British Academic Spoken English Research Articles

"We don't normally require that in other contexts, do we": Interpersonal meanings of tag questions in British university seminars based on the BASE corpus.

This study investigates the interpersonal meanings expressed by English tag questions in the context of British university seminars from two dimensions: evidential modification of tags and conduciveness of responses. The data for the study derive from seminars in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus, which is herein both quantitative and qualitative analyzed. The findings reveal that: (1) three-quarters of tag questions in the data are utilized by teachers, and the unmarked form of tag questions in university seminars are generally positive-negative forms, with a few examples of other varieties; (2) regarding evidential modification of tags, depending on the degree of epistemic certainty of the speakers on the proposition of the anchor, the default function of teachers' tag questions in the data is to convey emphasis, followed by confirmatory function, with only a few cases of informational function; and (3) regarding conduciveness of responses, over 70% of tag questions are followed by no verbal response, while less than 30% are followed by explicit responses. Accordingly, these findings raise the question of whether tag questions can really provide sufficient scope for interactions in classroom. It is hoped that this nuanced, corpus-based analysis of tag question utilization within the context of British university seminars would empirically reveal the interpersonal relations between teachers and students and thereby shed light on more efficient seminar discussions.

Unpacking the function(s) of discourse markers in academic spoken English: a corpus-based study

Discourse markers can have various functions depending on the context in which they are used. Taking this into consideration, in this corpus-based research, we analyzed and unveiled quantitatively and qualitatively the functions of four discourse markers in academic spoken English. To this purpose, four discourse markers, i.e., “I mean,” “I think,” “you see,” and “you know,” were selected for the study. The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus was used as the data gathering source. To detect the discourse markers, concordance lines of the corpus were carefully read and analyzed. The quantitative analysis demonstrated that from among the four discourse markers, “you know” and “you see” were the most and the least frequent ones in the corpus, respectively. In line with the quantitative analysis, the qualitative analysis of the concordance lines demonstrated that there were various functions with regard to each of the four discourse markers. The findings of this study can have implications in fields such as corpus-based studies, genre analysis, and contrastive linguistics.

An Analysis of the Multiword Units Presented in IELTS Speaking Preparation Books Published by Iranian Authors

This study compared the use of lexical bundles in authentic spoken language data with those of two English learning textbooks developed for IELTS preparation courses in Iran. The aim was to see if the language chunks available in the said textbooks were representative of the real-life language for which learners need to prepare. To achieve this aim, firstly, a list of lexical bundles was compiled based on Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and British Academic Spoken English (BASE). Further, the list was used as a reference tool to analyze the language data of two IELTS preparation books published and widely used in Iran. The results highlighted some considerable differences between MICASE and BASE with regard to the use of lexical bundles in terms of their frequency, structure, and function. Moreover, it was revealed that the books under investigation shared only a scarce number of similar lexical bundles with MICASE and BASE as a whole. Therefore, they failed to be representative of the authentic language that people use in real world. Finally, the implications of the study are discussed, and several practical suggestions are made in order to inform teachers, material developers, and syllabus designers of the importance of related corpus linguistic studies.

Stories and scenarios: Lecturers’ use of fantastic hypothetical events

A number of studies have examined the occurrence of stories in lecture contexts, and have suggested that stories can encourage student engagement and the acquisition and retention of lecture information content. Some of these studies have analysed story structures in terms of Labov and Waletzky's model (1967) or the more elaborate model developed by Martin (2008). Such models work well for stories that recount events that took place in past time, but they do not capture another type of story, the hypothetical scenario, sufficiently well. Drawing on prior research into stories in lecture discourse, and ‘Imagining Scenarios’ (Ädel 2010, 2012), we identify and describe passages in lectures where listeners are invited to imagine a fantastic hypothetical situation. Scenario identification criteria were developed, and examples were extracted from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus, the Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC), and the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Novice EMI lecturers may understandably be nervous about straying away from the delivery of facts and into the realms of fantasy, but our findings suggest that scenario-telling is part of the experienced lecturer's repertoire, and is an engaging way of elaborating abstract technical terms, concepts, or arguments central to a disciplinary topic.

WHAT IS VALUABLE IN THE ACADEME: CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS

The paper focuses on the corpus-based analysis of academic discourse values. The research aim is to reveal how teachers transmit academic discourse values through their everyday interactions with students (during lectures, seminars) and to reveal, which values are relevant for the students (based on the analysis of their essays, research papers and some such). The research relies on corpus-based approach and primary methods used are a semantic analysis and a context analysis as well as definition analysis of evaluative means. The research results have revealed that various values play important role in academic interactions and shape the image of the academe – on the local as well as on the global scale. The study of the contexts containing the word valuable in British National Corpus (Davis, 2008-), British Academic Spoken English (Nesi, & Thompson, 2000-), British Academic Written English (Nesi, 2008-), Corpus of Russian Student Texts (Rakhilina, Zevakhina, & Dzhakupova, 2013-) and Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (2002-) has revealed that the values of academic discourse can be subdivided into six domains: emotional, cognitive, educational, research-related, academic life-related, topic- / area-related. The further applicability of research findings manifests itself in various avenues of research: linguistics (evaluative means), axiology (cross-disciplinary study of values), teaching practices (academic discourse genres) and others.

Beyond the noun postmodifier: prepositional phrases preceded by nouns in spoken and written academic English

This study seeks to investigate variation in the use of prepositional phrases following noun phrases in spoken and written academic English. In order to do so, the British Academic Written English (BAWE) Corpus and the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus were used. The results of this analysis have revealed that there is a specific set of prepositions that control prepositional phrases (of, in, to, for). Nevertheless, contrary to previous studies the findings of this investigation show that prepositional phrases following nouns are more common in spoken registers than written registers. These results might be an indicator of different levels of expertise, or the use of genitives in spoken registers.

The role of pragmatic markers in academic spoken interlanguage. A corpus-based study of a group of Brazilian EFL university students

The present work addresses a group of university students of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) on how they use pragmatic markers in their oral productions.The initial hypothesis was that there would be differences both in usage and form in comparison to native speakers. In order to verify our claim, we set off to investigate two corpora: a learner oral corpus being compiled at the Federal University of Minas Gerais/Brazil and a sub-corpus from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE). While Brazilian students overuse items such as maybe and just, the datarecorded in the UK displayed a more varied range of markers and multiword forms. Overall, the findings reinforce the importance of analyzing empirical data for a broader understanding of how native speakers and learners can differ in their oral academic production. The paper also sheds light on language teaching and learning in the academic setting from a pragmatic viewpoint.

The bottom line: Are idioms used in English academic speech and writing?

Many researchers with English as an additional language (EAL), as well as EAL teachers and students, believe that idioms are not used in English academic speech or writing. By 'idiom', they usually mean an expression that is figurative, opaque, multiword, largely fixed, and institutionalised, in keeping with traditional EAL textbook definitions. By contrast, researchers addressing multiword expressions in academic corpora have frequently used the term 'idiom' very broadly, resulting in lists that include lexical bundles and other types of collocation, rather than more traditional idioms.This study identifies all the traditional, textbook-type idioms in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus, examines the range of texts in which they appear, then compares their frequency to the same idioms used in the Oxford Corpus of Academic English (OCAE). The resulting list of 545 idioms, 56 of which appear in four or more BASE texts and 43 of which appear at least 100 times in OCAE, can be used confidently by EAL writers and teachers to enrich their own and their students’ English academic speech and writing.

The lexical profile of academic spoken English

This study investigated (a) the lexical demands of academic spoken English and (b) the coverage of the Academic Word List (AWL) in academic spoken English. The researchers analyzed the vocabulary in 160 lectures and 39 seminars from four disciplinary sub-corpora of the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus: Arts and Humanities, Life and Medical Sciences, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences. The results showed that knowledge of the most frequent 4,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words provided 96.05% coverage, and knowledge of the most frequent 8,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words provided 98.00% coverage of academic spoken English. The vocabulary size necessary to reach 95% coverage of each sub-corpus ranged from 3,000 to 5,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words and 5,000 to 13,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words to reach 98% coverage. The AWL accounted for 4.41% coverage of academic spoken English. Its coverage in each sub-corpus ranged from 3.82% to 5.21%. With the help of the AWL, learners with knowledge of proper nouns and marginal words will need a vocabulary of 3,000 and 8,000 word families to reach 95% and 98% coverage of academic spoken English, respectively.

A Corpus-Driven Analysis of Spoken and Written Academic Collocations

As already well-acknowledged in the field, formulaic sequences often make up an important part of lexical knowledge. Within the L2 learning contexts, there is increasing demand for the need to understand and retrieve lexical items as in prefabricated chunks. In tertiary contexts, knowledge of academic collocations is even more required. For individual word forms, there is the General Service List (West, 1953), and the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000). However, what the field currently lacks is a list of academic collocations. Identification of collocations was conducted with the British Academic Spoken English and the Academic Corpus for comparison of academic collocations in spoken and written discourse. There was use of 20 node words in each corpus, which produced 934 written and 460 spoken collocations. With more number of written collocations being produced from the corpus, the study provides a comparative view of the top 50 collocations which suggests a concentration of common collocations in the field of economics. Within the guided approach for data-driven learning, there is proposal for the need to facilitate psychological conditions for learning collocations.

‘Ignore that 'cause it's totally irrelevant’: Marking lesser relevance in lectures

This paper explores the lexicogrammatical marking of less relevant or less important points in lecture discourse. The attested markers of lesser relevance derive from a close reading of 40 lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus and their use is documented with evidence from the whole BASE corpus of 160 lectures. Five basic types of markers were found, viz. markers of message status (e.g. irrelevant), topic treatment (e.g. briefly), lecturer knowledge (e.g. not remember), assessment (e.g. not learn), and attention and note-taking (e.g. ignore, not write down). Most markers denote partial relevance rather than irrelevance and require interpretation using contextual information. Some markers also have interpersonal functions. Our findings provide valuable input for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses aimed at improving lecture delivery, note-taking and comprehension, for subject lecturer training and for educational research. Since the study also addresses a gap in the literature on relevance marking, the results should also interest analysts of academic discourse specifically and spoken discourse generally.

An Exploration of Vocabulary Knowledge in English Short Talks- A Corpus-Driven Approach

Adopting a corpus-driven approach, the study aimed to explore the vocabulary knowledge in English short talks including word patterns, features, and usages that are most likely to be encountered by language users in the real context. A specific corpus TED was conducted through a collection of English talks that are less than 20 minutes from the website TED Talks. In addition, the existed corpus BASE (British Academic Spoken English) was included in the study as a sample of talks longer than 20 minutes. Applying three corpus tools, AntConc (Anthony, 2003), RANGE (Nation & Heartkey, 2002), and KfNgram (Fletcher, 2007), the researcher was able to compile frequency-ordered word lists, concordance lines, vocabulary coverage, and lists of lexical bundles. The results showed that although the most frequently-used words in TED corpus and BASE corpus were similar grammatical items, the order was quite different. Moreover, the chi-square test showed a significant difference among four pronouns I, You, We, They between the two corpora and also in different parts of the TED corpus. Finally, the results of concordance lines and lexical bundles presented the “typical” and “frequent” word usages in the beginning, middle, and ending part of English short talks. It is suggested that teachers can build their own corpus to meet specific teaching purposes or learner’s needs, and to generate the corpus results into classroom materials while teaching English short talks.

Just remember this: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical devices which highlight important or relevant points in lectures. Despite the established usefulness of discourse organizational cues for lecture comprehension and note-taking, very little is known about the marking of relevance in this genre. The current overview of lexicogrammatical relevance markers combines a qualitative and quantitative investigation of 160 lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. These markers could mostly be classified according to their main element into adjective, noun, verb and adverb patterns. Verb patterns were the most common, followed by noun patterns. The verb pattern V clause (e.g., remember slavery had already been legally abolished) and the noun pattern MN v-link (e.g., the point is) are the predominant types of relevance markers. The discrepancy between the prevalent markers and what may be thought of as prototypical or included in EAP textbooks as relevance markers also demonstrates the need for corpus linguistic research. Implications for EAP course design, teaching English for lecturing purposes, and educational research are discussed.

Research at the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, UK

Established in 1983, the Centre for Applied Linguistics (CAL) at the University of Warwick is committed to a wide range of teaching, research and consultancy activities which focus on language use, language analysis, language learning and language teaching. It is also engaged in the development of multimedia, teaching and research materials and in a number of joint projects with national and international institutions. Its activities are supported by a variety of resources: staff and student expertise, facilities, equipment and materials including collections such as the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) and the British Academic Written English (BAWE) and the Warwick ELT Archive.

What they highlight is…: The discourse functions of basic wh-clefts in lectures

This paper reports findings from a study on the discourse functions of basic wh-clefts such as what our brains do is complicated information processing in 160 lectures drawn from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. Like much linguistic research on this academic genre, the investigation is motivated by the need to gain a better understanding of language use in lectures to aid effective English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course design. To this end, the composition of the wh-clauses was analysed for its main constituents (subjects, verb phrases and modality) and the clefts were grouped according to their apparent main function and subfunction within the lecture discourse. The results show that basic wh-clefts mostly serve to highlight aspects of content information and there was also disciplinary variation in their use. Implications for EAP course design are discussed.

The frequency and functions of just in British academic spoken English

This study investigates the frequency and functions of ‘ just’ in British academic spoken English. It adopts the meanings of ‘ just’ established by Lindemann and Mauranen, 2001, taken from the occurrences of ‘ just’ across five speech events in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) to see if they also apply to occurrences of ‘ just’ in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. One fifth of the mostly monologic lecture data and one fifth of the more interactive seminar data was examined across the four disciplines of the BASE corpus. Results from corpus examples show that as in MICASE, ’just’ occurs most in academic spoken English as a minimizer or mitigator, across all four disciplinary groupings, often in metadiscursive or ‘teacher talk’ frames. Although the highest frequency of ‘ just’ was in Physical Sciences, there is little difference in the function of ‘just’ among the different disciplinary groupings. There is, however, some difference between student and lecturer use of ‘ just’, showing that there is a place for the teaching of ‘ just’ in English for academic purposes (EAP) classes for students preparing for university study.

‘… that's actually sort of you know trying to get consultants in …’: Functions and multifunctionality of modifiers in academic lectures

This corpus-based study explores the way pragmatic force modifiers ( Nikula, 1996) are employed to achieve multiple functions (ideational, interpersonal and textual) in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) lecture corpus. The term pragmatic force modifier (PFM) refers to linguistic devices such as actually, sort of, or you know that can be used to strengthen or weaken the force with which propositions are expressed while at the same time realising manifold social pragmatic purposes. Despite their high frequency of occurrences, discussion about these modifiers in the lecture setting appears to be rare in the literature. This study accounts for the functions of PFMs with reference to relevant contextual features and pinpoints functional variations associated with this particular genre. Attention is focused on the way in which one PFM could perform multiple functions, and multiple PFMs with an emphatic or softening effect could contribute to the same functions. Additionally, examining the interplay among various PFMs in a broader co-text improves our understanding of properties that have been overlooked in earlier treatment of modifiers separately. The study finds genre-defined functions and multifunctionality of PFMs in lectures, so there is no definite correlation between forms and functions; for instance, both intensifiers and softeners are associated with positive politeness and the formation of effective argumentation patterns. This approach may benefit the practical analysis of PFMs in other genres.

Research in progress, The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus Project

Research in progress, The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus Project

The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus Project

Paul Thompson p.a.thompson@reading.ac.ukSLALS, Language Resource Centre, PO Box 241, TheUniversity of Reading, Reading RG6 6WBHilary Nesih.nesi@warwick.ac.ukCELTE, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7ALRunning time of project: Spring 1999–December 2003The primary aim of the project is to create a freely accessibleresource for research into spoken academic discourse. The EnglishLanguage Institute, Michigan University, has established an on-linecorpus (MICASE) representative of academic speech events in aNorth American university, and the present project (BASE) willconstitute a British counterpart to the Michigan corpus. A varietyof university speech events (lectures and seminars, in a range ofdisciplines, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level) arebeing recorded at two UK universities, then transcribed andencoded to form a searchable corpus. As of spring 2001, we haveover 130 lecture recordings, of which about 70 have beentranscribed. We also have about 20 video-recorded seminars, sevenof which have been transcribed.The corpus should provide a major resource for research intothe linguistic and rhetorical features of spoken academic discourse.One line of research that we will follow is an exploration of thelexis of academic lectures across the disciplines and we intend tocompile a Spoken Academic Word List to complement theAcademic Wordlist of Coxhead (1998), which was based on acorpus of written academic discourse.