SPOKEN ENGLISH IN ACADEMIC LINGUA FRANCA SETTINGS AN INVESTIGATION OF FORM AND COMMUNICATIVE EFFECTI

1
SPOKEN ENGLISH IN ACADEMIC LINGUA FRANCA SETTINGS
AN INVESTIGATION OF FORM AND COMMUNICATIVE
EFFECTIVENESS

• Beyza Björkman

2
Outline

• This panel
• This project
• Two dimensions
• Code Morphosyntax
• Communicativeness
• Disturbance
• Discourse Clarification techniques
• Irritation
• General results

3
Researching Scandinavian language environments

• Philip and Alan Generally about comprehension
• John How we learn through English
• Tim and Margrethe ELF and language learning
• My project Code and discourse of spoken ELF in
  engineering

4
An investigation of spoken ELF

• What, if any, are the morphosyntactic
  commonalities of non-standard usage in monologic
  and dialogic speech event types studied in the
  ELF setting examined?
• Are the commonalities found shared with those
  described in the literature?
• What kind of morphosyntactic non-standard usage
  results in disturbance in spoken ELF
  communication?
• What kind of morphosyntactic non-standard usage
  is perceived as irritating in ELF situations?
• What are some of the discourse features in the
  two speech event types in the ELF setting
  examined?
• Are the discourse features found shared with
  those described in the literature?
• FORM CODE (1, 2) and COMMUNICATIVENESS (3, 4,
  5, 6)

5
Material

• A typical international Scandinavian university
• Two types of speech events
• Lectures (48 hrs.) and student group-work (28
  hrs.)
• compare size /specialization /speech event range
  with MICASE (size), VOICE (specialization), ELFA
  (speech event range)
• 20 L1s, 69 speakers

6
Dimension 1 Code (Morphosyntax)

• Large collection of recordings
• Methods
• Digital recordings
• Timed notes (observation with a protocol)
• Extensive analyses (listening, without complete
  transcription)
• Criteria
• The feature must
• occur for a minimum number of ten times
• be used by different L1 speakers
• in both speech event types (therefore extensive
  listening)
• A corpus of four lectures and four group-work
  sessions transcribed and analyzed (46 647 words)
• External judge to determine the error rate (false
  positives and false negatives) 9

7
Code Results

• Thirteen different types of non-standard forms as
  candidates for commonalities.
• Twelve Clearly divergent from prescriptive norms
  but unproblematic.

8
8
9
Dimension 2Communicativeness 1 Disturbance

• The only NonS morphosyntactic production that
  causes communication breakdown Question
  formulation
• Examples of usage
• How many pages we have now?
• What means endothermic?
• What other equation I would use?
• Why we place it there?
• So from which point you started?
• Why the flutters velocity is lower than the
  divergence velocity?

10
Patterns in morphosyntax

• Reductions of redundancy
• Not marking the plural
• Agreement
• Increased explicitness
• Pre- and post- dislocations
• Unraised negative/ Negation through external
  negator
• Repetition
• Plausible usage (effectiveness and
  function-oriented)
• Diachronic source is individual interlanguage use

11
Limitations
ltS1gt say put that if you divide it by lt/S1gt ltS2gt
yeah how much does it cost to produce its like
how much its not the material like how much
lt/S2gt ltS1gt no no no its its a the the
investment divided by the number of hours
of using it lt/S1gt ltS2gt
yeah
yeah lt/S2gt ltS1gt
and the operation lt/S1gt ltS2gt
workers operation lt/S2gt ltS1gt construction
lt/S1gt ltS3gt construction cost lt/S3gt ltS1gt
production lt/S1gt ltS2gt ok lt/S2gt ltS1gt not the
material not the material and the power
consumption lt/S1gt ltS2gt uh that kind of stuff this
is everything else but the material cost
lt/S2gt ltS1gt and then you put the material cost
lt/S1gt ltS2gt yeah then you have lt/S2gt ltS3gt i dont
think so lt/S3gt ltS1gt you dont think so
lt/S1gt ltS2gt yeah , ok so lt/S2gt ltS1gt ok ok we
do anyway we we check check lt/S1gt ltS2gt why do
we why do we why do
we have done that then why do we done lt/S2gt ltS3gt
we did that we thought that this was something
else lt/S3gt

• Hard to look at intersentential and even
  interclausal relationships.
• Discourse incomplete and incoherent.

12
Communicativeness 2 Discourse

• Clarification techniques (Penz, 2008)
• Clarification of
• terms and concepts
• details and content of task
• Metadiscursive comment on
• intent
• discourse structure (gist, reformulation etc.)
• discourse context
• common ground
• Backchanneling and repetition (Dewey, 2006)
• Let-it-pass (Firth, 1996)

What is steam reforming? It is a commercial way
to produce hydrogen.
I dont know if were supposed to know the code
during the lab.
Thats not what I wanted to say.
First Ill go through the time frame.
That was my question.
We have to check the distillation process.
13
Speakers let-it-pass when breakdown is
inconsequential. (Firth, 1996)
14
Communicativeness 3 Irritation test

• Inevitably artificial and lecture-like rather
  than interactive
• Methods
• Two, three examples of each non-standard usage.
• From two different voices with slightly
  recognizable Swedish and German accents.
• Others voices used (for ethical reasons).
• Only aural input. Recordings played along with a
  response sheet.
• 101 respondents from engineering courses.

15
Irritation
16

Communicativeness
Irritation
17
Additional comments 1Language is peripheral
18
Additional comments 2

• Irritation

19
General conclusions/ answers

• There are commonalities. (RQ1)
• Some shared with previous findings. (RQ2)
• (No who/which, invariable isnt it tag etc.)
• Little breakdown in communication (breakdown
  caused only by nonS question formulation). (RQ3)
• Suggestions of irritation at varying degrees
  toward all thirteen features. (RQ4)
• Rich discourse (RQ5 and 6)
• Clarification techniques (unlike Penz)
• Increased explicitness (similar to Mauranen,
  Dewey and Cogo)
• Back chanelling, repetition (similar to Dewey and
  Cogo)
• No Let-it-pass (dissimilar to Firth, Meierkord
  and House)

20

• References
• Dewey, M. and A. Cogo. (2006). Efficiency in ELF
  communication from pragmatic motives to
  lexico-grammatical innovation. Nordic Journal of
  English Studies 5 (2) 1-36.
• Firth, A. (1996). The discursive accomplishment
  of normality on lingua franca English and
  conversation analysis. Journal of Pragmatics 26
  237-259.
• Jenkins, J. (2000). The phonology of English as
  an international language new models, new norms,
  new goals. Oxford Oxford University Press.
• Jenkins, J. (2007). English as a lingua franca
  Attitude and identity. Oxford Oxford University
  Press.
• Mauranen, Anna. (2003). The Corpus of English as
  Lingua Franca in Academic Settings. TESOL
  Quarterly 37 (3) 513-527.
• Mauranen, Anna. (2004). English as Lingua
  Franca- an Unknown Language? Paper presented at
  Identity, Community, Discourse English in
  Intercultural Settings International Conference.
  Tampere, Finland.
• Mauranen, Anna. 2006. A Rich Domain of ELF the
  ELFA Corpus of Academic Discourse. Nordic
  Journal of English Studies 5(2) 145-159.
• Meierkord, C. (2004). Syntactic variation in
  interactions across international Englishes.
  English World-Wide 25(1) 109-132.
• Penz, H. (2008). What do we mean by that? ELF
  in Intercultural Project Work. Paper presented at
  the ESSE conference. August 22-26. University of
  Aarhus Aarhus, Denmark.
• Publications (on the present project/material)
• Björkman, B. (Forthcoming-2009). From code to
  discourse in spoken ELF. In Mauranen, A. and
  Ranta, E. (Eds.). English as a Lingua Franca
  Studies and findings. Cambridge Scholars Press
  Newcastle.
• Björkman, B. (Forthcoming-2009). English as a
  lingua franca at a Swedish technical university
  an effective medium? Proceedings of the Annual
  BALEAP Conference (2007) 'EAP in a globalising
  world English as an academic lingua franca.
  Peter Lang.
• Björkman, B. (2008). English as the lingua
  franca of Engineering the morphosyntax of
  academic speech events. Nordic Journal of
  English Studies 7(3) 103-122.
• Björkman, B. (2008). 'So where we are' spoken
  lingua franca English at a Swedish technical
  university. English Today, 24 (2), 11-17.
• Björkman, B. (2007). 'We' and 'you' pronouns and
  genre competence in oral technical descriptions.
  In Lainio, J., Leppänen, A. (Eds.), Linguistic
  Diversity and Sustainable Development (pp.
  89-109). Swedish Science Press.