Spoken English/ Written English: From Corpus to Curriculum to Classroom

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Spoken English/ Written English From Corpus to
Curriculum to Classroom

• Ronald Carter
• School of English Studies, University of
  Nottingham, UK

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A Noun Cline

• Glass cracks more quickly the harder you press
  on it.
• Cracks in glass grow faster the more pressure is
  put on.
• The rate of glass crack growth depends on the
  magnitude of the applied stress.
• Glass crack growth rate is associated with
  applied stress magnitude.
• (Halliday, 1989)

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Written Language

• First staged at the Glasgow Citizens in 1994,
  and described by Williams as being a 'comedy of
  death', the play sees Everett cast brilliantly
  against type as the rich dying widow Flora
  Goforth.

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A corpus-based approach

• Corpus (pl. corpora) a large, principled
  collection of texts, spoken and/or written.
• BNC WSC MICASE.
• Based on the one billion word Cambridge
  International Corpus (CIC) of both BrE and AmE,
  including CANCODE, an extensive written corpus, a
  business English corpus and a dedicated academic
  corpus.

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Facts and figures

• Using a corpus gives us useful statistics about
• frequency
• differences between spoken and written grammar
• social and contextual aspects

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ltS1gt Lets see ... weve already spent fifty
for him and I want him to spend another
hundred ltS2gt Well ltS1gt But thats better than
pins ltS2gt Right ltS1gt And surgery ltS2gt Which
would be another two hundred or ltS3gt Yeah
its more for a surgery
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ltS1gt Lets see ... weve already spent fifty
for him and I want him to spend another
hundred ltS2gt Well ltS1gt But thats better than
pins ltS2gt Right ltS1gt And surgery ltS2gt Which
would be another two hundred or ltS3gt Yeah
its more for a surgery
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ltS1gt Lets see ... weve already spent fifty
for him and I want him to spend another
hundred ltS2gt Well ltS1gt But thats better than
pins ltS2gt Right ltS1gt And surgery ltS2gt Which
would be another two hundred or ltS3gt Yeah
its more for a surgery
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ltS1gt Lets see ... weve already spent fifty
for him and I want him to spend another
hundred ltS2gt Well ltS1gt But thats better than
pins ltS2gt Right ltS1gt And surgery ltS2gt Which
would be another two hundred or ltS3gt Yeah
its more for a surgery
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Spoken language

• Writers orientate more towards norms, speakers
  orient towards each other
• Writing is more off-line and not time
  bound speech is more online and in real time
• Spoken language
• absence of sentences
• incomplete utterances
• jointly produced utterances
• flexible structures.
• Small words are big words (well, right,
  just, at all, sort of, I mean) and often have
  pragmatic functions.

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Words v. Chunks
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Ellipsis

• Didnt know that film was on tonight? (I)
• Sounds good to me. (That/It)
• Lots of things to tell you about the trip to
  Barcelona. (There are)
• A Are you going to Leeds this weekend?
• B Yes, I must. (go this weekend)

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Tails

• Shes a very good swimmer, Jenny is.
• Its difficult to eat isnt it, spaghetti?
• Were going to have steak and fries, we are.
• It can leave you feeling very weak, it can,
  though, apparently, shingles,cant it?

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There is and There are

• Existential There
• Theres three other people still to come
• Theres lots of cars in the car park
• Deictic There
• Theres your pills
• Theres his shoes

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Good or Bad?

• What happens is that there are 15 members of the
  Security Council, there's five permanent members
  and the five permanent members have got the veto.
  

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English in the World

• First Language Speakers
•  
• Mandarin Chinese 1.2 billion
• English 508 million
• Hindi 487 million
• Spanish 417 million
• Russian 277 million
• Bengali 211 million
• Additional or Second or Foreign Language
  Speakers
• English 2 billion by 2020.
• Chinese 30 million by 2020.
• Spanish 25 million by 2020.
• from Graddol (2007)

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Teaching and testing spoken English Some issues
and problems

• The ELF issue
• The EAL issue
• The single literate speaker issue
• The visual issue
• Fluency problem
• The confluence problem

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Fluency what is it?

• Fluency Speakers use Standard English produce
  smooth continuous talk, maintaining flow, and are
  grammatically accurate.
• Dysfluency Speakers are hesitant, sloppy, cant
  remember words, repeat themselves and code switch
  between languages

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Repetition and Confluence

• Dyu did you, pause 0.9 secs er, did you you
  see David at the meeting, er, last night, no, the
  night before, wasnt it?
• (CIC corpus)
• so what did Marketing do they did it that way
  and they introduced, mm, right, yeah, and last
  year they introduced eight new products in just
  six months eight thats huge, it is, isnt it?
  You know what I mean?
• (CIC corpus)

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Repetition and Negotiating Understanding

• Functions Can be both speaker or
  hearer-oriented
• strategic planning
• turn-sensitive
• vagueness
• clarification and confirmation
• summarising
• holding the floor
• emphasis
• Organisational and transactional v.
  Interpersonal and relational
• Implications for testing?

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Speakers, listeners and confluence

• ltS01gt do you think it is affected by your
  faith, like you were saying you ltS02gt mm, right,
  yeah have any kind of moral standards or not,
  like hooliganising and stuff, I mean, do you
  think thats because ofof your faith or do you
  think thats because well because of society or
  whatever?
• (CIC)

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Cross Lingual Spoken and Written
Viki its snowing quite strong outside....be
careful Sue I will, thx Viki wei wei...lei dim
ar? Sue ok, la, juz got bk from Amsterdam loh,
how r u? Viki ok la.. I have 9 tmrw Sue haha, I
have 2-4 ........sooooooooooo happy Viki che...an
yway...have your rash gone? Sue yes, but I have
scar oh...ho ugly ar! Viki icic...ng gan yiu
la...still a pretty girl, haha!! Cantonese
translations wei weilei dim ar hi, how are
you? ng gan yiu la it doesnt matter ar,loh
and la are discourse markers in Cantonese
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Spoken to Written

• Could you email Kyle Barber and ask him for a
  quote for a laptop? Said wed let Tatchell have
  one for himself as part of the deal. Compaq or
  Toshiba. At least 420Mb hard disk and 16Mb RAM.
  Good deal, tell David. Worth the laptop. More in
  the pipeline. (Inter company email) Right, so
  there I was sitting in Mick Jaggers kitchen
  while he went about making us both afternoon tea.
  Well, you can imagine how long it took to get him
  to talk about the bands latest album. Exactly.
  Youve got it. Over two minutes. (The Daily
  Telegraph Magazine 19/9/2004).

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Spoken English summary

• Spoken language has specific forms ellipsis,
  tails flexible clause structure vague language.
• Spoken language has forms that were unnoticed in
  the past new metalanguage is needed and
  traditional terms are not always adequate.
• There are structures that are frequent in speech
  and infrequent in writing and vice-versa but
  note the particular challenge of the growing
  continua between speech and writing.

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Spoken communication

• Fluency has been under-theorised. Teaching of
  spoken English still works from assumptions of
  correctness based on written language norms.
• Spoken language focuses on speakers and
  listeners. Speakers and listeners co-create and
  orient towards each other. Fluency is confluence.
• Teaching and curricula need to recognise the
  needs of 21st century spoken communication
  through English and to develop appropriate
  testing mechanisms. To this end corpora can
  provide a starting point.

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References

• Biber, D et al, (1999) The Longman Grammar of
  Spoken and Written English (Longman,
  Harlow)Carter, R. and McCarthy, M. (2006)
  Cambridge English Grammar A Comprehensive Guide
  to Spoken and Written Grammar and Usage (CUP
  Cambridge)Cornbleet, S and Carter, R (2001) The
  Language of Speech and Writing (Routledge,
  London)Halliday, M.A.K. (1989) Spoken and
  Written Language (OUP Oxford).
• O Keeffe, A, McCarthy, M. and Carter, R. From
  Corpus to Classroom (CUP Cambridge)Pridham, F
  (2001) The Language of Conversation (Routledge,
  London).