Anderson, W. and Corbett, J., ‘Teaching English as a Friendly Language: lessons from the SCOTS corpus’. Paper delivered at British Association for Applied Linguistics Annual Meeting, University of Swansea, 11 September 2008
Using the Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech (SCOTS), a 4 million word corpus of written and spoken texts in Scottish English and varieties of Scots, this paper investigates 'friendly' language, and shows how this can inform a model of language for learners of English as a second or foreign language. Against the current of English as a Lingua Franca, with its focus on simplification, plainness and regularity (e.g. Yano 2001, Seidlhofer 2004), the inclusion of 'friendly' language in a pedagogical model has the potential to humanise intercultural communication.
The SCOTS corpus contains a number of features useful to educators. It is freely available online, and may be browsed and searched using integrated tools, including a concordancer and a map showing geographic location of authors and participants. Twenty per cent of the corpus is made up of spoken language, presented in the form of video/audio recordings with orthographic transcriptions. Texts are also accompanied by extensive demographic and textual metadata.
The spoken section of the SCOTS corpus contains a wealth of information on interactional as well as transactional language use. 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 session makes the case for the inclusion of local speech varieties in EFL curricula and demonstrates how a corpus such as SCOTS can be exploited in the English language classroom.
References:
Seidlhofer (2004). 'Research perspectives on teaching English as a lingua franca'. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 24, 209-239.
Yano, Y. (2001). 'World Englishes in 2000 and beyond'. World Englishes, 20(2), 119-131.