Teaching English as a friendly language: lessons from the SCOTS corpus

Anderson, W. and Corbett, J. (2010) Teaching English as a friendly language: lessons from the SCOTS corpus. ELT Journal, 64(4), pp. 414-423. (doi: 10.1093/elt/ccp085)

Abstract

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.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Anderson, Professor Wendy and Corbett, Professor John
• Authors: Anderson, W., and Corbett, J.
• Subjects: L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2361 Curriculum; P Language and Literature > PE English; P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Language and Linguistics
• Journal Name: ELT Journal
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• ISSN: 0951-0893
• ISSN (Online): 1477-4526
• Published Online: 25 November 2009