ERIC Number: EJ898669
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2010
Pages: 10
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0951-0893
EISSN: N/A
Teaching English as a Friendly Language: Lessons from the SCOTS Corpus
Anderson, Wendy; Corbett, John
ELT Journal, v64 n4 p414-423 2010
This paper uses the interactional spoken data contained in the Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech (SCOTS) to investigate "friendly" language and shows how its principles can inform a model of language for learners of English as a second or foreign language. Pragmatic markers used in local speech varieties are in danger of being neglected in an educational environment that privileges a common core lingua franca. This paper makes the case for raising awareness of local speech varieties in English as a lingua franca (ELF) and EFL curricula and demonstrates how corpora such as SCOTS can be exploited in the classroom. The SCOTS corpus contains several features useful to educators: it is freely available online and may be browsed and searched using integrated tools, including a concordance facility and a map showing the geographic location of authors/participants. The spoken language drawn on here is available as video/audio recordings with orthographic transcriptions and extensive demographic and textual metadata.
Descriptors: Speech, Oral Language, Geographic Location, English (Second Language), Second Language Instruction, Second Language Learning, Computational Linguistics, Pragmatics, Language Variation, Official Languages, Metalinguistics
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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