Correspondence

Abstract

We would like to clarify, briefly, some of the issues arising from our article in ELT Journal 64/4 (Anderson and Corbett 2010), which prompted a critical response (Baker and Hüttner 2011). We grant that we neglected to give a fuller appreciation of the rich scholarship that Baker and Hüttner champion. However, this research will be familiar to readers of ELTJ. Our article considers varieties of speech in the light of Makoni and Pennycook’s (2007) invitation to ‘disinvent and reconstitute’ languages and Canagarajah’s (2007: 94) suggestion that ELF ‘does not exist as a system out there. It is constantly brought into being in each context of communication’. Engaging with English in ‘each context of communication’ is a challenge. Our article considers the modest role that a variationist corpus of native-speaker English, namely the Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech (SCOTS), might play in the EFL classroom, in the light of overlapping debates into national and international standard varieties, the ‘ownership’ of English, and the globalizing of English in lingua franca contexts. We present SCOTS as complementing rather than competing with the VOICE corpus of ELF (p. 416). Our position is that both local native-speaker and local ELF varieties share a rich resource, particularly for creating affective meanings from the local expressions that are available in those varieties. These local expressions often escape the descriptions and prescriptions of standard varieties and are elided in international EFL textbooks; however, we believe that they have a place in the language classroom. The growing number of online spoken corpora makes it increasingly possible for EFL professionals to raise awareness of how speakers use local varieties to manage interpersonal exchanges. The SCOTS corpus, as a multimodal archive of transcribed speech and audio-visual data, is a powerful instrument for the kind of research into pragmatics that Baker and Hüttner acknowledge is currently lacking. We did not feel it was necessary to labour the point that it is possible for speakers of standard English to converse and laugh in a friendly fashion. Neither did we feel it necessary to be explicit about the potential for Scots to express hostility; it is, after all, a variety notorious as a medium for ‘flyting’ (a literary form of ritualized personal abuse). Baker and Hüttner rightly note that the lexical items we discuss are not in themselves friendly; however, in practice, they are evidently used to maintain friendly relations. In suggesting that EFL teachers might find the SCOTS corpus of value, our intention, as we state clearly in our article, is not to promote Scots per se as a model for speech in the EFL classroom but to demonstrate, via examples of Scots in conversation, that the processes that ELF speakers engage in have analogues in native-speaker discourses. In the SCOTS corpus, we share an accessible and relevant resource for the comparative study of such practices.