie-Louise Brunner & Selina Schmidt ...................................... 31

A study of the discourse connective 'Yeah No' in Hiberno-English. John Donnelly ........................................................................................................ 34

Using telecollaborative learning projects to promote communicative competence in English in Sri Lankan primary schools. Thushara Gamage .................................................................................................. 34

Fostering oral skills in the primary EFL classroom via Desktop Videoconferencing. A pilot study. Araceli García Fuentes .......................................................................................... 36

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What does it happen in the ZPD during paired speaking tests? Jesús García Laborda & Nuria Otero de Juan ...................................................... 38

Discourse Analysis in the CLIL Classroom. The Effects of Teaching Activities on the Learning Process. David González Gándara ....................................................................................... 40

Talking the talk: ‘real world’ speech in relation to the ‘speaking activities’ in Portuguese produced English language teaching coursebooks. Nicolas Hurst ................................................................................... 43

When do we rectify? Rectification in contemporary spoken British English. Aleksandra Kaverina ............................................................................... 44

Discourse markers in university lecture settings: Enhancing communicative competence. Elena Kruglikova .................................................... 46

On ‘Standard Cases’ of verbal irony in spoken English. Claudia Lehmann ................................................................................................... 49

What makes a contraction: The import of speech rate on the realization of 'have to'. David Lorenz & David Tizón-Couto ................................ 50

The treatment of English conversation grammar in modern advanced EFL textbooks. Tamilla Mammadova .................................................... 52

Code-switching as a communication strategy in private ELF conversations. Kaisa Pietikäinen ........................................................................... 54

Oral English needs in Spanish professional settings: Different perspectives. Lourdes Pomposo ............................................................................. 56

‘Dude—This weed is DANK!’ Spoken discourse as the locus of lexical semantic change. Kurt Queller ................................................................... 57

From boardroom meeting to minutes: The oral-written continuum. Rosa Rabadán, Isabel Pizarro & Marlén Izquierdo .............................................. 59

‘So what does the Porsche have man?’ Discourse markers as cues to topic structure in conversation. Marine Riou ..................................................... 61

Speech verbs in nineteenth-century English fiction: Or how the narrator is responsible for the orality of his characters. Pablo Ruano ........................................................................................................... 63

Approaching multimodal discourse analysis to students’ training in academic contexts: Understanding questions in guest lectures. Mª Noelia Ruiz Madrid & Inmaculada Fortanet ................................................... 65

Assessment criteria for spoken interactions in ESP (English for Law Enforcement) target language use situations. Sonsoles Sánchez-Reyes & Gabriela Torregrosa .................................................. 67

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CLIL and educational games in primary school. Lidia Santos .................................... 70

A contrastive analysis of tense in spoken ENL and ESL. Elena Seoane & Cristina Suárez Gómez ................................................................ 72

Let’s hear it for the past: Visual input for better pronunciation. Harun Serpil & Leslie Kelly ................................................................................... 74

Left-dislocated NPs across the ‘speech-like’-‘written’ genre continuum in the recent history of English. David Tizón-Couto ................................................................................................. 75

Exploring the oral-written continuum by means of a comic strip: 'Basic Instructions' by Scott Meyer. Eduardo José Varela Bravo ................................................................................... 78

A Critical review of corpora for studying grammatical changes in spoken English. José Ramón Varela Pérez ............................................................ 80

Beyond language: Discussing social issues in the EFL Costa Rican classroom. Vivian Vargas & Vera Madrigal ......................................................... 82

Word order in matrix Wh-questions in Cajun Vernacular English. Richard Winters ..................................................................................................... 83

POSTERS ................................................................................................... 87

Are our students speaking English? Use of English in non-academic settings. Alba Gutiérrez Martínez .......................................................................... 89

Fluency and the use and functions of highly frequent lexical bundles in spoken texts by Norwegian non-native speakers of English. Hege Larsson Aas .................................................................................... 89

EFL learners' use of phrasal and phrasal prepositional verbs in spoken English: A preliminary corpus-based study. Martiña Piñeiro ...................................................................................................... 91

Learner corpora of spoken English: analysis of Czech university students' performances. Ježková Šárka .................................................................. 93

WORKSHOP ............................................................................................. 95

CASE - The Corpus of Academic Spoken English. Stefan Diemer, Marie-Louise Brunner & Selina Schmidt ...................................... 97

LIST OF PRESENTERS ........................................................................ 100

FLOOR PLAN O

7

OF CONFE

ERENCEE VENUEE

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CONFERENCE PROGRAMME Wednesday 4

09:00 – 10:00 Reception of participants

Representing orality

(Room 7)Testing

(Room 8)

10:00 – 10:30

Eduardo José Varela Bravo(Universidade de Vigo)

Exploring the oral-written continuum by means of a comic strip: 'Basic Instructions'

by Scott Meyer.

Jesús García Laborda Nuria Otero de Juan

(Universidad de Alcalá) What does it happen in the ZPD during

paired speaking tests?

10:30 – 11:00

Pablo Ruano(Universidad de Extremadura)

Speech verbs in nineteenth-century English fiction: Or how the narrator is responsible

for the orality of his characters.

Hmoud Alotaibi (Shaqra University)

An exploration of the varieties of the ESL Speakers’ Pronunciation.

11:00 – 11:30

Kurt Queller(University of Idaho)

“Dude—This weed is DANK!” Spoken discourse as the locus of lexical semantic

change.

Marian Amengual (Universitat Illes Balears)

Jesús García Laborda (Universidad de Alcalá)

Improving students’ oral competence through the reform of high-stakes tests.

11:30 – 12:00 Coffee break (Cafeteria)

12:00 – 12:15 Opening

(Main Hall)

12:15 – 13:30

Plenary talk Sali A. Tagliamonte

(University of Toronto) So like you know what? Spoken English entering the 21st century

(Main Hall)

LUNCH

Communication strategies

(Room 7)CLIL

(Room 8)

15:30 – 16:00

José Ramón Varela Pérez(Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) A critical review of corpora for studying grammatical changes in spoken English.

Vivian Vargas Vera Madrigal

(Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica) Beyond language: Discussing social issues

in the EFL Costa Rican classroom.

16:00 – 16:30

Kaisa Pietikäinen(University of Helsinki)

Code-switching as a communication strategy in private ELF conversations.

Lidia Santos (Universidade de Vigo)

CLIL and educational games in primary school.

16:30 – 17:00

Stefan DiemerMarie-Louise Brunner

Selina Schmidt (Universität des Saarlandes)

Starting Skype conversations: Pragmatic features and strategies in an ELF context.

David González Gándara (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) Discourse Analysis in the CLIL classroom.

The effects of teaching activities on the learning process.


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Wednesday 4 (cont.)

Poster session (Lecture Hall)

17:30 – 18:30

Alba Gutiérrez Martínez (Universidad del País Vasco)

Are our students speaking English? Use of English in non-academic settings.

Hege Larsson Aas (Høgskolen i Hedmark)

Fluency and the use and functions of highly frequent lexical bundles in spoken texts by Norwegian non-native speakers of English.

Martiña Piñeiro

(Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) EFL learners' use of phrasal and phrasal prepositional verbs in spoken English: A preliminary

corpus-based study.

Ježková Šárka (Univerzita Pardubice)

Learner corpora of spoken English: Analysis of Czech university students' performances.

19:30 Short guided tour

(meeting point: Obradoiro Square)

20:30 Reception

(Pazo de Fonseca)

Thursday 5

Varieties of English

(Room 7)Pronunciation

(Room 8)

09:00 – 09:30

John Donnelly (Trinity College Dublin)

A study of the discourse connective 'Yeah No' in Hiberno-English.

David Lorenz (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)

David Tizón-Couto (Universidade de Vigo)

What makes a contraction: The import of speech rate on the realization of 'have

to'.

09:30 – 10:00

Elena Seoane(Universidade de Vigo) Cristina Suárez Gómez

(Universitat Illes Balears) A contrastive analysis of tense in spoken ENL

and ESL.

Rosa Alonso (Universidade de Vigo) Patricia Argibay Suárez

The teaching of spoken English in secondary education and state language

schools.

10:00 – 10:30

Richard Winters(University of Louisiana at Lafayette)

Word order in matrix Wh-questions in Cajun Vernacular English.

Harun Serpil Leslie Kelly

(Anadolu Üniversitesi) Let’s hear it for the past: Visual input

for better pronunciation.


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Thursday 5 (cont.)

Workshop

(Lecture Hall)

11:00 – 12:00

Stefan DiemerMarie-Louise Brunner

Selina Schmidt (Universität des Saarlandes)

CASE - The Corpus of Academic Spoken English.

12:15 – 13:30

Plenary talk Sagrario Salaberri

(Universidad de Almería) Features of discourse foreign language teachers live by

(Main Hall)

LUNCH

Discourse and pragmatics

(Room 7)Teaching materials

(Room 8)

15:30 – 16:00

Marine Riou(Université Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle -

Université Paris 7 Denis Diderot) "So what does the Porsche have man?"

Discourse markers as cues to topic structure in conversation.

Tamilla Mammadova (Universidade de Santiago de

Compostela) The treatment of English conversation

grammar in modern advanced EFL textbooks.

16:00 – 16:30

Claudia Lehmann(Universität Osnabrück)

On ‘Standard Cases’ of verbal irony in spoken English.

Nicolas Hurst (Universidade do Porto)

Talking the talk: ‘Real world’ speech in relation to the ‘speaking activities’ in

Portuguese produced English language teaching coursebooks.

16:30 – 17:00

Aleksandra Kaverina(Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)

When do we rectify?: Rectification in contemporary spoken British English.

Yolanda Joy Calvo Benzies (Universidade de Santiago de

Compostela) Pronunciation in Spanish EFL materials for advanced learners: An evaluation of activities and a remedial programme.


17:30 – 18:45

Plenary talk Juana Marín Arrese

(Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Epistemic legitimisation, commitment and evasion in discourse: The case of Tony Blair

(Main Hall)

20:30 Gala dinner

(Hotel San Francisco)

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Friday 6

The oral-written continuum

(Room 7)ESP

(Room 8)

09:30 – 10:00

Rosa Rabadán(Universidad de León)

Isabel Pizarro (Universidad de Valladolid)

Marlén Izquierdo (Universidad del País Vasco)

From boardroom meeting to minutes: The oral-written continuum.

Sonsoles Sánchez-Reyes PeñamaríaGabriela Torregrosa Benavent (Universidad de Salamanca)

Assessment criteria for spoken interactions in ESP (English for Law

Enforcement) target language use situations.

10:00 – 10:30

David Tizón-Couto(Universidade de Vigo)

Left-dislocated NPs across the ‘speech-like’-‘written’ genre continuum in the recent history

of English.

Lourdes Pomposo (UNED)

Oral English needs in Spanish professional settings: Different

perspectives.

10:30 – 11:00

ICTs(Room 7)

Mª Noelia Ruiz Madrid Inmaculada Fortanet (Universitat Jaume I)

Approaching multimodal discourse analysis to students’ training in

academic contexts: Understanding questions in guest lectures.

Araceli García Fuentes(Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)

Fostering oral skills in the primary EFL classroom via Desktop Videoconferencing. A

pilot study.

11:00 – 11:30

Thushara Gamage (Macquarie University, Sydney)

Using telecollaborative learning projects to promote communicative competence in English

in Sri Lankan primary schools.

Elena Kruglikova (Siberian Federal University)

Discourse markers in the university lecture setting: Enhancing

communicative competence.


12:15 – 13:30

Plenary talk Anna Mauranen

(University of Helsinki) Academic dialogue: Co-constructing knowledge in English as a lingua franca

(Main Hall)

LUNCH

15:30 Excursion to the Galician coast

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PLENARIES

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Epistemic legitimisation, commitment and evasion in discourse: The case of Tony Blair

JUANA MARÍN ARRESE (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

This paper examines the use of epistemic stance resources as strategies for the

legitimisation of assertions, and as strategies for the obfuscation of speakers’

responsibility and accountability in supporting or justifying the veracity or validity of

their assertions (Marín-Arrese 2011a, 2013). Speakers make strategic use of epistemic

stance expressions, thereby seeking to legitimise the truth or validity of a representation

and overcome hearers’ cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance (Sperber at al.

2010, Hart 2011, Marín-Arrese 2011b). Since epistemic stance expressions are by

default indexical of the speaker's subjective and intersubjective positioning, the use of

these resources may also involve strategies for the mystification the speaker as

conceptualizer, by means of intersubjective and implicit indexing or by the evocation of

a virtual or generalized conceptualizer (Marín-Arrese 2011a, 2013).

The conceptual domain of epistemicity comprises the subcategories of evidentiality and

epistemic modality and pertains to the expression of epistemic support and evidentiary

justification for the communicated proposition (Boye 2012). The framework for the

analysis of stancetaking is based on a model which posits two macro categories of

stance, effective stance and epistemic stance, which are systematically related to the

indexing of inter/subjectivity (Marín-Arrese 2009, 2011a). In characterising the

categories, I draw on Langacker's (2007, 2009) distinction between the effective and the

epistemic level in discourse, which involves a systematic opposition between striving

for control of relations at the level of reality and control of conceptions of reality. The

category of epistemic stance includes epistemic modals, evidential and pseudo-

evidential expressions, and expressions of cognitive attitude and factivity (Chafe 1986,

Palmer 2001, Marín-Arrese 2009, 2011a, 2013). The model likewise relates epistemic

stance to the dimension of subjectivity/intersubjectivity, in terms of the degree of

salience of the conceptualizer role indexed by these resources (Langacker 1991), and

the degree to which they evoke personal responsibility of the stancetaker for the

communicated information or intersubjectively shared responsibility (Nuyts 2012).

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Epistemic stance resources reflect different forms and degrees of commitment of the

speaker towards the communicated information. Speakers have a vested interest in

justifying their assertions, especially in the context of a public inquiry, since they may

be held politically accountable for their assertions. Witnesses will ‘strive for epistemic

control’ (Langacker 2009) in the discourse, by attempting to manipulate the perceptions

of hearers and defeat their epistemic vigilance, and may thus make conscious choices to

either enhance or mitigate the force of their assertions. Mitigation involves decreased

commitment, which may be effective in both managing accountability for the

information and in maintaining an appearance of cooperation (Berlin 2008). In oral

testimony the use of aphonic stance markers (Brandt 2004), or ignorative uses of

language (Donaldson 1980), also allows the politician to distance themselves from a

position of responsibility by claiming ignorance or lack of sufficient information. These

forms of evasion or slipperiness, which have been explained in terms of face

management in political interviews (Bull 2008), may however prove damaging to their

credibility as witnesses in a public inquiry.

The paper presents a case study on the expression of stance and inter/subjectivity in the

oral evidence given by Tony Blair, as British Prime Minister, in the Hutton Inquiry

(August-October 2003), and to the Select Committee of the Iraq War Inquiry (2009), as

former Prime Minister. It will be argued that Tony Blair’s intended discursive

legitimation of events will be reflected in the pattern of use of epistemic stance

resources and in the expression of inter/subjectivity. The paper aims to establish

whether the stancetaking patterns in the two inquiries reveal particular preferred

legitimising strategies, which may relate to differences in Blair’s perceived political

involvement and interests, and thus in his coercive rhetorical goals.

References

Boye, Kasper. 2012. Epistemic meaning: A crosslinguistic and functional-cognitive study. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Berlin, Lawrence N. 2008. “I Think, Therefore ...”: Commitment in political testimony. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 27/4: 372-383.

Brandt, Per Aage. 2004. Evidentiality and enunciation. A cognitive and semiotic approach. In Juana I. Marín-Arrese (ed.) Perspectives on evidentiality and modality. Madrid: Editorial Complutense: 3-10.

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Bull, Peter. 2008. “Slipperiness, Evasion and Ambiguity”. Equivocation and facework in noncommittal political discourse. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 27/4: 333-344.

Chafe, Wallace. 1986. Evidentiality in English conversation and academic writing. In W. Chafe & J. Nichols (eds.) Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology. New York: Ablex: 261-272.

Donaldson, Tamsin. 1980. Ngiyambaa: the language of the Wangaaybuwan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hart, Christopher. 2011. Legitimising assertions and the logico-rhetorical module: Evidence and epistemic vigilance in media discourse on immigration. Discourse Studies 13/6: 751-769.

Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. II. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

——— 2009. Investigations in Cognitive Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

——— 2013. Modals: Striving for control. In J.I. Marín-Arrese, M. Carretero, J. Arús & J. van der Auwera (eds.) English modality: Core, periphery and evidentiality. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter: 3-55.

Marín-Arrese, Juana I. 2009. Effective vs. epistemic stance and subjectivity/ intersubjectivity in political discourse: A case study. In A. Tsangalidis & R. Facchinetti (eds.), Studies on English modality. In honour of Frank R. Palmer. Berlin: Peter Lang: 23-52.

——— 2011a. Effective vs. epistemic stance and subjectivity in political discourse: legitimising strategies and mystification of responsibility. In C. Hart (ed.). Critical discourse studies in context and cognition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 193-223.

——— 2011b. Epistemic legitimising strategies, commitment and accountability in discourse. Discourse Studies 13/6: 789-797.

——— 2013. Stancetaking and inter/subjectivity in the Iraq Inquiry: Blair vs. Brown. In J.I. Marín-Arrese, M. Carretero, J. Arús & J. van der Auwera (eds.) English modality: Core, periphery and evidentiality. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter: 411-445.

Nuyts, Jan. 2012. Notions of (inter)subjectivity. English Text Construction 5/1: 53-76.

Palmer, Frank. 2001. Mood and modality. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sperber, Dan, Fabrice Clément, Christophe Heintz, Olivier Mascaro, Hugo Mercier, Gloria Origgi, & Deidre Wilson. 2010. Epistemic vigilance. Mind and Language 25: 359-393.

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Academic dialogue: Co-constructing knowledge in English as a lingua franca

ANNA MAURANEN (University of Helsinki)

Academia is made up of endless spoken interaction that constitutes, reconstitutes and

develops it as an abstract, aggregate institution: academics talk to their peers in

conferences, in meetings, coffee-rooms and laboratories, and socialise generations of

students by talking to them in lectures, seminars, field trips, and consultations. Practices

vary across national and regional cultures, disciplines, and even institutions, but

interactional talk is omnipresent. It shapes our identities and our understanding of

academia and our disciplines. All this has become increasingly global, swiftly altering

our linguistic environment: not only do we publish and run conferences in English, but a

growing proportion of higher education programmes in non-English-speaking countries

are now carried out in English. In all these international contexts, English is used as a

lingua franca, with a minority of speakers for whom it is their native language. In these

circumstances, understanding what academic discourses are like and how they take

shape, it is crucial to look into the ways in which we speak English as a lingua franca.

This paper looks into English as a lingua franca in multi-party academic discussion. In

addition to the linguistic and discursive processes enabling the coming together of

participants’ widely diverse points of departure, the specific focus is on dialogic

discourse in the co-construction of knowledge, and the role of metadiscourse in this

collaborative achievement.

Features of discourse foreign language teachers live by

SAGRARIO SALABERRI (Universidad de Almería)

Certain discourse features used by teachers of English as a foreign language when

interacting with students in the performance of language learning tasks will be analysed,

with a focus on: a) the relationship between language and thought; b) discourse in the

classroom as a mediator that contributes to the construction of shared meaning. The

samples presented have been collected in the interaction between teachers and students

19

in primary and secondary schools. Aspects of “Teacher talk” that will be discussed

include: episode markers, turn taking, codeswitching, types of questions, clarification

requests, comprehension checks, confirmation checks, repetitions, and expansions.

So like you know what? Spoken English entering the 21st century

SALI TAGLIAMONTE (University of Toronto)

Spoken language is notoriously full of non-standard features; particularly forms such as

so, like, you know which typically occur on the left periphery of sentences, as in (1-5):

(1) Well, some of the girls, their home was in North Bay. (KL, F, 89) (2) So, we lost our stripes, we lost a mickey. (NB, M, 89) (3) Like, you don’t find this stuff in Canada. (SP, F, 16) (4) Oh it was alright. I was cabin-girl. (TS, F, 93) (5) Ah, he didn’t take that lightly. (KL, M, 20)

Research targeting these features has typically focused on their textual and interpersonal

functions (e.g. Aijmer 2002; Jucker & Ziv 1996; Schiffrin 1987); however, considerable

research has also established that they also carry social meaning such as speaker age,

sex, social class and education (e.g. Denis & Tagliamonte to appear, Dubois 1992,

Pichler 2009, Pichler & Levey 2011). I began by focusing on right periphery items and

constructions (Tagliamonte 2006), including phenomena such as general extenders

(Tagliamonte & Denis 2010) and utterance final particles (Denis & Tagliamonte to

appear). These analyses revealed dramatic patterns of obsolescence and innovation

across the 20th and into the 21st century and social correlates such as speaker age, sex,

social class and education, which are well known to be important indications of

linguistic change (e.g. Cheshire 2005, Labov 1972, Trudgill 1974). My research on

socially stratified corpora of spoken Canadian English is beginning to map the nature of

these factors, however, there is still no consensus on what type of mechanism underlies

these types of changes. Are they the result of lexical replacement, i.e. new form; old

function, or grammatical development, new function; new form?

20

A largescale analysis of over 100 individuals across five communities in Ontario,

Canada reveals that this area of Canadian English is undergoing substantial

reorganization. For example, well tends to be an older person’s usage, while like,

increases among youth, particularly women. In contrast, the most frequent form, so,

seems to operate outside social evaluation and is used across the age span. Once

discourse-pragmatic function is accounted for, the trajectories of change in apparent

time reveal stability of form and function for well and so, obsolescence for you know,

but grammatical development for like.

The fact that both change and stability is evident in the data suggests that these left

periphery forms are both systematic and hierarchically organized. Moreover, they offer

multiplex insights into variation and change but crucially discourse and syntax. I will

outline these tantalizing issues in my presentation.

References

Aijmer, Karin. 2002. English discourse particles, Evidence from a corpus. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Cheshire, Jenny. 2005. Age and generation-specific use of language. In U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K. J. Mattheier & P. Trudgill (eds.). Sociolinguistics: An introductory handbook of the science of language and society. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter: 1552–1563.

Denis, Derek & Sali A. Tagliamonte (to appear). Innovation and change right? Utterance final tags in Canadian English. In H. Pichler (ed.). Discourse-pragmatic variation and change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dubois, Sylvie (1992). Extension particles, etc. Language Variation and Change 4/2: 163-203.

Jucker, Andreas H. & Yael Ziv (eds.). 1996. Discourse markers: descriptions and theory. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Pichler, Heike. 2009. The functional and social reality of discourse variants in a northern English dialect: I don't know and I don't think compared. Intercultural Pragmatics 6/4: 561-596.

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Pichler, Heike & Stephen Levey. 2011. In search of grammaticalization in synchronic dialect data: General extenders in north-east England. English Language and Linguistics 15/3: 441-471.

Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2006. "So cool, right?": Canadian English entering the 21st century. Canadian English in a Global context. Theme issue of Canadian Journal of Linguistics 51/(2,3): 309-331.

Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Derek Denis. 2010. The stuff of change: General extenders in Toronto. Canada. Journal of English Linguistics 38/4: 335-368.

Trudgill, Peter J. 1974. The social differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

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FULL PAPERS

25

The teaching of spoken English in secondary education and state language schools

ROSA ALONSO (Universidade de Vigo)

PATRICIA ARGIBAY SUÁREZ

English is the most widely spoken foreign language in Europe. Nevertheless, students in

Spain are generally not able to speak English fluently by the end of compulsory

secondary education (henceforth SE). Foreign languages can also be learned in State

Language Schools (henceforth EOI). Since EOIs specialize in second language learning,

they are expected to devote greater attention to the teaching of speaking than SE

schools. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has thus far compared the

teaching of this skill in the two kinds of institutions. The purpose of this paper, then, is

to fill that gap through ascertaining which type of institution typically pays more

attention to the teaching of speaking skills; the study has been carried out in Galicia, a

region of north-western Spain. Three key issues are addressed: (a) the time teachers

devote to teaching speaking and to the practice of speaking activities, (b) the attention

they pay to the assessment of the different components of speaking (accuracy, fluency,

pronunciation) and (c) the type of speaking tasks carried out. A total of eighty

participants have taken part in the study: forty SE teachers and forty EOI teachers. The

analysis of the role of the teacher in the teaching of speaking was based on a

questionnaire about their personal background and classroom management. The data

were classified and processed using a Wald-type test for comparing proportions. The

results indicate that although SE teachers are more experienced, they report devoting

less time to the teaching of speaking while EOI teachers appear to be more engaged in

the teaching of this skill. In terms of assessment, the EOI group puts more emphasis on

accuracy and although both groups undervalue the assessment of interaction with native

speakers, for EOI teachers it is seen to be a more relevant issue. In the use of speaking

activities, the EOI group uses less-controlled speaking activities more and they promote

interaction, while SE teachers opt for more controlled speaking tasks. Apparently, more

attention should be paid by both groups to improve students’ motivation to speak in the

L2. On the other hand, accuracy is considered an important element to be assessed by

EOI teachers, but not by the SE group. Besides, EOI teachers appear to promote

learners’ autonomy by practising less-controlled speaking activities which aim at using

26

not only given linguistic patterns but also new vocabulary and formulaic expressions

that can improve fluency.

Keywords: speaking, teaching, State Language Schools, secondary education, Galicia.

An exploration of the varieties of the ESL Speakers’ Pronunciation

HMOUD ALOTAIBI (Shaqra University)

The most significant constructs of ESL pronunciation models are accentedness,

intelligibility, and comprehensibility (Derwing & Munro 2005, Jenkins 2000, Pickering

2006). It is clear though that the assessment of these characteristics shows no

consideration for the potential affection of the assessor towards the speaker. Thus, the

study presented here proposes a notion named “likeability” (L) to examine whether the

ratings of listeners are determined in part by the esteem in which they hold the speaker.

A questionnaire compiled by Murphy (2012) was given to 11 US and 11 ELLs.

Participants were provided with three YouTube links of interviews of Nelson Mandela,

a former President of South Africa, Ban Ki-Moon, the current Secretary-General of the

United Nations, and Bandar Bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the United

States. The first hypothesis of the study is that the American raters would be harsher in

their judgments of Ban Ki-moon and Bin Sultan due to the political conflict and the

dramatic events that have been associated with them in the past but this would not be

the case with Mandela, who has many ardent admirers in the U.S.A. The second

hypothesis is that the participants among the international group who share the language

background of the speaker would rate that speaker more highly than the others.

Unexpectedly, however, both US and ELL listeners rated Mandela the lowest in terms

of comprehensibility and Bin Sultan the most comprehensible. All the participants in the

international group provided similar ratings regardless whether they share the language

background of the speaker. The paper concludes with a suggestion for more thorough

investigation of the concept of likeability in selecting ESL speech models, particularly

with assigning speakers with different professional fields, ethnicity, and language

27

background. This investigation is crucial in finding the most suitable models for

pronunciation teaching.

Keywords: pronunciation, lingua franca, foreign accent.

References

Derwing, T. & Munro, M. 2005. Second language accent and pronunciation teaching: A research-based approach. TESOL Quarterly 39: 379-797.

Jenkins, J. 2000. The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Murphy, J. 2012. New models for pronunciation instruction: High-achieving, accented, intelligible, comprehensible ESL speakers. Unpublished manuscript.

Pickering, L. 2006. Current research on intelligibility in English as a lingua franca. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 26: 219-233.

Improving students’ oral competence through the reform of high-stakes tests

MARIAN AMENGUAL (Universitat Illes Balears)

JESÚS GARCÍA LABORDA (Universidad de Alcalá)

Since the arrival of the communicative movement in the early 1970s and the late 1980s,

communicative language teaching approaches and language testing have continued to be

encouraged. The global requirements brought about by the Bologna Process (1999) and

the establishment of the European Higher Education Area, which enables the academic

recognition of studies taken in any European university and encourages students’

mobility to study and/or work in Europe, have also led most current English language

teaching approaches to highlight the role of communication, particularly learner’s oral

communication skills (see Roca-Varela and Palacios 2013). One effective way of

encouraging the implementation of communicative teaching seems to be related to the

manipulation of tests, especially high-stakes tests. Thus, high-stakes tests have recently

started to be exploited to deliberately produce beneficial washback and support desired

teaching and learning practices (Chapman & Snyder 2000, Cheng 2004, McNamara

28

2001, Saif 2006, Shohamy 2001). To this end, the Spanish education authorities put

forward the design of a new English Test, included in the Spanish University Entrance

Examination (PAU), which required the obligatory evaluation of an oral component.

This initiative was welcomed by many secondary teachers and researchers who

criticised past ET examinations for preventing students from acquiring more productive

skills not evaluated by the test (Amengual 2009, 2010). The Baccalaureate Final

Evaluation (BFE) that will foreseeably substitute the current PAU also plans to include

a speaking component in order to increase the current oral competence of Spanish

students (see Laborda & Martín-Monje 2013), and meet the ever-increasing demand for

more communicative English tests. In 2012, the National Institute of Educational

Evaluation conducted a pilot test in seven regions in Spain to assess the feasibility of the

introduction of an oral component in the PAU. This study investigates the opinion of 14

secondary teachers (out of a total of 15) who participated in the implementation of the

pilot oral test in Majorca (Balearic Islands). The participants evaluated a total of 125

secondary students in May 2012. Results, collected from a questionnaire, reveal that

teachers hold a positive view on the organization, structure and design of the oral test.

In addition, most participants believe that the inclusion of an oral component in the test

would affect teachers’ methodology ensuring that this skill is taught and practised in the

class in order to prepare students well for the examination (Amengual 2010). Although

both language teaching and learning are expected to benefit from this initiative, some

concerns are also raised over gains obtained due to coaching for the examination.

Finally, and despite its potential benefits, most teachers question the feasibility of

conducting this test due to the current economic situation of the country.

Keywords: Oral tests, high-stakes tests, washback, communicative language teaching,

communicative language testing.

References

Amengual-Pizarro, M. 2009. Does the English test in the Spanish university entrance examination influence the teaching of English?. English Studies 90/5: 582-598.

——— 2010. Exploring the washback effects of a high-stakes English test on the teaching of English in Spanish upper secondary schools. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 23: 149-170.

Bologna Declaration. 1999. The European higher education area. Joint declaration of the European ministers of education. Bologna, 19 June 1999.

29

Chapman, D. W. & C. W. Snyder, Jr. 2000. Can high stakes national testing improve instruction: Re-examining conventional wisdom. International Journal of Educational Development 20: 457-474.

Cheng, L. 2004. The washback effect of a public examination change on teachers’ perceptions towards their classroom teaching. In L. Cheng, Y. Watanabe & A. Curtis (eds.). Washback in language testing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 147-170.

Laborda, J. & M. L. Martín-Monje. 2013. Item and test construct definition for the new Spanish baccalaureate final evaluation: A proposal. In L. Cerezo & M. Amengual (eds.) Second language testing: Interfaces between pedagogy and assessment. Monograph issue of International Journal of English Studies 13/2: 69-88.

McNamara, T. 2001. Language assessment as social practice: Challenges for research. Language Testing 18: 334-339.

Roca-Varela, M. L. & I. Palacios. 2013. How are spoken skills assessed in proficiency tests of general English as a foreign language? A preliminary survey. A proposal. In L. Cerezo & M. Amengual (eds.) Second language testing: Interfaces between pedagogy and assessment. Monograph issue of International Journal of English Studies 13/2: 53-68.

Saif, S. 2006. Aiming for positive washback: A case study of international teaching assistants. Language Testing 23/1: 1-34.

Shohamy, E. 2001. The power of tests. Washington DC: National Foreign Language Center.

Pronunciation in Spanish EFL materials for advanced learners: An evaluation of activities and a remedial programme

YOLANDA JOY CALVO BENZIES (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)

The teaching of pronunciation has undergone many changes in recent decades (Morley

1991, Scarcella & Oxford 1994). Broadly speaking, it has moved from a traditional

approach to a research-based one (Scarcella & Oxford 1994). In the former model, the

main aim was to attain a native-like pronunciation; EFL teachers focused only on

segmental aspects, with phonetic descriptions being an important element of

pronunciation lessons. In contrast, in the research-based approach, the emphasis is on

intelligibility rather than on sounding native-like, both segmental and suprasegmental

30

aspects are addressed, and phonetic descriptions tend to be used only when absolutely

necessary. The types of exercises used for teaching pronunciation are also said to have

changed in this period, from simple drills of isolated words to tasks that involve some

form of communicative action. However, is this so in Spain? Spanish students of

English tend to have serious problems with English pronunciation (Kenworthy 1987,

Alcaraz & Moody 1999, Estebas 2009, Walker 2010) since there are many differences

in the phonological systems of both languages and Spanish follows a regular system of

correspondences between spelling and pronunciation whereas no such regularity exists

in English. The aim of this paper is to identify and analyse the type of activities found in

a representative sample of EFL textbooks widely used at advanced levels of education,

and in this way to ask whether they follow a research-based approach or, rather, they

continue to use traditional kinds of activities. Features such as the frequency, type and

format of the different pronunciation activities will be taken into consideration. Our

research questions are: (a) How many different types of activities (such as

discriminations, repetitions, fill in the blanks, multiple choice, productions,

transformations) are used to focus on pronunciation, and which of these are found most

frequently? (b) Do the activities in these textbooks share a similar format or do they

include a wide variety of formats? Findings show that pronunciation continues to play a

low-priority role in these EFL materials, with relatively few sections and activities for

practising pronunciation; furthermore, the majority of these follow a repetitive format,

mainly drills and repetitions. Hence, in some ways Spanish EFL textbooks continue to

resemble the so-called traditional approach towards the teaching of pronunciation,

rather than emphasizing a research-based model in which oral communication is the

principal focus of attention.

In the second part of this paper we will suggest alternative types of activities to help

advanced Spanish learners of English overcome their main difficulties with

pronunciation; these suggestions will emphasise authenticity, integration of

pronunciation within other language skills and a high degree of both perceptive and

productive oral language, aspects that currently used EFL textbooks at advanced levels

seem to lack.

Keywords: pronunciation, EFL materials, advanced Spanish learners, remedial

programme.

31

References

Alcaraz, E. & B. Moody. 1999. Fonética inglesa para españoles. 4th ed. Alcoy: Marfil.

Estebas Vilaplana, E. 2009. Teach yourself English pronunciation: An interactive course for Spanish speakers. Oleiros: Netbiblo.

Kenworthy, J. 1987. Teaching English pronunciation. New York: Longman Group UK Limited.

Morley, J. 1991. The pronunciation component in teaching English to speakers of other languages. TESOL Quarterly 25/3: 481-520.

Scarcella, R. & R. Oxford. 1994. Second language pronunciation: State of the art in instruction. System 22/2: 221-230.

Walker, R. 2010. Teaching the pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Starting Skype conversations: Pragmatic features and strategies in an ELF context

STEFAN DIEMER, MARIE-LOUISE BRUNNER & SELINA SCHMIDT (Universität des Saarlandes)

This paper is concerned with conversation organisation features documented in CASE,

the Corpus of Academic Spoken English, compiled at Saarland University in 2013/14,

comprising roughly 150 hours of Skype conversations between EFL speakers from four

different countries (Germany, Bulgaria, Italy and Spain). By describing the pragmatic

features and strategies used in this multimodal academic context we endeavour to

contribute to the exploration of spoken English as a lingua franca. English in an

international academic context has developed distinct features in lexis, syntax and

pragmatics (Diemer & Schmidt 2014, Conrad & Mauranen 2003, Mair 2003, Meierkord

1996). Several corpora have been compiled in this field, such as the English as Lingua

Franca in Academic Settings corpus (Mauranen 2008) and the Vienna-Oxford

International Corpus of English (Seidlhofer 2013). Recently, international spoken

varieties have been attracting attention (e.g. Jenkins et al. 2001) as English plays a

central part in academic and private computer-mediated communication (CMC),

frequently between nonnative speakers. CMC research has not yet explored the domain

of Skype conversations due to the lack of respective specialised corpora. We aim at

32

providing a resource that allows research in such varied areas as English as an

international language, CMC, error analysis of learner language, pragmatics and lexical

innovation. The particular focus in this paper is on pragmatic features and strategies in

Skype conversation starts, as documented in CASE. We conceive of conversation starts

as not only openings as categorised by Schegloff (1968), but also the ensuing

introduction of the first topic. Conversation openings have been extensively researched

in telephone conversations (Schegloff 1986, 2004, Couper-Kuhlen 2001) and, recently,

in some computer-mediated communication (CMC) settings, such as vlogs (Frobenius

2011); however, not in a dialogic CMC setting using Skype. Openings in CASE

generally follow Schegloff’s classification, but have to be adapted to the international

CMC environment. Topic introductions were researched by Geluykens (1993) whose

structural categories can also be identified in CASE. Additionally, we propose a

preliminary content-related classification of topic introductions in CMC spoken

settings, distinguishing between assigned, task-oriented, and random topics, as well as

hybrids. Another key issue in first contact situations between non-native speakers of

English is rapport management. While several researchers comment on face-to-face

rapport (Spencer-Oatey 2002), a CMC situation introduces several new factors, e.g.

novelty and situational delicacy caused by CMC features. In the international English

context, pragmatic competence is also essential. Learner mistakes and errors may

influence conversational sequence and organisation, leading to misunderstandings and

resulting in repair or accommodation. Finally, Skype as a medium influences both

conversational content and structure, as speakers have to deal with echoes, lags and

interferences.

Keywords: English as a lingua franca, Corpus of Academic Spoken English, pragmatic

strategies, computer-mediated communication, spoken English, academic English.

References

Conrad, S. & A. Mauranen. 2003. The corpus of English as lingua franca in academic settings. TESOL Quarterly 37/3: 513-527.

Couper-Kuhlen, E. 2001. Constructing reason-for-the-call turns in everyday telephone conversation. InLiSt: Interaction and Linguistic Structures 25. [http://www.inlist.uni-bayreuth.de/issues/25/]. 10 June 2013.

33

Diemer, S. et al. Forthcoming. CASE Sofia-Saarbrücken: Corpus of Academic Spoken English in an international context. Saarbrücken: Saarland University / Sofia: St Kliment Ohridski University. Web.

Diemer, S. & S. Schmidt. 2014. Ja, also, can you see me now? - Designing and compiling a corpus of computer-mediated international academic English. ICAME Journal 38.

Frobenius, M. 2011. Beginning a monologue: The opening sequence of video blogs. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 814-827.

Geluykens, R. 1993. Topic introduction in English conversation. Transactions of the Philological Society 91/2: 181-214.

Jenkins, J., M. Modiano & B. Seidlhofer. 2001. Euro-English. English Today 17/4: 13-19.

Mair, C. (ed.). 2003. The politics of English as a world language. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Mauranen, A. 2008. ELFA. The Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings. [http://www.helsinki.fi/englanti/elfa/index.html]. 23 November 2013.

Meierkord, C. 1996. Englisch als Medium der interkulturellen Kommunikation. Untersuchungen zum non-native-/non-native speaker-Diskurs. Frankfurt: Lang.

Schegloff, E. A. 1968. Sequencing in conversational openings. American Anthropologist 70: 1075-1095.

——— 1986. The routine as achievement. Human Studies 9: 111-151.

——— 2004- Answering the phone. In G. H. Lerner (ed.). Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 63-129.

Seidlhofer, B. 2013. VOICE. The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (version 2.0 Online). [http://www.univie.ac.at/voice/page/index.php]. 23 November 2013.

Spencer-Oatey, H. 2002. Managing rapport in talk: Using rapport sensitive incidents to explore the motivational concerns underlying the management of relations. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 529-545.

34

A study of the discourse connective 'Yeah No' in Hiberno-English

JOHN DONNELLY (Trinity College Dublin)

This study examines the use of the discourse connective Yeah No in Hiberno-English.

Data was collected personally by recording one-on-one conversations with participants;

75 tokens were recorded. The aim was to identify, label the characteristics of Yeah No,

explain its functions within a Relevance Theory framework and also to establish if there

were links between duration and positional aspects of Yeah No and its functions. It was

found that Yeah No appears to have four sub-functions of a general function of inference

constraint which are: topic return, eradicating doubt, agreeing with a negative and delay

device. Further analysis on features of duration and utterance position of Yeah No

uncovered significant results linking extended duration of Yeah No with the delay

device function and mid-utterance production with the use of Yeah No as a topic return.

It is argued that Yeah No encodes a procedure and through a combination of contextual

background, duration, and position of Yeah No in an utterance, the discourse connective

functions to signal to a hearer how to interpret an utterance and guide them to the

relevant inference.

Keywords: discourse, connectives, Hiberno-English, Relevance Theory.

Using telecollaborative learning projects to promote communicative competence in English in Sri Lankan primary schools

THUSHARA GAMAGE (Macquarie University, Sydney)

In outer circle countries like Sri Lanka, there is a growing need to learn to speak in

English due to its growing role in education, governance and popular culture (Kachru

and Nelson 2001: 11). Despite colonisation in 1796, English was not introduced into

schools until 1830; when it was felt that the 'natives' should in time 'qualify themselves

for holding some of the higher appointments' (Raheem and Ratwatte 2004: 93). By

1832, there were a significant number of private and missionary schools using English

as the main medium of instruction (Kirpatrick 2007:91). By 1948, this situation had

changed dramatically, following the introduction of free education in both mother

35

tongues, Sinhala and Tamil, to reduce socioeconomic inequality, with enrolment rates

soaring, resulting in 93 percent of students in state schools using the mother tongue as

the medium of instruction (Kirpatrick 2007:91).Thus, English became a second

language in most schools across the country.

Although The Ministry of Education and The British Council in Sri Lanka have taken

the initiative to promote English language programs in primary schools in Sri Lanka, it

is not evident if these projects have specifically focused on promoting communicative

competence in English in Sri Lankan classrooms. Telecollaborative projects which have

been defined as online communicative tools that bring together learners from different

countries have been used to exchange collaborative projects and intercultural exchanges

that support language learning (O’Dowd and Eberbach 2004). A recent study by

Gamage and Chappell (2013) indicated that there are favourable classroom and socio-

institutional conditions between primary schools in Sri Lanka and Australia to use

telecollaborative projects to promote communicative competence in English in primary

schools in Sri Lanka. This is due to the potential to integrate these projects into the

school curriculum as a spoken English activity.

Therefore this paper will evaluate how two specific telecollaborative projects using two

popular online communicative tools for schools - Edmodo and Voicethread - have the

potential to be used as social and artefact mediations to promote communicative

competence in English in two primary schools in Sri Lanka. This will be discussed

using two case studies which are currently being implemented as educational

interventions between two primary schools in Sri Lanka and a primary school in

Australia as an International School Award (ISA) project facilitated by the British

Council in Sri Lanka and a communicative English language designed by the researcher

and teacher participants.

Keywords: communicative competence, telecollaborative learning, mediation,

innovation .

36

References

Edmodo. 2013. [https://www.edmodo.com/].1 November 2013.

Gamage, T. & P. Chappell. 2013. Exploring the potential to promote online learning. The University of Sydney Papers in TESOL 8/3: 57-98. Web. 2 November 2013.

Hall, D. 2001. Materials Production: Theory and Practice. In D. R. Hall & A. Hewings (eds.) Innovation in English Language Teaching: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge: 229-240.

Kachru, B. & C. Nelson. 2001. World Englishes. In A. Burns & C. Coffin (eds.) Analysing English in a Global Context: A reader. London and New York: Routledge: 9-25.

Kirkpatrick, A. 2007. World Englishes Implications for International Communication and English Language Teaching. Web. August 2012.

O’Dowd, R. & K. Eberbach. 2004. Guides on the Side? Tasks and Challenges for Teachers in Telecollaborative Projects. Cambridge Journal 16/1: 5-19. Web 30 June 2012.

Raheem, R. & H. Ratwatte. 2004. Visible strategies: invisible results: language policy and planning in Sri Lanka. In S. M. A. T. S. Mansoor (ed.). Language Policy, Planning and Practice - A South-Asian Perspective. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Web.30 June 2012.

Richards, J. C. & T. S. Rodgers. 2001. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Web. 30 June 2001.

The British Council. n.d. Accreditation and awards – International School Award (ISA). Web. July 7 2012.

The Ministry of Education. 2011. English as life skill. Web. July 30 2012.

Voicethread. 2013. [http://voicethread.com/]. 1 November 2013.

Fostering oral skills in the primary EFL classroom via Desktop Videoconferencing. A pilot study

ARACELI GARCÍA FUENTES (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)

The present paper describes a pilot study set out to determine the effects of synchronous

and asynchronous oral Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) through voice

37

recordings and videoconferencing exchanges, in the acquisition of oral skills by very

young learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). This study presents a brief

literature review on the field, as there is almost no research, to my knowledge, on the

use of videoconferencing with young learners. Advantages and disadvantages of the use

of oral CMC in the EFL classroom are discussed.

This study analyses the participants’ oral skills development qualitatively and

quantitatively. Data have been collected through daily observation, video-recordings of

the sessions and students’ performances, and pre and post tests – administered before

and after the study, respectively. Participants filled in questionnaires to know their

perceptions and opinions about the use of Desktop Videoconferencing (DVC) in the

EFL classroom. The researcher also provides practical strategies to those educators

interested in the use of DVC in the EFL classroom with very young learners.

This investigation aims at answering the following research questions: 1- Has the use of

oral CMC any benefits in the development of oral skills in foreign language learning

(FLL)? Are the possible technical problems that may occur worthwhile? 2-What are the

participants’ experiences and perceptions regarding the use of DVC and asynchronous

audio/video tools? Will motivation increase when using these tools in the classroom? 3-

Is it feasible to use DVC in the EFL classroom with such a group of learners to foster

oral skills?

The participants in this study are: 1 teacher-researcher and 52 seven year-old EFL

learners from a State Primary School in Galicia. They are distributed into 3 groups:

group A (18 students) and B (16 students) are experimental groups (using CMC tools)

and group C (18 students) acts as a control group; the latter group also has a different

English teacher who does not make use of CMC in the classroom.

This study consists of the development of 5 didactic units dealing with topics included

in the EFL curriculum established for the first cycle of Primary Education in Galicia. At

the end of each didactic unit and, prior to the videoconferencing meetings, students will

be asked to speak in English and they will be recorded performing asynchronous CMC

tasks. With these recordings the teacher will carry out different listening activities in the

classroom. These tasks will serve as a rehearsal for the videoconferencing session of the

following day.

38

Preliminary results indicate that willingness to speak in the FL increases when talking to

a real partner. With a high degree of motivation, students will be more fluent in the FL.

The researcher expects participants to show an improvement in their oral skills and

more motivation to use the foreign language (FL) in and out of the classroom. She also

hopes to help other EFL teachers in the use of DVC with young learners in the

classroom.

Keywords: EFL, oral skills, young learners, videoconferencing, Computer-Mediated

Communication.

References

Banegas, D. L. 2013. ELT through videoconferencing in primary schools in Uruguay: First steps. Innovation and Language Learning and Teaching, 7/2 .Web. 5 June 2013.

Gruson, B. & F. Barnes. 2012. What is the impact of videoconferencing on the teaching and learning of a foreign language in primary education?. Eurocall-langs.org. Web. 2 June. 2013.

O’Dowd, R. 2000. Intercultural learning via videoconferencing: A pilot exchange project. ReCALL 12/1:49-63. Web. 3 May 2013.

O’Dowd, R. (ed.). 2007. Online Intercultural Exchange: An Introduction for Foreign Language Teachers. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Warschauer, M. 2001. Online Communication. In R. Carter & D. Nunan (eds.). The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 207-212.

Whyte, S. 2011. Learning to teach with videoconferencing in primary foreign language classrooms. ReCALL 23/3: 271-293. Web. 12 May 2013.

What does it happen in the ZPD during paired speaking tests?

JESÚS GARCÍA LABORDA & NURIA OTERO DE JUAN (Universidad de Alcalá)

Tests have mostly been associated to individual cognition (Weir 2005, Chapelle,

Enright & Jamieson 2007). This may well contrast with the current communicative

theories of language learning. It is just a matter of a simple question: If students

39

worldwide are taught that speaking is of primary importance, why does not it happen so

in speaking tests? If interaction is important in language learning, why is it almost

absolutely absent in language tests? Current speaking tests are either individually

delivered (i.e. TOEFL) or, if paired, have a limited communicative scope (i.e. the

Cambridge Board Examinations such as First Certificate). The question is how to

promote really communicative tests for high stake decisions.

In a research done at Universidad de Alcalá, 40 volunteer first semester students in the

School of Education (in the degree of pre-school education) were paired randomly

regardless of their sex, age and proficiency level. The only connection among them was

the fact that they were enrolled in the same college. Students took a 15-minute interview

which consisted on three main parts: First, a brief two-minute interviewer-interviewee

dialogue on personal issues such as family, likes and so on; second, the description of a

picture selected randomly by the candidate from a set of eight about daily routines,

sports, shopping or social activities followed by two or three questions from the other

testee (not from the interviewer); and, third, a mini role-play with a three minute

preparation. This dialogue could be moderated by the interviewer to change the

production but this type of interventions were not very common.

The results indicate that students perform better when the dialogue is co-constructed

with their pairs despite differences in age and L2 proficiency. The results also show that

the interactions with the interviewer, who usually has a higher position, are neither as

fluent nor productive in terms of accuracy, cohesion and vocabulary as with their own

peers.

The results seem to indicate that there must be a connection between the dialogic

interaction that happens in the ZPD (Vygotsky 1978, Poehner & Lantolf 2010) between

the candidates and, more important, under the supervision of the interviewer as a

moderator (Poehner 2007), that empowers the candidates’ communication acts. As a

result, the assessments are more objective (Poehner 2011, Lantolf & Poehner 2013) and

not so subjected to the anxiety and other interferences due to the testing context.

Keywords: ZPD, oral testing, interaction.

40

References

Chapelle, C. A., M. K. Enright & J. Jamieson (eds.). 2008. Building a Validity Argument for the Test of English as a Foreign Language. London: Routledge.

Lantolf, J. P. & M. E. Poehner. 2013. The unfairness of equal treatment: Objectivity in L2 testing and dynamic assessment. Educational Research and Evaluation, 19/2, 141-157.

Poehner, M. E. 2011. Dynamic assessment: Fairness through the prism of mediation. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice 18/2: 99-112.

Poehner, M. E. & J. P. Lantolf. 2010. Vygotsky's teaching-assessment dialectic and L2 education: The case for dynamic assessment. Mind, Culture, and Activity 17/4: 312-330.

Vygotsky, L.S. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press.

Weir, C. 2005. Language Testing and Validation: An Evidence-based Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.

Discourse Analysis in the CLIL Classroom. The Effects of Teaching Activities on the Learning Process

DAVID GONZÁLEZ GÁNDARA (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)

This research project analyses oral discourse in the CLIL (Content and Language

Integrated Learning) classroom. Results about the possible effect of different activities

carried out in the classroom with regard to the use of the L1 and the L2 made by the

teacher and students are expected. The data used for the analysis was extracted from a

sample of recordings of CLIL lessons in a primary school located in Galicia. Research

in this particular field and under these conditions is almost non-existent in spite of the

fact that CLIL is becoming more and more popular in Galician schools. This contrasts

with the extensive research of this issue in other EFL contexts and situations. The

results obtained in previous studies will be taken as starting-point. In this study, it is

assumed that a very frequent use of the L2 in the CLIL classroom is desirable (Ellis

1984, Krashen 1988). Firstly, because the significant input the L2 primary education

pupils can have access to is very limited, and, secondly, because the time available for

each student to put the L2 in practice is even more restrained; this is especially so in

41

classes with twenty or more learners where there are very few opportunities for real

language use. A good deal of research papers try to demonstrate that a moderate use of

the L1 is also positive for the learning process (Burden 2000, Philips 1993, Prodromou

2002, Atkinson 1987, Hawks 2001); however, they do not argue that the main part of

the lessons should be in the L2 and that the L1 should be reserved for very few

occasions and with a good justification for it. According to all this, our research

questions can be formulated as follows:

Question 1: Up to what extent does the typology of activities used in the classroom

condition the language used by both teacher and students?

Question 2: What kind of spoken activities really promote oral communication?

Question 3: Up to what extent does the teacher accommodate the use of spoken English

to the needs of their students?

As mentioned above, we worked with a sample of oral interactions recorded in the

classroom setting. These were organised and transcribed according to the following

criteria:

1. The different episodes were identified and delimited, instead of structuring the data in

lessons. These episodes were labelled and tagged with the following information: type

of episode, date when the lesson was recorded, subject’s level; type of task including

here the mode of interaction, materials used, new information or revision, type of

content, etc.

2. The transcription protocol here adopted was adapted from previous studies according

to those features which were of most relevance for the present work.

3. Students were identified with a code. A database was created with information about

their level, the period of time the student had been involved in CLIL, and the

characteristics of the CLIL program in each particular case.

Our preliminary results indicate that the use of both the L1 and the L2 is clearly

conditioned by the classroom activities. As regards the type of content, we found that

revision activities, as opposed to those where new language is presented, allow students

to use the L2 with more confidence playing an important role in the improvement of

42

students’ production. Regarding the type of activities, those in which the students are

organised in small groups do foster interaction among the students but only in the L1;

however, they facilitate casual interactions between the teacher or assistant teacher and

students individually and more naturally than in a normal class situation. As for the time

they have been involved in CLIL, it is been observed that those students with a higher

experience in the CLIL programmes have a better attitude towards the understanding of

the L2 in the classroom.

Keywords: discourse analysis, CLIL, EFL, classroom language.

References

Atkinson, D. 1987. The mother tongue in the classroom: a neglected resource?. ELT Journal 41: 241-247.

Buckmaster, R. 2000. First and second languages do battle for the classroom. Retrieved from: <http://www.theguardian.com/education/2000/jun/22/tefl3>, last accessed 13/12/2013.

Burden, P. 2000. The use of Only English in a learner-centred university classroom in Japan. RELC Journal 31: 139-149.

Cole, S. 1998. The use of L1 in communicative English classrooms. Retrieved from: <http://jaltpublications.org/old_tlt/files/98/dec/cole.html>, last accessed 13/12/2013.

Ellis, R. 1984. Classroom Second Language Development. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Hawks, P. 2002. Making distinctions: a discussion of the use of the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom. Hwa Kang Journal of TEFL 7: 47-55.

Krashen, S. 1988. Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Development. New York: Prentice-Hall International.

Phillips, S. 1993. Young Learners. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Prodromou, L. 2002. From mother tongue to other tongue: What is the place of the learners mother tongue in the EFL classroom?. Retrieved from: <http://statcan.ca/english/Pgdb/People/Population/demo36a.htm>, last accessed 13/12/2013.

43

Talking the talk: ‘real world’ speech in relation to the ‘speaking activities’ in Portuguese produced English language teaching coursebooks

NICOLAS HURST (Universidade do Porto)

This paper takes coursebooks to represent the backbone of many teaching-learning

experiences across the whole range of the European educational spectrum which

includes English language teaching (ELT) contexts, not least in Portugal. Given the

timetable load and administrative duties modern day teachers are expected to fulfill and

the current economic restrictions on investment, it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine

a classroom without coursebooks. Furthermore, in some cases, these same ELT

coursebooks may constitute the only contact learners have with the target foreign

language as well as the only means concerned parents may have to confirm that their

children are indeed learning. In a recent survey, Harwood (2010: 9) concluded that “[i]t

would seem that much of the language taught in commercial materials differs markedly

from the language that is used in spoken and written discourse”. Noting that ‘Corpus

Linguistics’ has led to an extensive reappraisal of what the defining characteristics of

English discourse/texts really are, a particularly relevant question to pose, in relation to

local and international coursebook writers, is: what kind of English are learners being

required to use in the speaking activities included in their ELT coursebooks? Generally,

it is argued that the use of authentic materials containing authentic language, as well as

providing good models of real language in use, has a positive effect on learner

motivation, provides cultural input, is more likely to relate to learner needs and gives

support to a creative approach to ELT. However, there may be a great distance between

what is recommended at the level of international, academic discussion and what is

actually contemplated in the teaching materials produced for different, local learning

contexts (markets?).

This paper explores, both from quantitative and qualitative perspectives, how much and

what kind of oral work learners are expected to complete in their utilization of the

prescribed coursebooks. The research methodology involves the enumeration of

different ‘moments’ when learners are expected to speak and the analysis of each of

these moments to determine what resemblance (if any) that the moment bears to

existing models of the grammar of spoken English (Leech, 1998) and the characteristics

of certain spoken discourses (Gilmore, 2004). In addition, the degree to which the

44

activity/task corresponds to (or not) similar real world contexts is discussed. Thus, the

issues of text authenticity and task authenticity in relation to speaking activities and

spoken English are addressed (Guariento & Morley, 2001). Reference is made to three

different Portuguese produced ELT coursebooks for the 7th year of compulsory

education in Portugal. All three books were published at the same time (2006) and all

have recently been replaced on the local market by new books.

Keywords: coursebooks, spoken English, authenticity, materials evaluation.

References

Gilmore, Alex. 2004. A comparison of textbook and authentic interactions. ELT Journal 58/4: 363-374.

Guariento, W & J. Morley. 2001. Text and task authenticity in the EFL classroom. ELT Journal 55/4: 347-353.

Harwood, N.(ed.). 2010. English language teaching materials: Theory and practice. Cambridge: CUP.

Leech, G. 1998. English grammar in conversation. Longman Language Review 5: 5-14.

When do we rectify? Rectification in contemporary spoken British English

ALEKSANDRA KAVERINA (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)

When the communicative act takes place, the speaker’s intention is usually twofold: to

be understood without any impediment and to make the hearer realize that what is being

said is relevant. On many occasions, for communication to be successful, the speaker

feels the necessity to repeat part of his/her utterance in a more explicit and accessible

manner. Thus, reformulation is an important linguistic and cognitive process which

represents a key concept in the structuring of discourse (Blakemore 1988, 1993, Garcés

Gómez 2008) and in the processing of information by the interlocutor. As such it has

been the object of a considerable amount of work over the last couple of decades or so

(Blakemore 1993, Portolés 2001, Cuenca 2003, Garcés Gómez 2008, 2009).

The reformulation structure consists of two discourse segments, A and B, linked by a

reformulation marker, where A is the segment of reference and B is the reformulated

45

one. Depending on the type of semantic-pragmatic relationship established by the

reformulation marker between the two segments, reformulation has traditionally been

classified into paraphrastic and non-paraphrastic. For the present piece of research I am

interested in a subtype of paraphrastic reformulation, namely rectification. Rectification

occurs when there is a need to replace the segment of reference by a reformulated

segment, which corrects, rectifies or improves what the speaker has said initially

(Robles i Sabater 2012).

The main aim of this presentation is to provide a preliminary descriptive approach to the

behavior of two reformulation markers of rectification, namely in other words and or

rather, in contemporary spoken British English.

This paper is part of an ongoing research project on rectification and on the use of a

number of rectification markers in American and British English. The results obtained

in an earlier study (Author 2013) indicate that the markers in other words and or rather

increase in use in Present-day written British English from the 1960’s to the 1990’s, as

represented in the one-million word LOB and FLOB corpora. In order to obtain a more

comprehensive picture of the use of these two reformulation markers in British English,

for the present paper I make use of the spoken component of the British National

Corpus (BNC), which comprises a total number of 100 million words from the 1970’s

to the 1990’s, and can therefore provide me with a wider testing ground for the analysis

of the selected rectification markers in contemporary British English.

In my presentation attention is paid to the following issues: (i) distribution of the two

rectification markers in other words and or rather in the corpus; (ii) in relation to their

syntactic characteristics, the type of elements that these two reformulation markers

usually link in the spoken language (that is, words, phrases, sentences, etc.); and (iii) the

pragmatic effects that these markers achieve within a text in order to trigger successful

communication.

Keywords: reformulation, rectification markers, spoken English, corpus-based analysis,

pragmatics.

46

References

Blakemore, D. 1988. The organization of discourse. In Newmeyer, F. J. (ed.). Linguistics: The Cambridge survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 229-250.

Blakemore, D. 1993. The relevance of reformulations. Language and Literature 2/2: 101-120.

Cuenca, M. J. 2003. Two ways to reformulate: A contrastive analysis of reformulation markers. Journal of Pragmatics 35: 1069-1093.

Garcés Gómez, M. P. 2008. La organización del discurso: marcadores de ordenación y reformulación. Madrid: Iberoamericana.

Garcés Gómez, M. P. 2009. La reformulación del discurso en español, en comparación con otras lenguas (catalán, francés, italiano, inglés, alemán e islandés). Madrid: Universidad Carlos III..

Kaverina, Aleksandra. 2013. Rectification through in other words and or rather in Contemporary American and British English. Paper presented at the 37th AEDEAN Conference, Oviedo, Spain.

Portolés, J. 2001. Marcadores del discurso. Barcelona: Ariel Practicum

Robles i Sabater, F. 2012. Los límites de la reformulación: léase y sus equivalentes alemanes. Verba 39: 161-188.

Discourse markers in university lecture settings: Enhancing communicative competence

ELENA KRUGLIKOVA (Siberian Federal University)

The paper explores the most evident pragmatic functions of discourse markers which

they employ in the lecture setting. Discourse markers are understood as linguistic

devices which play critical role in the interpretation of the utterance functioning as

signposts at the textual and interactional level (Halliday 1976, Fraser 2010, Aijmer

2002), markers of discourse coherence (Shiffrin 2001), communicative resources for the

academic stance and crucial elements in the rhetorical means bridging between

discourse formation and author’s (lecture’s) interpretation.

47

The presented study has a twofold purpose. Firstly, it finds genre-defined functions and

multifunctionality (Lin 2010) of discourse markers in university lectures thus presenting

the results of functional and frequency analysis of discourse structuring devices in oral

academic texts. Offering an overview of the characteristics and occurrence of discourse

markers the study shows how the lecturers increase interactivity of their discourse and

organize the lecture to communicate the content to students more efficiently. The

linguistic devices under study are separate words of different parts of speech and

repeatedly occurring in lectures word combinations (lexical bundles, lexical phrases,

formulas, fixed expressions, pre-fabricated patterns, etc.). The criteria for referring of

above mentioned devices to the class of discourse markers are prevailing of their

pragmatic functions over lexical specificity, context-sensitivity (Andersen 2001) and

interactivity (Aijmer 2002).

Secondly, the impact of language and culture on the use of discourse markers in lectures

is investigated through the analysis of the usage of discourse connectors by American

and Russian speakers of English shedding more light on the differences between native

and non-natives lecturers using English to deliver courses to non-native users of

English. The findings show that there are differences in the overall usage, distribution

and frequency of different discourse connectors while managing to communicate

English-medium courses to Russian and Chinese students. The research additionally

indicate differences in pragmatic functions of discourse markers connected with the

usage of English as lingua franca when the lecturers have above all to improve students’

comprehension and enhance their communicative competence. Using definite discourse

markers is viewed as a part of cooperative strategy that increases communicative

explicitness (Hynninen 2011), allows to keep the interaction going and helps to avoid

communicative breakdowns which is especially important in non-native language

context (Jung 2006). Investigated variations in different discourse markers employment

account for English level proficiency as well as for different rhetorical and educational

traditions.

The study employs both qualitative and quantitative methodologies with the elements of

conversational analysis and is based on the data from the Michigan Corpus of Academic

Spoken English and lectures conducted by native (American) and non-native (Russian)

speakers of English at two universities in Russia.

48

Keywords: discourse markers, academic discourse, multifunctionality, English as lingua

franca.

References

Aijmer, K. 2002. English discourse particles: Evidence form a corpus. Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V.

Andersen, G. 2001. Pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation: A relevance theoretic approach to the language of adolescents. Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V.

Erman, B. 2001. Pragmatic markers revisited with a focus on you know in adult and adolescent talk. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 1337-1359.

Fraser, B. 2009. Topic orientation markers. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 892-898.

Halliday, M.A.K. & R. Hasan, 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

Hynninen, N. 2011. The practice of ‘mediation’ in English as a lingua franca interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 965-977.

Jung, E. H. 2006. Misunderstanding of academic monologues by nonnative speakers of English. Journal of Pragmatics 38: 1928-1942.

Lenk, U. 1997. Discourse markers and global coherence in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 30/2: 245-257.

Lin. C. Y. 2010. ‘… that’s actually sort of you know trying to get consultants in’: Functions and multifuncionality of modifiers in academic lectures. Journal of Pragmatics, 42: 1173-1183.

Morell, T. 2004. Interactive lecture discourse for University EFL students. English for Specific Purposes 23: 325-338.

Schiffrin, D.2001. Discourse markers: language, meaning and context. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen & H. Hamilton (eds.). The handbook of discourse analysis. Cornwall: Blackwell: 54-97.

49

On ‘Standard Cases’ of verbal irony in spoken English

CLAUDIA LEHMANN (Universität Osnabrück)

This full paper will report on a mixed method study which seeks to identify cases of

verbal irony in spoken English that can be treated as approved cases of irony in

interaction. Based on these findings, a new account of verbal irony will be provided.

One of the most influential theory of verbal irony, Sperber and Wilson’s echoic mention

theory (“On Verbal Irony”), is based on supposed “standard cases” of irony (“Irony and

the use-mention distinction” 298). Using these, they argue that speakers of ironic

utterances echoically interpret a previously used proposition. In doing so, speakers

distance themselves from this proposition and ridicule it (Meaning and Relevance128-

134). Unfortunately, the theory misses a detailed account of what constitutes standard

cases of irony and how these were collected.

The aims of this paper are, first, to provide a more empirical basis for the identification

of standard cases of irony in actual conversations and, second, to revise Sperber and

Wilson’s notion on the defining features of irony on that basis. To do so, a casual

conversation between four female speakers has been recorded using a participant

observation design. Three of the females are native English coming from the north of

England. The fourth female is the present researcher. This four-hour recording revealed

thirty-nine potentially ironic instances. To objectivize the decision between ironic and

non-ironic utterances, twenty-two native English judges, other than the participants in

the conversation, were asked to rate these instances with regard to their degree of irony.

The rating scale ranged from 1 (“not ironic at all”) to 5 (“heavily ironic”). Participants

of the rating experiment were instructed to trust their first intuition but use the entire

scale during the whole procedure. Eventually, twelve instances could be identified that

received a median rating of 4 or 5 and can, consequently, be treated as approved or

‘standard’ cases of irony.

A subsequent qualitative analysis of these instances showed that not all of them fit

Sperber and Wilson’s echoic mention theory. Therefore, a new account of verbal irony

is necessary. A first, tentative proposal will be provided, highlighting all the features

that unite these cases such as expressing criticism and being humorous. It will be argued

that these function-oriented features provide evidence for the fact that irony cannot be

50

treated as a discrete speech act but must rather be treated as a goal-defined, fuzzy

category such as is provided by the notion of the “activity type” (Levinson 368) and that

a conversation analytical approach will thus be necessary to complement the picture of

irony in interaction.

Keywords: verbal irony, casual conversation, participant observation, rating experiment,

conversation analysis, activity type.

References

Levinson, S. C. 1979. Activity types and language. Linguistics 17/5-6: 365-400.

Sperber, D. & W. Deirdre. 1981. Irony and the use-mention distinction. In P. Cole (ed). Radical Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press: 295-318.

———. 1992. On verbal irony. Lingua 87/1: 53-76.

Deirdre, W. & D. Sperber. 2012. Meaning and relevance. Cambridge University Press.

What makes a contraction: The import of speech rate on the realization of 'have to'

DAVID LORENZ (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)

DAVID TIZÓN-COUTO (Universidade de Vigo)

As a semi-modal of obligation/necessity, ‘have to’ is a frequent sequence in English (cf.

Leech et al. 2009). High-frequency sequences are prone to undergo phonetic reduction

and contraction (i.a. Bybee 2006). For ‘have to’, a contracted form hafta has been

assumed in the context of to-contraction in analogy to gonna, wanna, oughta, etc.

(Pullum 1997, Falk 2007). This poses the question of what realization(s) of ‘have to’

constitute such a contraction, and where this contraction stands within the paradigm of

to-contraction (i.e. is it conventionalized like gonna, wanna, or uncommon like tryna,

needa). More specifically, we consider two known factors of reduction, speech rate and

phonological environment (cf. Jurafsky et al. 1998), and ask how they affect the

realization of ‘have to’. This is apt to yield insights into a larger puzzle: What leads

speakers to use a frequent sequence (like ‘have to’) non-compositionally (i.e. as a single

51

unit rather than a combination of have+to)? This study analyzes the realization of ‘have

to’ in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (Du Bois et al. 2005),

distinguishing two types of reduction: firstly the alternation between /ʊ/ and schwa,

which can occur in any instance of to (e.g.the best way to[tə] get there; today [tə’deɪ]);

and secondly the flapping or omission of the voiceless stop /t/, which does not usually

occur at the beginning of a word (*the best way to [ɾʊ]get there; *today [ɾʊ’deɪ]). A

reduction of /t/ in ‘have to’ therefore indicates that the sequence is accessed non-

compositionally, i.e. as a chunk in which to is not a separate item. This serves as a

working definition of contraction.

We employ three measures of speech rate: the rate (syllables per second) in the entire

speech unit (the phrase or sentence), the duration of the target item (‘have to’), and the

difference between speech rates at the target item and in the surrounding context. As for

the linguistic environment, we consider the following sound and the preceding item.

Results show that the contraction is relatively rare given the overall frequency of ‘have

to’. Rapid speech promotes /t/-reduction on all three measures; the variation of /u/ and

schwa in the final vowel, on the other hand, is not determined by speech rate, but by the

following sound. This indicates that hafta patterns with the non-conventionalized to-

contractions (such as tryna, needa) in terms of relative frequency as well as the import

of speech rate, despite the higher absolute frequency of ‘have to’. The results confirm

that speech rate is generally a determinant of phonetic reduction; however, they also

suggest that rapid speech specifically triggers a type of reduction that is not merely

articulatory but tied to non-compositional access to word sequences.

Keywords: phonetic reduction, contraction, speech rate, phonological environment,

'have to'.

References

Bybee, J. 2006. From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition. Language 82/4: 711-733.

Du Bois, J. W, W.L. Chafe, C. Meyer, S.A. Thompson, N. Marty & R. Englebretson. 2000-2005. The Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, Parts 1-4. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.

52

Falk, Y. N. 2007. Do we wanna (or hafta) have empty categories?. In Butt, M & T. Holloway King (eds.). Proceedings of the LFG07 conference. CSLI Publications. 184-197.

Jurafsky, D., A. Bell, E. Fosler-Lussier, C. Girand, & W. Raymond. 1998. Reduction of English function words in Switchboard. In Proceedings of ICSLP-98, Sydney.

Leech, G., M. Hundt, C. Mair, & N. Smith. 2009. Change in contemporary English. Cambridge University Press.

Pullum, G. K. 1997. The morpholexical nature of English to-contraction. Language 73: 79-102.

The treatment of English conversation grammar in modern advanced EFL textbooks

TAMILLA MAMMADOVA (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)

Not until recently has the grammar of spoken English been considered as a separate

field of study; in fact, only with the appearance of audio recording and advanced

technology has the analysis of spoken language been made possible. In spite of the fact

that different scholars (Goffman 1983, Sacks et al. 1974, Schegloff 2007, Sidnell 2010)

have emphasized the importance of the studies on conversation grammar, little attention

has been paid to its actual teaching.

The goal of this paper is to investigate up to what extent the grammar of conversation is

present in modern textbooks. For this purpose, I have analyzed a sample of recent

textbooks of upper-intermediate and advanced levels (levels B2-C1, according to the

Common European Framework of Reference), which are widely used in Spanish

language schools and universities. Within the general area of the grammar of

conversation and following Biber et al. (1999), I will focus on the study of non-clausal

units (i.e. grammatical items that lack finite clause structure) and, more particularly, on

the so-called inserts (i.e. words and expressions that signal relations between speaker(s),

hearer(s) and discourse). I will then touch upon such insert structures as interjections

(e.g. oh), hesitators (e.g. erm), discourse markers (e.g. well, now), attention signals (e.g.

hey), response forms (e.g. right), polite speech formulae (e.g. thank you), greetings and

53

farewells (e.g. bye), etc., and see if these patterns are somewhat included in advanced

modern textbooks. The data will be mainly presented in the form of tables and figures.

At the end of the study, I will also make a proposal of some tasks and exercises on

conversation grammar which could be taken to the practice.

The analysis of the insert patterns in the textbooks selected demonstrates conversation

grammar has received little attention in EFL materials. These preliminary results also

indicate that there are very few exercises conceived for the practice and learning of this

area of conversation, and, as a result, this could have negative implications for the

learning of oral skills. Considering conversation grammar to be relatively a new field, it

should not be striking that we did not find much of its traces in modern textbooks.

However, taking into consideration that this area is particularly important in language

production, we contend that conversation grammar should be treated in much more

detail in textbook publications. Still, there is much to study from the point of view of

the relevance of all the items of conversation grammar and their inclusion in textbooks

and what is even more important, their pedagogical treatment so that it can be easily

acquired by students.

Keywords: conversation grammar, non-clausal units, inserts, EFL, CEF.

References

Biber, D. et al. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman Publications Group.

Goffman, E. 1983. The interaction order. American Sociological Review 48: 1-17.

Sacks, H., E. A. Schegloff & G. Jefferson. 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50: 696-735.

Schegloff, E. A. 2007. Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sidnell, J. 2010. Conversation analysis: An introduction. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

54

Code-switching as a communication strategy in private ELF conversations

KAISA PIETIKÄINEN (University of Helsinki)

Research on spoken English as a lingua franca (ELF) has mainly centered around

academic or business environments so far, while private ELF talk has received

considerably less attention. This paper focuses specific attention on private ELF use by

investigating conversations within six multicultural couples who have 11 different first

languages, and who use ELF as their main couple tongue. We approach private ELF

from the perspective of code-switching, by analysing what kinds of functions code-

switching has in ELF couples’ talk.

Previous studies have suggested that code-switching or borrowing in ELF is used for

expressing linguacultural group identity when it is not covering for linguistic

deficiencies (e.g. Pölzl 2003, Klimpfinger 2007, 2010, Franzen 2012, Turunen 2012).

However, in this study, it is observed that the functions of code-switching are more

various than previously thought, and sometimes code-switching actually occurs

unconsciously. Detailed conversation analysis of over nine hours of conversational

interview data from six ELF couples reveals that code-switching has at least six

different functions in private ELF talk. These functions include: 1) demonstrating use of

a language, 2) automatic code-switching, 3) replacing or clarifying unfamiliarities, 4)

replacing nontranslatables, 5) specifying addressees and 6) emphasising the message.

Of these, automatic code-switching is subjected under specific scrutiny as, unlike other

identified types of code-switching, it occurs without any noticeable awareness of the

switch.

Mauranen (2013) interprets automatic code-switching occurrences as involuntary slips

where the cognitive processing has sidetracked, whereas research on multilingual

competence indicates that multilinguals with high linguistic skills, such as the

established couples studied in this project, should be able to recognise which language

is in use during each moment (Nation and McLaughlin 1986, Sanz 2013). By subjecting

the collected data under a combination of conversation analysis and content analysis, it

is revealed that all six couples recognised code-switching as their communicational tool,

but those couples who shared a range of different languages, and who had been together

the longest, seemed to deploy it the most. These three couples’ conversations also

55

featured the discovered occasions of automatic code-switching. Therefore, it is

concluded that, especially within established relationships, ELF talk features code-

switching so prominently that, in some cases, and over time, it may become an

automated process which occasionally emerges unintentionally. However, the use of

code-switching, be it conscious or automatic, did not jeopardize understanding but de

facto facilitated building rapport. In sum, code-switching shows to be an intrinsic

resource of ELF in situations where multilingual competences are shared and allowed to

be utilized.

Keywords: English as a lingua franca, code-switching, conversation analysis, private

ELF, ELF couples.

References

Franzen, M.A. 2012. Code switching in student ELF interactions: An analysis of cultural expressiveness through lexical references. MA thesis. Utrecht University.

Klimpfinger, T. 2007. ‘Mind you, sometimes you have to mix’ – The role of code-switching in English as a lingua franca. Vienna English Working Papers 16/2: 36–61.

Klimpfinger, T. 2010. ‘She’s mixing the two languages together’ – Forms and functions of code-switching in English as a lingua franca. In A. Mauranen & E. Ranta (eds.). English as a lingua franca: Studies and findings. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars: 348–371.

Mauranen, A. 2013. Lingua franca discourse in academic contexts: Shaped by complexity. In J. Flowerdew (ed.). Discourse in context: Contemporary applied linguistics. Vol.3. London: Continuum: 225–245.

Nation, R. & B. Mclaughlin. 1986. Novices and experts: An information processing approach to the “good language learner” problem. Applied Psycholinguistics 7/1: 41–55.

Pölzl, U. 2003. Signalling cultural identity: The use of L1/Ln in ELF. Vienna English Working Papers 12/2: 3–23.

Sanz, C. 2013. Multilingualism and metalinguistic awareness. In C.A. Chapelle (ed.). The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 3933–3942.

Turunen, K. 2012. A study on code-switching in the ELFA corpus. MA thesis. University of Helsinki.

56

Oral English needs in Spanish professional settings: Different perspectives

LOURDES POMPOSO (UNED)

The dominance of English used as a lingua franca (ELF) in international business

contexts is now beyond dispute. English is intrinsic in professional communication all

around the world, but many factors which influence business discourses are not

similarly assumed in all the contexts in all the European countries. A high percentage of

companies in Spain are not satisfied with the level of English the employees have and as

a consequence, part of their annual budget is invested in English classes. And yet,

despite this investment, they still have the feeling of not meeting the real needs. Spain,

although being aware of the importance of English as a lingua franca in business

environments, is, in fact, one of the worst rated in having the knowledge of English

communicative skills (EF EPI report 2012). The study presented here is the result of a

research carried out with business people who need English for professional

communication in professional environments. The study aims to find out what their oral

needs are as well as their lack of necessary competencies to be effective in

communication. This needs analysis was centered on the participants’ personal and

professional profile, on common communicative situations and the necessary skills for

English communication (Dudley-Evans & St. John 1998: 125). Despite the limitation in

obtaining data in real business interactions (St. John 1996) due to the unwillingness to

permit outsiders to sit in at their meetings and negotiations we managed to get enough

participation in this research using different instruments such as in-depth interviews, on-

line questionnaires and recordings of oral simulations. As a result, we had the chance to

discover real linguistic and pragmatic needs as perceived from different perspectives

and different participants. In fact, the perception of the necessary characteristics of

business English discourse in order to have effective and productive individual and

interactive communication is different to that from human resources departments, from

individual employees and from professional assessors of linguistic and non-linguistic

competencies in ESP. We have compared the results to get relevant conclusions related

to oral communication and to offer a new research line to improve teaching of oral

business English at universities or in company classes in Spain.

57

Keywords: business English, oral needs, oral production, mobile learning, professional

settings.

References

Dudley-Evans, T. & M. J. St. John. 1998. Developments in ESP: A multidisciplinary approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

EF English Proficiency Index. 2012. Education First. www.ef.com/epi.

St. John, M. J. 1996. “Business is booming: Business English in the 1990s”. English for Specific Purposes 15/1: 3–18.

‘Dude—This weed is DANK!’ Spoken discourse as the locus of lexical semantic change

KURT QUELLER (University of Idaho)

It is now generally acknowledged that grammaticalization occurs in spoken discourse,

with erstwhile lexical items getting contextually reanalyzed as grammatical markers

within new constructions. In contrast, changes in word meaning are still commonly

conceptualized as occurring within the lexicon, via direct mappings from older to newer

senses. The present paper critiques this lexical-semantic “mapping fallacy”, arguing that

innovative word senses likewise arise via constructional reanalysis in spoken discourse.

Drawing on and extending Croft’s (2000) model of linguistic evolution, the paper

argues that lexical semantic innovation crucially involves utterance-level meanings

inferred in the context of particular spoken usage events. Speakers use the relevant word

conventionally, yet in contexts where hearers are inclined to infer a non-compositional

“gestalt utterance meaning” broadly consistent with speaker’s communicative intent.

Such ad hoc utterance meanings implicitly contain an innovative sense for the word in

question, motivated not by convention but by the utterance context. The new lexical

sense becomes conventionalized through “semantic backformation” from such gestalt

utterance meanings, as erstwhile hearers begin attending to these implicit non-

conventional word senses and exploiting them in new speech contexts where

conventional interpretations prove impossible. Those of their listeners who do not reject

58

innovative usage outright will now incorporate the new meaning into their own

lexicons, and this usage gradually establishes itself in lexical convention. Crucially,

neither speakers nor hearers need ever have constructed any semantic mapping between

conventional and innovative senses.

The model is illustrated with an analysis of a recent innovation in American English

slang: the use of “dank” as an epithet of approval, as in these examples (culled, like

others in the study, from urbandictionary.com and from other internet sources):

1. “Damn, that sh*t [=marijuana] was dank!” 2. “That borritos was dank, man / …was the dankness!” 3. “Man that was a dank party last night." 4. “Man, the Preuss High School Class of 2013 sure is dank.”

(1) represents the source usage, where “dank” technically refers to potent, well-cured

marijuana, retaining some of its moisture and continuing to “sweat” resin. (2) reflects a

minimal extension to other items rolled in a wrapper and orally consumed. (3)

represents further extension to a party where marijuana may (or may not) have been

consumed, while (4) shows the fullest extension to any entity construed as “cool” or

“high quality.” Standard “mapping” account would call this a case of semantic

“amelioration”, but such a taxonomic approach only describes the outcome, not the

process of change. Change occurs when connoisseurs utter things like (1), invoking the

above technical sense; novices unfamiliar with this sense nevertheless understand it is

an expression of approval, and later gradually extend that sense to the other contexts. In

other words, (1) is a conversational “bridging context” (Heine 2002), in which either the

conventional or the innovative sense may be assumed without impairing communicative

success. Neither connoisseur (speaker) not novice (hearer) has “mapped” the meaning

“damp and musty-smelling” into the meaning “high-quality”; that extension has

occurred in spoken discourse, as speakers and hearers work to “coordinate” around

contextually serviceable meanings. This scenario is argued to provide a better account

of the actuation and spread of lexical semantic change than a traditional sense-mapping

account.

Keywords: grammaticalization, spoken discourse, lexical semantic change, semantic

mapping, AmE slang.

59

References

Croft, W. 2000. Explaining language change. Harlow, England: Longman.

Heine, B. 2002. “On the role of context in grammaticalization”. In Wischer, I. & G. Diewald (eds.). New reflections on grammaticalization. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 83–102.

From boardroom meeting to minutes: The oral-written continuum

ROSA RABADÁN (Universidad de León)

ISABEL PIZARRO (Universidad de Valladolid)

MARLÉN IZQUIERDO (Universidad del País Vasco)

As a form of spoken discourse business meetings are part of a complex communication

continuum ranging from oral genres and multimodal textual clusters to derived written

genres. In addition to being structured texts, these genre chains (Swales 1990) with a

high degree of intertextuality (Bhatia 2004) share part of the ‘meeting matrix’ (Bargiela-

Chiappini and Harris 1997, Koester 2010). They differ, however, in how contextual

relations are represented in the text and in how discursive practices are codified in

patterns of linguistic behavior. To characterize discourse across registers, identifying

these differences is essential. The literature on the language of meetings (Poncini 2004,

Koester 2006, Handford 2010, etc.) suggests that spoken discourse features such as

backchanneling, vague language and frequent hedging add to the ‘messiness’ of this

oral genre. Previous work on minutes (Rabadán, Izquierdo & Pizarro 2011) highlights

the existence of conventionalized language routines that tend to be associated with

particular moves (Biber, Connor & Upton 2007).

This paper sets out to explore i) how a number of lexicogrammatical choices used to

convey relations among participants at different stages of business meetings (Handford

2010: 151) compare to those of the written sub-genre, minutes, when reporting these

stages, and ii) what correspondences can be identified across genres. This comparison

draws on two sets of corpus data: the results of analyzing the oral subcorpus of

CANBEC (the Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus) as reported by

60

Handford (2010) and the English subcorpus of C-GARE (Comparable corpus of

meeting minutes in its Spanish acronym), compiled by the ACTRES team (2011-12)

http://actres.unileon.es/inicio.php?elementoID=11. Our analysis focuses on how power

relations among participants are signaled (in the meetings) and reported (in the

minutes). To this end, C-GARE will be queried for a) pronouns/full references to

persons, b) markers of modality, c) markers of agreement/disagreement at different

textual stages, namely presenting, negotiating and decision making. Expected results

include a mapping of similarities and differences between the oral and written genres in

the way these relations are linguistically handled. In turn, these results will serve as a

basis to identify genre-bound conventionalized language and will help L1 and L2

speakers of English alike to produce effective texts when participating in a boardroom

meeting and/or when writing down the minutes (Bowker 2012).

Keywords: business meeting, minutes, oral/written genres, corpora, comparison,

language strategies.

References

Bargiela-Chiappini, F. & S. Harris. 1997. Managing language: The discourse of corporate meetings. Amsterdam/Phildadelphia: John Benjamins.

Bhatia, V. K. 2004. Worlds of written discourse. A genre-based view. London: Continuum.

Biber, D., U. Connor & T. A. Upton (eds). 2007. Discourse on the move. Using corpus analysis to describe discourse structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Bowker, J. 2012. From ‘communities of practice’ to ‘communities of learning’: Interdiscursivity in changing corporate priorities. In P. Gillaerts, E. de Groot, S. Dieltjens, P. Heynderickx & G. Jacobs (eds.). Researching discourse in business genres. Bern: Peter Lang: 115-138.

Handford, M. 2010. The language of business meetings. Cambridge: CUP.

Koester, A. 2006. Investigating workplace discourse. Abingdon: Routledge.

———. 2010. Workplace discourse. London: Continuum.

Poncini, G. 2004. Discursive strategies in multicultural business meetings. Bern: Peter Lang.

Rabadán, R., M. Izquierdo & I. Pizarro. 2011. “Contrastive rhetoric for FL writing: An English-Spanish case study”. Paper presented at ICAME ’33. Leuven 2011.

61

Swales, J. 1990. Genre analysis. Cambridge: CUP.

‘So what does the Porsche have man?’ Discourse markers as cues to topic structure in conversation

MARINE RIOU (Université Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Université Paris 7 Denis Diderot)

This paper analyses the role of discourse markers (DMs) in cuing discourse-topic

transition in American English conversation, and it relies on the qualitative and

quantitative analysis of a two-hour audio corpus of eight casual conversations taken

from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (Du Bois et al. 2000-

2005). This study assesses the role that DMs play in the introduction of a new topic.

While the quantitative part of this study allows for a far-reaching overview of the role of

all the DMs of the corpus, a few qualitative case studies of topic transitions such as (1)-

(4) concentrate on specific DMs such as well, anyway, so and you know:

(1) Okay anyway can I run this by you really quick?(SBC028)

(2) Well then let’s talk about our vacation.(SBC005)

(3) You know I was talking to Keri tonight.(SBC028)

(4) So you didn’t go work out today?(SBC043)

DMs have regularly been associated to diverse cohesive and textual functions (Fraser

1999, Jucker and Ziv 1998, Schiffrin 1987, Schourup 1999), and topic management is

one such role (Horne et al. 1999). Discourse topic is defined in logical and pragmatic

terms as the center of shared attention, and what a portion of the conversation is about

(Goutsos 1997), as well as in interactional terms as a joint product carried out by the

participants, which is not exterior or independent of the participants and setting (Brown

and Yule 1983, Mondada 2001). Following Crow (1983), for whom a more precise

definition of topic entails a close analysis of topic boundaries, this study focuses on one

specific locus of topic management, i.e. topic transition.

The approach chosen for this study combines Conversation Analysis and Interactional

Linguistics methods. The corpus was segmented in turn-constructional units (TCUs)

(Ford et al. 1996, Selting 2000) and coded for a variety of interactional and grammatical

62

parameters in a spreadsheet, including the type of topic transition, the position of DMs

in TCUs, whether they functioned as backchannel, as well as the combination of several

DMs in one TCU. The identification of topic transitions was checked with an inter-rater

reliability procedure on 25% of the corpus, which yielded an almost perfect agreement

(Cohen’s kappa, κ= 0.94). Results show that TCUs with a topic transition tend to be

signaled by a TCU-initial DM more than TCUs which are not topic transitions, and that

some DMs specialize more than others in the cuing of topic structure. An unexpected

result is that, contrary to an assumption frequently found in the literature, there is no

major difference between disjunctive and stepwise topic transitions (Maynard 1980,

Jefferson 1984, Holt and Drew 2005) in terms of the use of DMs. However, the set of

DMs used is not exactly the same according to the type of topic transition being cued.

Keywords: discourse marker, topic management, topic transition, conversation analysis,

turn-constructional unit.

References

Brown, G. & G. Yule. 1983. Discourse analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Crow, B. K. 1983. Topic shifts in couples’ conversations. In R.T. Craig & K. Tracy (eds.). Conversational coherence: Form, structure, and strategy. London: Sage: 136–56.

Du Bois, J. W., W. L. Chafe, C. Meyer, S. A. Thompson, R. Englebretson, & N. Martey. 2000-2005. Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, Parts 1-4. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium. TalkBank.org, 17 September 2013, http://talkbank.org/media/CABank/SBCSAE/.

Ford, C. E., B. A. Fox & S. A. Thompson. 1996. Practices in the construction of turns: The “TCU” revisited. Pragmatics 6: 427–54.

Fraser, B. 1999. What are discourse markers? Journal of Pragmatics 31: 931–52.

Goutsos, D. 1997. Modeling discourse topic: Sequential relations and strategies in expository text. Norwood, N.J: Ablex.

Holt, E. & P. Drew. 2005. Figurative pivots: The use of figurative expressions in pivotal topic transitions. Research on Language and Social Interaction 38/1: 35–61.

Horne, M., P. Hansson, G. Bruce, J. Frid, & M. Filipsson. 1999. Discourse markers and the segmentation of spontaneous speech. Working Papers of Lund University Department of Linguistics 47: 123–39.

63

Jefferson, G. 1984. On stepwise transition from talk about a trouble to inappropriately next positioned matters. In R. T. Craig & K. Tracy (eds.). Conversational coherence: Form, structure, and strategy. London: Sage: 191–222.

Jucker, A. H. & Y. Ziv (eds.). 1998. Discourse markers: Descriptions and theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Maynard, D. W. 1980. Placement of topic changes in conversation. Semiotica 30/3-4: 263–290.

Mondada, L. 2001. Gestion du topic et organisation de la conversation. Cadernos de Estudos Lingüísticos 41: 7–35.

Schiffrin, D. 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schourup, L. 1999. Discourse Markers. Lingua 107: 227–265.

Selting, M. 2000. The construction of units in conversational talk. Language in Society

29: 477-517.

Speech verbs in nineteenth-century English fiction: Or how the narrator is responsible for the orality of his characters

PABLO RUANO (Universidad de Extremadura)

There is no gainsaying the fact that narrators are utterly responsible for how characters

speak within novels. It is through its figure that the author introduces the words of the

characters that populate his fictive universe. However, when it comes to the assessment

of that role, it is not so clear how exactly the author carries out the modelling of such

orality through the teller of the story.

Normally, the spoken element is regarded as belonging to the words uttered by the very

characters. That is to say, it is the projected clause which encompasses the features that

model how the character speaks. Within that clause, the narrator makes use of different

and varied elements —fillers, dialects, discourse markers, etc.— that account for the

orality of the figure whose words are being glossed.

However, there might be equally meaningful devices —albeit less conspicuous—

beyond characters’ discourse, which can contribute to the outlining of the spoken

64

element too. In the particular case of this paper, we will focus on speech verbs. They are

indeed the vehicle that bridges the gap between the voice of the narrator and characters’

words. Their role is mainly linguistic. Nevertheless, they can also play a stylistic

function that, as it will be seen, may result in the supply of another aspect which

contributes to the modelling of the oral element: there is a huge difference between

those characters who growl and thunder, on the one hand, and those who pout and

whimper, on the other, as the following two examples from Charles Dickens’ David

Copperfield show:

'Jane Murdstone,' thundered Mr. Murdstone. 'Will you be silent? How dare

you?'

'How can you ask me anything so foolish?' pouted Dora.

This paper presents a corpus-based approach of the use of speech verbs in nineteenth-

century English fiction. With a corpus (c. 17m words) made up of seventy-six novels by

eight different authors (Charlote Brönte, Dickens, Elliot, Gaskel, Hardy, Meredith,

Thackeray and Trollope) and using a computational methodology carried out with the

help of Wordsmith Tools 6 (Scott 2012), it will be possible to elicit this linguistic

element and see that, indeed, it can be used in relation to different aspects —e. g., the

gender of the character— that may contribute to the very orality of those whose speech

is being reported.

Keywords: corpus, speech verbs, Wordsmith Tools, nineteenth-century English fiction.

References

Caldas-Coulthard, C. R. 1987. Reported speech in written narrative texts. In Coulthard R. M.(ed.). Discussing discourse. Birmingham: University of Birmingham: 149-67.

Page, N. 1973. Speech in the English novel. London: Longman.

Leech, G & M. Short. 2007. Style in fiction. London: Longman.

Scott, M. 2012. Wordsmith Tools. Version 6. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Semino, E. & M. Short. Corpus stylistics: Speech, writing and thought presentation in a corpus of English narratives. London: Routledge.

65

Approaching multimodal discourse analysis to students’ training in academic contexts: Understanding questions in guest lectures

Mª NOELIA RUIZ MADRID & INMACULADA FORTANET (Universitat Jaume I)

The Bologna process has paved the way for the introduction of English as a Medium of

Instruction (EMI) in Higher Education (Dalton-Puffer 2007, Fortanet-Gómez 2013,

Llinares, Morton & Wittaker 2012, Ruiz de Zarobe, Sierra & Gallardo del Puerto 2011,

Smit & Dafouz 2012). Among the different topics included in this research scenario, we

focus on one of the main participants, students, and we look into a very specific aspect,

namely, the linguistic and non linguistic difficulties undergraduate students might face

in an academic community in which English is becoming the medium for instruction. In

this new scenario, knowledge cannot be transmitted as it has traditionally been in the

conventional L1 lecturing, since the focus is not solely on content but also on language

and on the engagement with students (Ball & Lindsay 2013). Such engagement with

learners involves more dialogic classroom dynamics with richer forms of interaction

that enable active participation and effective comprehension (Aguilar & Rodriguez

2012, Borg 2011, Costa 2012, Fortanet-Gómez & Ruiz-Madrid, forthcoming). Within

the academic contexts, lectures have been traditionally considered as the most

prominent speech event in the classroom in higher education (Pérez-Llantada &

Ferguson 2006, Csomay 2007, Deroey & Taverniers 2011), and have as a consequence

focused the attention of researchers in academic discourse analysis. However, very few

of them (Thompson 2003, Crawford-Camiciottoli 2007, Fortanet-Gómez & Ruiz-

Madrid, forthcoming) have approached this analysis from a multimodal perspective.

Authors (forthcoming) analyse how speakers use nonverbal strategies in order to

complete the meaning of their discourse, especially of questions in guest lectures,

following a Multimodal Discourse Analysis perspective (MDA) (Querol-Julián 2010,

Querol-Julián & Fortanet 2012). The results obtained show that in order to achieve a

complete understanding of spoken discourse, both linguistic and non-linguistic features

should be jointly analysed.

The aim of this paper is to show whether students are aware of the meaningful role of

non-linguistic features in guest lectures and if so, does their interpretation coincide with

the lecturers’ intention when using these multimodal features? If not, how can we, as

language teachers, help them to achieve it? Starting from the analysis of the results

66

obtained in a previous study about Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) of two

lectures taught in English (Authors, forthcoming) specific activities on the role of

gestures and their meaning were designed. These activities were completed by 30

students of Academic English in the English Studies Degree. The analysis of the results

obtained revealed a need to include specific training on multimodal features in academic

contexts.

Keywords: MDA (Multimodal Discourse Analysis), students’ training, lectures,

questions.

Acknowledgements: This study has been developed as part of the research project

funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (ref. FFI2011-24269).

References

Aguilar, M. & R. Rodríguez. 2012. Lecturer and student perceptions on CLIL at a Spanish university. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 15/2: 183-197.

Ball, P. & D. Lindsay. 2013. Language demands and support for English-medium instruction in tertiary education. Learning from a specific context. In A. Doiz, D. Lasagabaster & J. M. Sierra (eds.). English-medium instruction at universities. Global challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters: 44-61.

Crawford-Camiciottoli, B. 2007. The language of business studies lectures. A corpus-assisted analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Costa, F. 2012. Focus on form in ICLHE lectures in Italy: Evidence from English-medium science lectures by native speakers of Italian. Ibérica 22: 30-47.

Csomay, E. 2007. Variation in academic lectures: Interactivity and level of instruction. In R. S. Reppen, S. M. Fitmaurice & D. Biber (eds.). Using corpora to explore linguistic variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 205-224.

Dalton-Puffer, C. 2007. Academic language functions in a CLIL environment. In D. Marsh & D. Wolff. Diverse contexts-converging goals. CLIL in Europe. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang: 201-209.

Deroey, K. L. B. & M. Taverniers. 2011. A corpus-based study of lecture functions. Moderna Språk 105/2: 1-22.

Fortanet, I. 2013. CLIL in higher education. Towards a multilingual language policy. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

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Fortanet, I. & M. N. Ruiz-Madrid. Forthcoming. Multimodality for comprehensive communication in the classroom: questions in guest lectures. Ibérica.

Llinares, A, T. Morton & R. Wittaker. 2012. The role of language in CLIL. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Perez-Llantada, C. & G. R. Ferguson (eds.). 2006. English as a glocalization phenomenon: Observations from a linguistic microcosm. València: Publicacions de la Universitat de València.

Querol-Julián, M. 2010. Multimodality in discussion sessions: Corpus compilation and pedagogical use. Language Value Journal. 2/1: 1-26.

Querol-Julián, M. & I. Fortanet. 2012. Multimodal evaluation in academic discussion sessions: How do presenters act and react? English for Specific Purposes 31: 271-283.

Ruiz de Zarobe, Y., J. M. Sierra, & F. Gallardo del Puerto (eds.). 2011. Content and foreign language integrated learning: Contributions to multilingualism in European contexts. Bern: Peter Lang.

Smit, U. & E. Dafouz. 2012. Integrating content and language in higher education. Gaining insights into English-medium instruction at European universities. AILA Review 25. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.

Thompson, S. E. 2003. Text-structuring metadiscourse, intonation and the signalling of organisation in academic lectures. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 2: 5-20.

Assessment criteria for spoken interactions in ESP (English for Law Enforcement) target language use situations

SONSOLES SÁNCHEZ-REYES PEÑAMARÍA & GABRIELA TORREGROSA BENAVENT (Universidad de Salamanca)

Research questions: An understanding of the target language use (TLU) situation is

centre stage for ESP course design (Tomlinson 2005: 309). The mainstream subject

“English” in the curriculum of the Spanish National Police Corps Training Centre

embodies the most customary communicative events in policing, – which are typically

oral –, following target situation analysis to suit professional needs. What specific uses

will law enforcement students put the target language to in their work contexts (Byram

68

& Hu 2013: 500)? What assessment criteria are relevant for evaluating the students’

spoken performance in the TLU situations?

Approach: Scrutiny of the learners' real world professional communicative requirements

led to identify 17 blocks of police-related target situations to include in the course

syllabus and to develop a checklist for assessment purposes, taking into account the two

factors which characterise LSP testing as a special case of communicative language

testing (Douglas 2001: 45), in contrast with general language testing (Knapp &

Seidlhofer 2009: 530): authenticity of task and interaction between language knowledge

and specific purpose content knowledge.

Method: In the evaluation of TLU spoken situational interactions, the criteria for

correctness are based on indigenous assessment criteria, “used by subject specialists in

assessing the communicative performances of apprentices” (Douglas 2000: 68), as well

as target language knowledge and background knowledge assessment criteria. English

teachers establish these assessment criteria in cooperation with in-service police

officers, content teachers and police students, to guarantee their relevance.

Data: The assessment checklist comprises the following ten headings:

ASSESSMENT CRITERIA Poor Fair Good Very Good Excellent

1. COMPREHENSION

INTELLIGIBILITY of own production

FULL UNDERSTANDING of partner’s

discourse

ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND

COLLOQUIAL AND NON-LITERAL

LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL

REFERENCES

2. INTERACTIONS

PROMPT REACTIONS AND ACTIVE ROLE

FLUENCY

LENGTH

TURN-TAKING

COOPERATION AND NEGOTIATION OF

MEANING

RESPONSE TO UNPREDICTABILITY

3. COMMUNICATION SKILLS

RECONTEXTUALISATION AND

REPHRASING

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COMMUNICATIVE STRATEGIES

INTERVIEWING SKILLS

CLARITY AND EXPLICITNESS,

ELIMINATION OF AMBIGUITY

ECONOMY OF EXPRESSION

4. LANGUAGE ACCURACY

GRAMMAR

VARIETY AND APPROPRIATENESS OF

VOCABULARY

PRONUNCIATION

INTONATION AND STRESS PATTERNS

5. NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION

BODY LANGUAGE

TONE

EYE CONTACT

6. AUTHORITY / CONFIDENCE /

RAPPORT

MANNER

POLITENESS

INTERPERSONAL SKILLS

7. BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE

CONTENT

PROFESSIONAL DISCOURSE (specific

terminology and genres)

8. INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE

CROSS-CULTURAL AWARENESS AND

EMPATHY

REGISTER AND APPROPRIATENESS TO A

MULTICULTURAL SOCIAL CONTEXT

9. ORGANIZATION

SEQUENCING

TRANSITIONAL STATEMENTS

COHESION AND COHERENCE

10. OVERALL QUALITY

OVERALL COMMUNICATIVE

EFFECTIVENESS

Results: The use of this assessment checklist when police students are roleplaying a

TLU situation allows the language instructor to evaluate the learner’s progress clearly

(continuous / formative assessment), and enhances student’s motivation and

involvement. The grid is useful for self-assessment and peer-assessment, as well as

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external assessment by other target language instructors and even content teachers from

the background knowledge areas concerned, if they are proficient in English.

Keywords: ESP, law enforcement, target language use situations, assessment criteria,

spoken interactions.

References

Tomlinson, B. (ed.). 2005. Developing materials for language teaching. London: Continuum.

Douglas, D. 2000. Assessing languages for specific purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

——— 2001. Three problems in testing language for specific purposes: Authenticity, specificity and inseparability. In C. Elder et al. Experimenting with uncertainty: Essays in honour of Alan Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 45-52.

Knapp, K. & B. Seidlhofer. 2009. Handbook of foreign language communication and learning. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Byram, M. & A. Hu 2013. Routledge encyclopedia of language teaching and learning. New York: Routledge.

CLIL and educational games in primary school

LIDIA SANTOS (Universidade de Vigo)

This research work proposes a collection data and a consequent reflection based on a set

of questions: (1) What is the role of CLIL perspective on the development of

communicative skills —oral production, spoken interaction, listening and

comprehension; (2) What is the role of educational games in the development of these

communicative activities; (3) How to develop communicative activities through CLIL

in primary education; (4) How to establish an interaction between CLIL perspective,

educational games , the contents of the curricular area of Environmental Studies and the

contents planned to study English at this level of education.

Assuming that the issue of the introduction of foreign languages to children is well

studied and that the introduction should be implemented in a pleasant way to provide a

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more effective learning and to awake children's interest, this project was designed to try

to understand not only the effect of CLIL in this level of education but also the

influence of games on the development of communicative skills.

Although several teaching units have been planned for classes for the 1st and 4th grades,

I intend, in this paper, to demonstrate, through a lesson planning prepared for the 4th

grade, that the games focus mainly on the development of the students’ oral interaction

and on the achievement of the lesson aims.

The lesson planning has been prepared for the unit “Following school classroom rules”.

It was established as the main goal that , at the end of the unit, students should be able

to orally structure a dialogue similar to that shown in the “discourse competence”. The

vocabulary to be taught to students in the “linguistic competence” was delimited, and

the rules for the school and the classroom that students should learn were followed by

the appropriate “modal verbs”. In the end, students should be able to use them correctly.

For the first activity, “To match pictures and rules”, it was decided to prepare an activity

that would take students to realize what would be the rule to be used to request for

authorization. The whole activity is performed only with the aid of pictures, interaction

between teacher and students and small “strips” with the written rules. For the second

activity, a game (the main purpose of the investigation) was prepared. In the first part of

the game, the teams have the same working tools (pictures and written rules) and they

should be able to remember what they have learnt in the previous activity, using an

exchange of information between both. In the second part, the teams have different rules

and prints to encourage the interaction between them and avoid the use of their mother

tongue.

Keywords: teaching techniques, games, primary education, CLIL.

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A contrastive analysis of tense in spoken ENL and ESL

ELENA SEOANE (Universidade de Vigo)

CRISTINA SUÁREZ GÓMEZ (Universitat Illes Balears)

This paper is concerned with grammatical variation in spoken indigenized second

language varieties of English (Kortmann & Lunkenheimer 2011), in particular the

variation found in the expression of perfect meaning in the English varieties spoken in

Jamaica, Kenya and Tanzania, as compared with British English. In previous studies we

analysed perfect meaning in other institutionalized L2 varieties, namely East and South-

East Asian Englishes (AsEs), as represented in the ICE-corpora; our main focus here

will be to identify morphosyntactic peculiarities which, as is the case in AsEs, can be

explained in terms of diffusion from the input language at the time of colonization, that

is, an early variety of spoken and, not necessarily standard, English, in which the

grammaticalization of the perfect was not complete and alternated with other forms (cf.

Rissanen 1999: 224-225, Schneider 2000: 211). We will also ask whether potential

similarities found between these typologically unrelated and geographically disparate

languages may conform to the same developmental process, one that is subject to

consistent sociolinguistic and language contact conditions (Schneider 2007: 4-5).

From a methodological perspective, we will analyse all occurrences of a selection of

verbs and analyse how they express perfect meaning in informal spoken discourse in

ICE-Jamaica and ICE-East Africa (which subsumes Kenyan and Tanzanian English).

Through this analysis we intend to (i) ascertain whether the tendency observed in ENL

varieties and in AsEs whereby the perfect form is losing ground to the preterite also

holds true for spoken the varieties under study (Van Rooy 2009:311-312, cf. Hundt &

Smith 2009); (ii) see whether the competition between the present perfect and the

preterite for the expression of (especially recent-past) perfect meaning, reported for

American English (Hundt & Smith 2009) and found in AsEs (Seoane & Suárez-Gómez

2013, Suárez-Gómez & Seoane 2013), is also a feature of the spoken indigenized L2

varieties analysed in this study, confirming thus the vernacular universal noted by

Chambers (2004) (cf. also Kortmann & Szmrecsanyi 2004, Kortmann & Lunkenheimer

2011: feature 99); (iii) ask whether the base form and have+base form, which are

productive forms for expressing perfect meaning in AsEs are also productive in these

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varieties and are therefore motivated by common cognitive constraints towards

simplification stemming from language contact conditions (Schneider 2007:4-5), or

whether, on the contrary, they are a peculiarity of AsEs determined by the isolating

nature of the substrates (cf. Seoane and Suárez-Gómez 2013); (iv) see whether low

adverbial support favours the occurrence of a higher number of variants, as is the case

with the less evolved AsEs (Suárez-Gómez and Seoane 2013, Sharma 2001, Hundt and

Smith 2009).

Keywords: AsEs, indigenized varieties, spoken ENL, tense.

References

Hundt, M. & N. Smith. 2009. The present perfect in British and American English. Has there been any change, recently? ICAME Journal 33:45-63.

Kortmann, B. & K. Lunkenheimer (eds.). 2001. The electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English [eWAVE]. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. [http://www.ewave-atlas.org/] Last accessed on 2013-11-06.

Kortmann, B. & B. Szmrecsanyi. 2004. Global synopsis: morphological and syntactic variation in English. In Kortmann, B., K. Burridge, R. Mesthrie and E. Schneider (eds.). A handbook of varieties of English. Vol. 2: Morphology, syntax. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter: 1142-1202.

Rissanen, M. 1999. Syntax. In R. Lass (ed.). The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. III (1476-1776). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 187-331.

Seoane, E. & C. Suárez-Gómez. 2013. The expression of the perfect in East and South-East Asian Englishes. English World-Wide 34/1: 1-25.

Schneider, E. 2000. Feature diffusion vs. contact effects in the evolution of New Englishes: A typological case study of negation patterns. English World-Wide 21/2: 201-230.

——— 2007. Postcolonial Englishes: Varieties around the world. Cambridge: CUP.

Sharma, D. 2001. The pluperfect in native and non-native English: A comparative corpus study. Language Variation and Change 13: 343-373.

Suárez-Gómez, C. & E. Seoane. 2013. ‘They have published a new cultural policy that just come out’: Competing forms in spoken and written New Englishes. In K. Bech & G. Andersen (eds.). English Corpus Linguistics: Variation in time, space and genre. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 163-182.

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Van Rooy, B. 2009. The shared core of the perfect across Englishes: A corpus-based analysis. In T. Hoffmann & L. Siebers (eds.). World Englishes: Problems, properties and prospects. Amsterdam/ Philadephia: John Benjamins, 309-330.

Let’s hear it for the past: Visual input for better pronunciation

HARUN SERPIL & LESLIE KELLY (Anadolu Üniversitesi)

This study focuses on improving college-level Turkish learners’ pronunciation accuracy

of the English past tense marker “-ed”. The ICAO Guidelines for English Aviation

Training Programs indicates that the primary learning objective for pilots and air traffic

controllers is "voice-only communication." ICAO also recommends that ESP teachers

use audio and visual resources, for "Pilots and controllers respond orally much more to

aural (radiotelephony) and graphic (instruments, scopes) input and prompts rather than

to textual prompts." Because voice-only communication is the primary objective of the

program, we opted to do our research in the area of pronunciation – specifically the

regular past tense ending. Turkish students tend to either omit the “-ed” or replace it

with /t/. They are usually over-confident because nobody corrects them and they assume

that they pronounce it correctly. So, over time it seems to get fossilized. Furthermore,

the majority of teaching materials available for Aviation English provide only audio

prompts and, as a result, the instructors rely primarily on radio recordings.

Our question is: Will the accuracy of the target sound be improved if the students are

given visual stimulation in addition to audio stimulation? Through experimental design,

three groups of students (n=63) were pre-tested, taught and re-tested over six weeks.

The two treatment groups consisted of air traffic control students (ATCs), and the

control group consisted of flight trainees (pilots). All groups were given the same

presentation of the target sound; this consisted of three columns, each representing a

sound for the regular past tense. The students were then given notecards with present

tense verbs written on them, which they were asked to say in the past tense. The focused

practice portion of the lesson was where the separation occurred. The experimental

group watched videos before retelling what they saw. The control group heard audio

files of ATC communication before generating their own retellings of the events. The

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control group was provided with exclusively audio content in this target area for the

duration of the six-week study while the experimental group was provided visual

stimulation for the focused practice portion of each lesson on the regular past tense

ending “-ed”.

Based on classroom observations and preliminary data, the experimental group indicates

improvement and higher confidence in their utterance of the target sound. The survey

data indicates no significant correlations to performance for either anxiety level or

learning style. The results of this study can be used by ESP teachers as they weigh how

much video stimulation to seek out and integrate into each lesson. It is our belief that

the results will provide guidance for all ESP teachers while designing pronunciation

lessons.

Keywords: aviation English, ESP, pronunciation training, visual prompts, audio

prompts, accuracy.

Left-dislocated NPs across the ‘speech-like’-‘written’ genre continuum in the recent history of English

DAVID TIZÓN-COUTO (Universidade de Vigo)

Left Dislocated Noun Phrases (LDNPs) have been frequently considered a word-order

design characteristic of spoken discourse (Geluykens 1992, Lambrecht 1994). In

historical data from the Early Modern and Late Modern periods, LDNPs (e.g. After it

was dark any Ship that came to us we engaged them) may fulfill rhetorical purposes

within the text very different from those they would take up today in either written or

spoken English discourse (Montgomery 1982, Kies 1988, Prince 1997, Gregory &

Michaelis 2001) such as, for example, parenthetical uses (e.g. Moreover these Creatures

[rather Sheep than Goats as they breed greater or lesser Stones,] they discover it by

their Gate...). Nonetheless, all LDNPs share one particular feature regardless of where

they are attested, namely their topic-setting function (Lambrecht 1994). In an attempt to

assess their contribution to the categorization of historical genres across the ‘speech-

like’-‘written’ genre continuum, I will divide the foregrounding default role of LDNPs

into two hyper-functions: (a) a discourse-organisational function (Prince 1997, Gregory

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& Michaelis 2001, Netz et al. 2011) and (b) an affective role (Keenan-Ochs &

Schieffelin 1976, Geluykens 1992, Kim 1995):

Speech-like Speech-purposed Mixed Written

Letters and diaries Drama and sermons Fiction and trials

History, Handbooks...

The analysis focuses on genre distribution and discourse functions of the 989 LDNPs

extracted from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Early Modern English (PPCEME), Modern

British English (PPCMBE) and Early English Correspondence (PCEEC). As for the

distribution of LDNPs across historical genres, the findings suggest that the frequency

of LDNPs in speech-like texts (letters and diaries) is lower (0.13; normalized frequency

per 1,000 words) than in speech-purposed (drama and sermons; n.f.: 0.94) or mixed

(fiction and trial proceedings) and written ones (biography, educational treatise,

handbook, history, law, philosophy, science and travelogue; n.f.: 0.64) in the recent

history of English. However, concerning their discourse function, those LDNPs that

deploy an affective or highlighting role (in the sense of Keenan-Ochs & Schieffelin

1976:245, Geluykens 1992:95, Kim 1995:285), rather than a more neutral discourse-

organisational role, have been found to be more frequent in speech-like (58.2%) and

speech-purposed (55.8%) genres (only 35.2% in mixed genres and 37.5% in written

genres). Additional variables suggest that the form and function of LDNPs reflect

differences between speech-related and purely written genres. For instance, a tally of the

element which may precede LDNPs (usually a conjunction or a complementizer) shows

that 34.2% of all instances of LDNPs preceded by a conversational item such as clause-

level and (Culpeper & Kytö 2010:166) is attested in letters and diaries (by far the

highest percentage for any genre). In addition, bare LDNPs (i.e. with no previous

conjunction) are most frequent in speech-purposed (70.2% in sermons and drama) and

mixed texts (67.6% in fiction and trial proceedings), while those that have a previous

marker of any kind are more likely to convey a highlighting functional shade (44.1% of

the total for affective roles) rather than a neutral discourse-organizational role (35.8% of

the total for discourse-organizational roles). These findings suggest that LDNPs seem to

have been particularly useful as deictic rhetorical devices in written-to-be-spoken texts

such as sermons and drama, and that other conversational clause-initial markers such as

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and interacted more regularly with LDNPs when the authors/speakers felt freer to

innovate (i.e. in genres with less editorial control).

Keywords: left-dislocation, discourse functions, genre, Modern English.

References

Anagnostopoulou, E., H. van Riemsdijk & F. Zwarts (eds.). 1997. Materials on left dislocation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Culpeper, J. & M. Kytö. 2010. Early modern English dialogues. Spoken interaction as writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Geluykens, R. 1992. From discourse process to grammatical construction: On left dislocation in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Gregory, M. & L. Michaelis. 2001. Topicalization and left-dislocation: A functional opposition revisited. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 1665-1706.

Keenan-Ochs, E. & B. Schieffelin. 1976. Foregrounding referents: A reconsideration of left dislocation in discourse. BLS 2: 240-257.

Kies, D. 1988. Marked themes with and without pronominal reinforcement: Their meaning and distribution in discourse. In E. Steiner & R. Velman (eds.). Pragmatics, discourse and text: Some systemically-inspired approaches. London: Pinter: 47-72.

Kim, K. 1995. Wh-clefts and left-dislocation in English conversation: Cases of topicalization. In P. Downing & M. Noonan (eds.). Word order in discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 247-296.

Lambrecht, K. 1994. Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus and the mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Netz, H., R. Kuzar & Z. Eviatar. 2011. A recipient-based study of the discourse functions of marked topic constructions. Language Sciences 33/1: 154-166.

Prince, E. 1997. On the functions of left-dislocation in English discourse. In A. Kamio (ed.). Directions in functional linguistics. Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 117-144.

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Exploring the oral-written continuum by means of a comic strip: 'Basic Instructions' by Scott Meyer

EDUARDO JOSÉ VARELA BRAVO (Universidade de Vigo)

Comic strips are an excellent way to explore the written-oral continuum because they

combine images and text in a complex communicative act and because the language

employed is largely conversational, informal and context-dependent (Yus Ramos 1997,

Jenkins & Detamore 2008, Valero 2010). Strips are studied by different disciplines such

as second language teaching and learning, pragmatics or communication studies, which

focus on their visual, linguistic, communicative and cultural values. Modern technology

and the web 2.0 have made strips even more popular and accessible than in the past,

when they depended on classical printed, filmed and media broadcasts (Luppa 2001,

Amara 2012).

In a comic strip there are several layers: visual, conversational, narrative, intertextual

and hypertextual. The language of each layer depends on a different kind of context and

performs a particular function in the macrostructure. Oral and written features appear in

a gradient of cases which is worth studying in detail following current descriptions of

the oral-written continuum (Gass et alii. 2002, Carter & McCarthy 2006).

Comic strips which appear regularly online can be useful in two main ways: as

databases of examples and as language practice and cultural immersion when reading a

strip (Smith, Smith & Bobbitt 2008).

Scott Meyer’s Basic Instructions is an excellent example to explore the oral-written

continuum in strips because of its content and because of the complex multi-layered

constructive technique used to develop each topic, which enables a step by step analysis

of language features.

1) The story always describes an informal and humorous debate, usually between two

characters or more, on how to develop a notion and perform an action successfully. This

strip presents a remarkable level of both textual and conversational elaboration in 4

panels.

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2) The notion being debated is described by the narrator on the upper part of each panel

and discussed by the characters dialogically in their conversation. Both layers,

paralanguage and expressions, must be combined in an overall interpretation.

3) While the comments by the narrator present the features of a written text, the

characters employ many oral features in their conversation.

4) The constructive technique of this strip always repeats the same scheme with some

variations: topic introduction, discussion and interaction and final and surprising

conclusion.

5) The strip is realistic, even though the language and reasoning in the conversation is

witty and humorous.

Comic strips as a subgenre provide a corpus of valuable examples presenting different

combinations of oral and written features which are worth collecting in a database and

studying. Scott Meyer’s series, on the other hand, is a remarkable example to study the

constructive technique of this subgenre.

Keywords: oral-written continuum, text analysis, multi-layered textual constructions,

comic strips.

References

Amara, P. 2012. So you want to be a comic book artist?: The ultimate guide on how to break into comics. New York: Aladdin.

Carter, R. & M. MacCarthy. 2006. Cambridge grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gass, S. M., K. Bardovi-Harlif, S. Sielof Magnan & J. Waltz (eds.). 2002. Pedagogical norms for second and foreign language learning and teaching. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Gocomics. Gocomics. [http://www.gocomics.com/]. Last accessed: 8 December. 2013.

Jenkins, R. & D. Detamore. 2008. Comics in your curriculum. Marion IL: Pieces of Learning.

Luppa, N. 2001. Interactive design for new media and the web. 2nd ed. Burlington MA: Focal Press.

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Meyer, S. Basic Instructions. [http://basicinstructions.net/]. Last accessed: 8 December. 2013.

Smith, A. D., T. G. Smith & R. Bobbitt. 2008. Teaching in the pop culture zone: Using popular culture in the composition classroom. Boston MA: Wadsworth.

Valero Garcés, C. (ed.). 2010. Dimensions of humour. Explorations in linguistics, literature, cultural studies and translation. Valencia: Universitat de València.

Yus Ramos, F. 1997. La interpretación y la imagen de masas. Alicante: Generalitat Valenciana. Instituto de Cultura “Juan Gil Albert”.

A Critical review of corpora for studying grammatical changes in spoken English

JOSÉ RAMÓN VARELA PÉREZ (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)

In recent years, several converging trends in linguistic theory have recognized the value

of the analysis of naturally occurring language use. This new impetus has been fostered

by the availability of fully comparable matching corpora, which make it possible to

compare rates of ongoing change across different registers of speech and writing. By

plotting current changes in English grammar based on comparisons of well-matched

corpora of English comparable as regards their internal composition and sampling

criteria, so-called "short-term diachronic comparable corpus linguistics" (Leech et al.

2009: 24) is now regarded as a new methodology at the interface between traditional

historical linguistics, informed by a long-term perspective, and variationist

sociolinguistics, with its emphasis on recent and short-term developments.

However, although spoken language is the ideal test-bed for the study of linguistic

change from below, the number of available transcriptions of genuine spoken

interactions is still clearly in the minority compared to the wide range of recent written

corpora as well as other materials that can be found on the Internet (e.g. newspaper

articles, blog entries, twitter, etc.).

In this presentation, I will make a critical assessment of the possibilities and limitations

shown by three corpora for the study of suspected grammatical changes in spoken

(American) English: two online corpora which can be accessed through an easy-to-use

81

interface and a specialized corpus assembled from transcripts downloaded from the

Internet:

(a) The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies 2008-), which

contains a sub-corpus of about 65 million words of spoken American English, mainly

representing transcripts of unscripted conversation on TV and radio programs broadcast

from 1990 until the present time, so the corpus is updated regularly.

(b) The Corpus of American Soap Operas (SOAP), which contains 100 million words in

more than 22,000 transcripts of ten American soap operas from 2001 until 2012 (Davies

2012).

(c) Transcripts of interviews and debates from the programme Larry King Live,

published on the CNN web site, which cover the time period 2000-2011.

I will illustrate with my own research the technical and methodological issues involved

in plotting shifts in the use of different negative constructions (negative and operator

contraction, DO-support, to-infinitives split by not, etc). Finally, in the conclusion, I

make a plea for those qualities that should be shared by all comparable corpora such as:

(a) they should faithfully represent conversational English as well as other registers of

the spoken language; (b) their size should be big enough for grammatical studies; (c)

they should allow true sociolinguistic research; (d) they should be freely available to all

scholars; (e) they should follow the same sampling frame.

Keywords: spoken American English, corpus linguistics, current grammatical changes.

References

Davies, M. 2008-. The corpus of contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. [Online], Available: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ [Accessed December 1st, 2013]

——— 2012. Comparing the corpus of American soap operas, COCA, and the BNC. [Online], Available: http://corpus2.byu.edu/soap/overview.asp [Accessed December 1st, 2013]

Larry King Live - CNN.com - Transcripts. [Online]. Available: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/lkl.html [Accessed December 3rd, 2013]

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Leech, G., M. Hundt, C. Mair & N. Smith. 2009. Change in contemporary English: A grammatical study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Beyond language: Discussing social issues in the EFL Costa Rican classroom

VIVIAN VARGAS & VERA MADRIGAL (Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica)

The main purpose of this research paper is to examine the positive impact of content-

based instruction on adults learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom at

Universidad Nacional in Costa Rica, and its benefits in the study of a second language.

Additionally, having EFL adult learners and teachers as the main target for this research

will allow us to focus on the analysis of social issues and controversial topics that will

play a significant role in language learners’ motivation, participation, willingness to

learn, and volunteering in class. The incorporation of social issues in content-based

course programs, and the implementation of useful hints on how content-based

methodology is carried out by foreign language teachers, specifically in Oral Expression

and Composition courses, provide the students with a variety of activities in which they

can interact more than in a language input class. Furthermore, this research study

acknowledges the fact that learners tend to speak more actively in subject-learning

classes: this type of instruction is applied by taking into account students’ needs,

opinions, teachers roles and feedback. Openness to feedback will assist students in oral

and written courses, since learners can receive others’ perspectives about their ideas,

feelings and spoken performance with equanimity, having the opportunity to learn about

empathy towards communication in the class. In fact, students do not tend to drop out

from classes in which they are motivated, they engage while learning about topics that

they will find in real life situations or which are controversial to talk about, having as a

result an improvement in their oral language competence. Besides, several activities and

strategies for instruction in content-based course programs can be applied in both,

conversational and writing tasks. Although a large amount of literature might argue for

potential benefits of content-based teaching, not many research studies focus on the

importance of applying it for improving speaking as well writing skills. In Costa Rica,

this way of learning and teaching is in fact appropriate and well accepted by learners

since they participate more often in classroom verbal output. Therefore, through

83

teachers’ interviews, students’ surveys, and theoretical research, this study shows the

significance of teacher instruction in engaging EFL students in learning spoken English

from content through social and controversial topics. Lastly, this research conducts a

study of students’ perceptions to demonstrate how by developing interactive

communicative abilities, through writing and spoken courses which follow content-

based instruction, learners are able to take part in interactions that open gaps to reflect

upon the whole array of current events and worldwide issues which they will be

exposed to on a regular basis.

Keywords: content-based instruction, second language teaching, social issues, oral

participation.

Word order in matrix Wh-questions in Cajun Vernacular English

RICHARD WINTERS (University of Louisiana at Lafayette)

This paper examines the word order in matrix questions in Cajun Vernacular English

(CVE), which is spoken principally in south central and southwestern Louisiana, and is

a variety of English distinct from Southern American English and African American

English (Dubois and Horvath 1998, 2003). The speakers of CVE are primarily the

descendants of French-speaking Acadians, who were forcibly expelled from Nova

Scotia after the Seven Years' War, when France's Canadian colonial territories were

ceded to the British (Brasseaux 1987, Melançon 2006).

Standard English requires subject-aux inversion when an object or adjunct is questioned

in matrix interrogative sentences, which, following Rizzi (1996), is due to a residual V2

effect that results in T-to-C movement of the auxiliary verb, or do-insertion in the

absence of another auxiliary verb, along with the movement of the wh-phrase to Spec,

CP to satisfy the Wh-Criterion. CVE, on the other hand, fronts the wh-phrase in such

questions, but allows the subject-verb word order to be maintained; subject-aux

inversion does not take place (Marshall 1982, Cox 1992, Scott 1992, Walton 1994,

Cheramie 1998). This lack of inversion occurs across the board, with both wh-phrases

that are arguments and with those that are adjuncts.

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(1) a. What Mary said?

b. Who you invited to the party?

c. When they arrived?

This is also the case with modal verbs:

(2) a. Who you can ask?

b. What I should do?

c. When John must leave?

In cases where a wh-question is negated, again, subject-aux inversion does not occur,

although do-insertion does appear to take place.

(3) a. Why you didn’t wash the dishes?

b. *Why you not wash the dishes?

Negated questions with modal verbs also exhibit the same lack of subject-aux inversion.

(4) a. Who you can't stand?

b. What he wouldn't do?

Following Rizzi’s (1997) Split CP model as further elaborated by Westergaard and

Vangnes (2005) and Westergaard (2006, 2007), this paper argues in a minimalist

framework that residual V2 features are absent in CVE in interrogative contexts. The

lack of these features obviates the need for do-support in affirmative wh-questions. In

the case of negative questions, it is further argued that the apparent presence of do-

support is more readily explained by treating don't as a lexicalized negative adverb. The

lack of residual V2 features in CVE and the manner in which wh-questions are negated

are attributed to the conditions of this English variety's genesis, namely phenomena

related to language contact and imperfect language learning.

Keywords: Cajun Vernacular English, wh- questions, word order, minimalist

programme.

References

Brasseaux, C. A. 1987. Founding of New Acadia: The beginnings of Acadian life in Louisiana, 1765-1803. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP.

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Cheramie, D. M. 1998. Cajun Vernacular English and the influence of vernacular on student writing in South Louisiana. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Southwestern Louisiana.

Cox, J. 1992. A Study of the Linguistic Features of Cajun English. Lafayette, LA: Southern University of Lafayette (ERIC. ED352840).

Dubois, S. & B. M. Horvath. 1998. From accent to marker in Cajun English: A study of dialect formation in progress. English World-Wide 19/2: 161-88.

——— 2003. Verbal Morphology in Cajun Vernacular English: A Comparison with Other Varieties of Southern English. Journal of English Linguistics 31/1: 34-59.

Marshall, M. 1982. Bilingualism in Southern Louisiana: Sociolinguistic analysis. Anthropological Linguistics 24: 308-24.

Melançon, M. E. 2006. Stirring the linguistic Gumbo (Cajun English). In Wolfram W. & B. Ward (eds.). American voices: How dialects differ from coast to coast. Oxford: Blackwell: 238-43.

Rizzi, L. 1996. Residual verb second and the Wh-criterion. In A. Belletti & L. Rizzi. Parameters and functional heads: Essays in comparative syntax. New York: Oxford UP: 63-90.

——— 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In L. Haegman (ed.). Elements of grammar: Handbook in Generative Syntax. Dordrecht: Kluwer: 281-337.

Scott, A. M. 1992. Some phonological and syntactic characteristics of Cajun English. Cajun English: Informal English in French Louisiana. Spec. issue of Louisiana English Journal: 26-37.

Walton, S. L. 1994. Flat speech and Cajun ethnic identity in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Tulane University.

Westergaard, M. R. 2006. Triggering V2: The amount of input needed for parameter setting in a split-CP model of clause structure. In A. Belletti, E. Bennati, C. Chesi, E. DiDomenico & I. Ferrari. Language Acquisition and Development: Proceedings of GALA 2005. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars: 658-71.

——— 2007. Learning and unlearning V2: On the robustness of the triggering experience in a historical perspective. In M. C. Picchi & A. Pona (eds.). Proceedings of the XXXII Incontro di Grammatica Generativa. Alessandria: Edizione dell'Orso: 193-207.

Westergaard, M. R. & Ø. A. Vangsnes. 2005. Wh-questions, V2, and the left periphery of three Norwegian dialect types. Journal of Comparative Germanic 8: 117-58.

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POSTERS

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Are our students speaking English? Use of English in non-academic settings

ALBA GUTIÉRREZ MARTÍNEZ (Universidad del País Vasco)

This study reports on the use of English outside the classroom by students of English

from the University of Cantabria. The goal of the paper is to quantify and describe the

extracurricular activities our students do and connect it with their motivation towards

learning English and academic success. The data was collected through individual

questionnaires (Marchi 2008, Weger 2013) and self-assessment tests of students in

different university degrees. The results will help us understand our students better and

what their motivation is. Pedagogical implications can be interesting and some remarks

related to the functional practise of ESL in university settings will be included.

Keywords: non-academic settings, ESL, extracurricular activities, speaking.

References

Weger, H. 2013. Examining English language learning motivation of adult international learners studying abroad in the US. RELC Journal 44: 27-101.

Marchi, G. 2008. Actividades extracurriculares: ¿Qué hacen los estudiantes universitarios para practicar una lengua extranjera (LE) fuera del aula? Entre Lenguas 13: 71-83.

Fluency and the use and functions of highly frequent lexical bundles in spoken texts by Norwegian non-native speakers of English

HEGE LARSSON AAS (Høgskolen i Hedmark)

This poster presents results from a small-scale pilot study of inter-corpus variation

which is part of a larger study on lexical bundles (Biber et al. 1999) and fluency

variables in spoken texts by Norwegian non-native speakers of English. Lexical

bundles, or “recurrent expressions, regardless of their idiomaticity, and regardless of

their structural status” (Biber et al. 1999), characterize spoken language output in

particular (Erman & Warren 2000, Biber et al. 1999, Altenberg 1998), and contrastive

studies of non-native (NNS) and native (NS) speech often reveal “a complex picture of

overuse, underuse, misuse of target language NS sequences” (De Cock 2004: 243).

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Patterns of overuse may indicate a reliance on “phrasal teddy bears” (cf. Hasselgren

1994) in NNS speech, which may be a reflection of low proficiency. At the same time,

frequent lexical bundles may also function as part of a fluency enhancement strategy

(Götz 2013), contributing positively to speech production (Dechert 1984). Through an

analysis of audio recordings and transcriptions from the Norwegian component of the

LINDSEI corpus of English interlanguage (Guilquin, De Cock & Granger 2010) and

transcriptions from the comparable English NS corpus LOCNEC (ibid.), this study

investigates whether learner texts that contribute greatly to the pattern of “overuse” of

some lexical bundles can be found to be more fluent than learner texts that make less

use of them. “Fluency” is operationalized in a narrow sense (cf. Lennon 1990) relating

to temporal aspects of the utterance, as one component of fluency which may both

reflect cognitive ease and contribute positively to perceptions of fluency by listeners

(Segalowitz 2010). The analysis of lexical bundles is restricted to bundles with three or

more words containing a lexical verb (following e.g. Paquot 2013), with a high

frequency in the NNS corpus and a pattern of overuse relative to the NS reference

corpus. For the analysis of temporal variables (including mean length of run, speech rate

(words per minute) and pause length), six 5-minute samples of NNS speech are

extracted from six interviews selected on the basis of the frequency of the bundles in

question (the interviews with the lowest and highest frequencies, as well as two

interviews centred around the mean). It is expected that the interviews with the greatest

number of these lexical bundle tokens will also be characterized by greater fluency in

terms of the temporal variables measured.

Keywords: lexical bundles, Norwegian learners, spoken texts, fluency.

References

Altenberg, B. 1998. On the phraseology of spoken English. The evidence of recurrent word-combinations. In A. P. Cowie, Phraseology, theory, analysis and applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 101-22.

Biber, D. et al. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow: Longman.

De Cock, S. 2004. Preferred sequences of words in Ns and NNs speech. Belgian Journal of English Language and Literatures (BELL), New Series 2: 225-46.

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Dechert, H. W. 1984. Second language production: Six hypotheses. In H. W. Dechert, D. Möhle & M. Raupach. Second Language Productions. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag: 211-30.

Erman, B. & B. Warren. 2000. The idiom principle and the Open Choice Principle. Text 20/1: 29-62.

Gilquin, G., S. De Cock & S. Granger. 2010. Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage.

Götz, S. 2013. Fluency in native and nonnative English speech. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hasselgren, A. 1994. Lexical teddy bears and advanced learners. A study into the ways Norwegian students cope with English vocabulary. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 4/2: 237-60.

Lennon, P. 1990. Investigating fluency in EFL: A quantitative approach. Language Learning 40/3: 387-417.

Paquot, M. 2013. Lexical bundles and L1 transfer effects. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 18/3: 391-417.

Segalowitz, N. 2010. Cognitive bases of second language fluency. New York: Routledge.

EFL learners' use of phrasal and phrasal prepositional verbs in spoken English: A preliminary corpus-based study

MARTIÑA PIÑEIRO (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)

The main aim of this study is to analyze how Spanish EFL learners use phrasal and

phrasal prepositional verbs in spoken English. Two main parts can be distinguished: the

first one is devoted to more theoretical considerations, mainly the definition of the terms

(phrasal and phrasal prepositional verbs) and a general review of the literature; the

second part is organized in two different sections: justification and purpose of the paper

together with the description of the study. More specifically, the latter part includes the

research questions, the methodology used and the discussion of the results. Phrasal and

phrasal prepositional verbs (along with prepositional verbs) are commonly referred to as

phrasal verbs. However, and more specifically, phrasal verbs can be considered as

compound verbs (Palmer 1974: 213), formed by a verb and an adverbial particle (as in

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He pulled down the blinds), and phrasal prepositional verbs can be seen as verbs

followed by two particles (one being adverbial and the other prepositional) (as in He did

away with his wife). The learning of phrasal verbs as a general category has been the

subject of extensive scholarship throughout the years being a central issue in the

learning of English. However, to my knowledge, no study on the actual use of phrasal

and phrasal prepositional verbs by Spanish EFL learners in spoken English has been

carried out yet.

In this study, four questions are addressed: a) How often do Spanish learners of English

use phrasal and phrasal prepositional verbs in spoken English?; b) Do Spanish learners

use more phrasal and phrasal prepositional verbs in written or in spoken English?; c)

Are there any differences between males´ and females´ usage of phrasal and phrasal

prepositional verbs?; and d) Are there any differences in the use of phrasal and phrasal

prepositional verbs due to the learner's level of proficiency? Data were extracted from

four main corpora: LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays), ICLE

(International Corpus of Learner English), SULEC (Santiago University Learner of

English Corpus) and LINDSEI (Louvain International Database of Spoken English

Interlanguage). The conclusions were the following: as a whole, Spanish learners prefer

the spoken language when using multi-word combinations. As expected, advanced

learners were the ones who used them most often. As regards gender, no significant

differences were found.

As we did not compare the results obtained with any native corpus of spoken English,

no conclusions could be drawn in terms of their overuse or underuse of phrasal and

phrasal prepositional verbs, although less proficient students did not use them as much

as the more advanced learners did. Further research needs to be carried out to see

whether there are any differences between the oral use of phrasal and phrasal

prepositional verbs by native speakers of English and Spanish EFL learners. Moreover,

a larger sample of English oral texts should be considered so that more significant

results can be achieved.

Keywords: phrasal verbs, phrasal prepositional verbs, Spanish, learner, corpus, spoken

language.

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References

Palmer, F. R. 1974. The English verb. London: Longman.

Learner corpora of spoken English: analysis of Czech university students' performances

JEŽKOVÁ ŠÁRKA (Univerzita Pardubice)

This paper presents one part of a bigger project called “Aspects of English Language

Acquisition of Czech Students on the Onset of Teacher Education”, aimed at the

process of acquiring communicative competence in speaking English as a foreign

language by Czech university learners. Grammar of spoken language has been explored

for a couple of decades and some authors argue that writing and speech are two

different systems (Carter and McCarthy 1995: 147). Even though studies of second

language acquisition have revealed that such differences are very important because

they are reflected in the discourse of speaking and writing, English language learners

are quite frequently instructed on the basis of written discourse (McCarthy and Carter

2001: 73). Thus, research has been motivated by the question of whether students are

able to acquire the syntactic and discourse structures, observable in native speakers’

discourse (Biber et al. 1999: 1052).

The team set up the following objectives: a) to create a corpus of learner spoken English

and make it available for further research use; b) to make an analysis of selected

grammatical, discourse and pronunciation features in the learner corpus with

conclusions for second language acquisition processes including the possible negative

transfer of Czech grammatical and pronunciation features into English; c) to obtain

quantitative and qualitative data regarding individual learning stories to carry out an

analysis; and, d) to interrelate the above-mentioned analyses.

The first stage of the project was devoted to designing data-collecting tools so that they

suited the research aims and objectives and were in accordance with the current trends

in the field. Then we focused on the selection of grammatical and discourse features, the

occurrence of which is examined in the learner corpus. In the selection process, we took

into account features listed as typical of spoken language on the basis of their

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occurrence in large native English corpora (Biber et al. 1999: 1066). After piloting all

the tools and recording the interviews, the corpus comprises monologues and dialogues

which were transcribed by the students themselves and checked afterwards by the

research team. Even though the concepts of English as a Lingua Franca and of learners’

English language differ, some of the tendencies in the usage of language can be similar

(Seidlhofer 2011: 94). Thus, based on the previous studies of English native speakers’

and non-native speakers’ spoken discourse (Mauranen 2012: 67, Granger et al. 2002:

135), certain grammatical features have been chosen, explored in learners’ corpora and

considered within the concept of English as Lingua Franca. All the chosen grammatical

structures are analyzed with respect to second language acquisition processes and

considered within the background of systemic differences between English and Czech

languages.

Keywords: learner corpora, Czech learners of English, university students, spoken

language, syntax, discourse.

References

Biber, D. et al. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow: Longman.

Carter, R. & M. McCarthy. 1995. Grammar and the spoken language. Applied Linguistics 16/2: 141–158.

Granger, S. et al (eds.). 2002. Computer learner corpora, second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Mauranen, A. 2012. Exploring ELF. Academic English shaped by non-native speakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McCarthy, M, & R. Carter. 2001. Ten criteria for a spoken grammar. In E. Hinkel & S. Fotos. New perspectives on grammar teaching in second language classrooms. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 51-75.

Seidlhofer, B. 2011. Understanding English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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WORKSHOP

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CASE - The Corpus of Academic Spoken English

STEFAN DIEMER, MARIE-LOUISE BRUNNER & SELINA SCHMIDT (Universität des Saarlandes)

The workshop addresses researchers who are just beginning to engage in corpus

analysis and whose primary exposure has been through literature, but also those with

experience in corpus compilation and design. It combines hands-on examples, advice

and recommendations with a critical discussion of existing best practice on spoken

corpus design and compilation. The general aims of the workshop are thus threefold.

Using corpus examples, we will:

• look at key issues in the design, compilation, organisation, transcription and

annotation of a corpus of CMC academic spoken English;

• present common problems arising during transcription and annotation with the help of

corpus data, as well as possible solutions; and,

• discuss recommendations for best practice in spoken corpus design, annotation, use,

and storage.

More concretely, there will be an emphasis on asking questions about, and propose

answers to, the major issues arising during the compilation of spoken CMC language

corpora. Thus, the workshop will be especially relevant to graduate students and

postdocs who are collecting data for analysis of spoken CMC interaction, particularly

where a comparison between at least two background languages is intended. We will

begin by describing CASE, the Corpus of Academic Spoken English, compiled at

Saarland University, Germany, in 2013/14, comprising roughly 150 hours of Skype

conversations between EFL speakers from four different countries, including speakers

from Santiago de Compostela University. The corpus is intended to close a particular

gap in the available data on academic international English: discourse in a computer-

mediated communication (CMC) environment via Skype. Although several corpora of

international academic English exist, such as the English as Lingua Franca in Academic

Settings corpus (Mauranen 2008) and the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of

English (Seidlhofer 2013), none of these document Skype conversations. CASE, which

is still being annotated, will contain separate annotation levels for EFL mistakes and

errors, laughter and prosody, international English features, and CMC features. Its

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infrastructure facilitates adding even more levels. Several data samples will serve to

illustrate the main layout and components. We will then focus on the technical aspects

of the corpus creation process, in particular planning conversations and obtaining

background data, recording, combining and standardizing audio and video, the

advantages and disadvantages of using Skype or similar programmes for corpus

compilation, the central issues of privacy and data security, and the problem of access

and secure storage. These issues are particularly problematic for first-corpus compilers;

we will therefore provide first-hand advice and recommendations based on the CASE

experience. The workshop is also designed to give participants hands-on experience

with some of the key issues encountered in working with spoken corpus data. Using

data samples from the corpus, we hope to discuss problems arising during transcription

and annotation, such as the choice of transcription systems and standardisation, the

organisation of the general transcription process, potentially problematic areas, the

integration of pragmatic annotation, and the use of cloud-based cooperative

communities for the coordination of corpus work. In an interactive setting, participants

will discuss particular technical and CMC-related issues, and also spoken international

English features such as the question of how to identify and transcribe non-standard

language. Based on results from CASE in the areas of conversation, organisation and

sociolinguistic influence on EFL, the workshop organizers will present and discuss

concrete recommendations concerning data collection, treatment, compilation and

transcription, which are put forward to supplement existing best practice as presented in

Wynne 2005. We will also contrast these recommendations with samples from other

corpora. Workshop participants are therefore encouraged to bring own data samples or

send them to the organizers beforehand.

Keywords: Corpus of Academic Spoken English, corpus design, corpus compilation,

transcription, annotation, computer-mediated communication.

References

Diemer, S. et al. Forthcoming. CASE Sofia-Saarbrücken: Corpus of Academic Spoken English in an international context. Saarbrücken: Saarland University / Sofia: St Kliment Ohridski University.

Mauranen, A. 2008. ELFA. The Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings. Web. 10 December 2013.

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Seidlhofer, B. 2013. VOICE. The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (version 2.0 Online), 2013. Web. 10 December 2013.

Wynne, M. (ed.). 2005. Developing linguistic corpora: A guide to good practice. Oxford:

Oxbow Books. Web. 10 December 2013.

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LIST OF PRESENTERS

Rosa Alonso [email protected]

Hmoud Alotaibi [email protected]

Marian Amengual [email protected]

Marie-Louise Brunner [email protected]

Yolanda Joy Calvo Benzies [email protected]

Stefan Diemer [email protected]

John Donnelly [email protected]

Inmaculada Fortanet [email protected]

Thushara Gamage [email protected]

Araceli García [email protected]

Jesús García Laborda [email protected]

David González Gándara [email protected]

Alba Gutiérrez Martínez [email protected]

Nicolas Hurst [email protected]

Sarka Jezkova [email protected]

Aleksandra Kaverina [email protected]

Elena Kruglikova [email protected]

Hege Larsson Aas [email protected]

Claudia Lehmann [email protected]

David Lorenz [email protected]

Vera Madrigal [email protected]

Tamilla Mammadova [email protected]

Nuria Otero [email protected]

Nuria Otero de Juan [email protected]

Kaisa Pietikäinen [email protected]

Martiña Piñeiro [email protected]

Lourdes Pomposo [email protected]

Kurt Queller [email protected]

Rosa Rabadán [email protected]

Marine Riou [email protected]

Pablo Ruano [email protected]

Sonsoles Sánchez-Reyes Peñamaría [email protected]

Lídia Santos [email protected]

Selina Schmidt [email protected]

Elena Seoane [email protected]

Harun Serpil [email protected]

Cristina Suárez-Gómez [email protected]

David Tizón Couto [email protected]

Gabriela Torregrosa Benavent [email protected]

José Ramón Varela Pérez [email protected]

Eduardo Varela-Bravo [email protected]

Vivian Vargas [email protected]

Richard Winters [email protected]

Information:http://www.usc.es/en/congresos/icse/

[email protected]

Organizer:Spertus research group

www.spertus.es

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