SPOKEN ENGLISH IN ACADEMIC LINGUA FRANCA SETTINGS

AN INVESTIGATION OF FORM AND COMMUNICATIVE EFFECTIVENESS

Beyza Björkman

2

Outline

• This panel • This project:

– Two dimensions• Code: Morphosyntax• Communicativeness

– Disturbance– Discourse: Clarification techniques– Irritation

• General results

Researching Scandinavian language environments

• Philip and Alan: Generally about comprehension

• John: How we learn through English• Tim and Margrethe: ELF and language learning • My project: Code and discourse of spoken ELF

in engineering

4

An investigation of spoken ELF

1. What, if any, are the morphosyntactic commonalities of non-standard usage

in monologic and dialogic speech event types studied in the ELF setting

examined?

2. Are the commonalities found shared with those described in the literature?

3. What kind of morphosyntactic non-standard usage results in disturbance in

spoken ELF communication?

4. What kind of morphosyntactic non-standard usage is perceived as irritating in

ELF situations?

5. What are some of the discourse features in the two speech event types in the

ELF setting examined?

6. Are the discourse features found shared with those described in the

literature?

FORM: CODE (1, 2) and COMMUNICATIVENESS (3, 4, 5, 6)

5

Material

• A typical international Scandinavian university

• Two types of speech events– Lectures (48 hrs.) and student group-work

(28 hrs.)

compare size /specialization /speech event range with MICASE (size), VOICE (specialization), ELFA (speech event range)

– 20 L1s, 69 speakers

6

Dimension 1: Code (Morphosyntax)

• Large collection of recordings • Methods

– Digital recordings

– Timed notes (observation with a protocol)– Extensive analyses (listening, without complete transcription)– Criteria:

• The feature must:» occur for a minimum number of ten times» be used by different L1 speakers» in both speech event types (therefore extensive

listening)

• A corpus of four lectures and four group-work sessions transcribed and analyzed (46 647 words)

• External judge to determine the error rate (false positives and false negatives): 9%

Code: Results

• Thirteen different types of non-standard forms as candidates for commonalities.

• Twelve: Clearly divergent from prescriptive norms but unproblematic.

8

NonS word forms discriminization

NonS analytic comparative more big

NonS plural forms/countability

How many hydrogen ...

NonS article usage Anybody can define the renewability?

D. comparative/superlatives much more wider

SVA A catalyst have...

Tense and aspect issues In water turbines water is flowing...

Word order Salinity affects what kind of material can you use.

Not marking the plural 500 meter, two different reactor, several process

Negation It looks not good. / It’s a not very good generator.

NonS Passive voice It can be happened that…/ We affect by the flow...

Pre- /Post-dislocation

(Headers/Tails)

1. So biomass it cannot alone supply all

fuel and food needs...

2. What is the problem when it gets too big

the vessel?

9

Dimension 2Communicativeness 1: Disturbance

• The only NonS morphosyntactic production that causes communication breakdown: Question formulation

• Examples of usage• How many pages we have now? • What means endothermic?• What other equation I would use? • Why we place it there? • So from which point you started? • Why the flutter’s velocity is lower than the divergence

velocity?

10

Patterns in morphosyntax

• Reductions of redundancy– Not marking the plural– Agreement

• Increased explicitness – Pre- and post- dislocations – Unraised negative/ Negation through external negator – Repetition

• Plausible usage (effectiveness and function-oriented)

• Diachronic source is individual interlanguage use

11

Limitations

• Hard to look at intersentential and even interclausal relationships.

Discourse: incomplete and incoherent.

<S1> say put that if you divide it by </S1><S2> yeah how much does it cost to produce it’s like how much it’s not the material like how much </S2><S1> no no no it’s it’s a the the investment [divided by] the number of [hours of] using it </S1> <S2> [yeah] [yeah] </S2><S1> and the [ operation] </S1><S2> [workers] operation </S2><S1> construction </S1><S3> construction cost </S3> <S1> production </S1><S2> ok </S2>

<S1> not the material not the material and the power consumption </S1><S2> uh that kind of stuff this is everything else but the material cost </S2><S1> and then you put the material cost </S1><S2> yeah then you have </S2><S3> i don’t think so </S3><S1> [you don’t think so] </S1><S2> [yeah] , ok so </S2><S1> [ok ok we do] anyway we we [check check] </S1><S2> [why do we] [why do we] why do we have done that then why do we done </S2><S3> we did that we thought that this was something else </S3>

12

Communicativeness 2: Discourse

• Clarification techniques (Penz, 2008)– Clarification of

• terms and concepts • details and content of task

– Metadiscursive comment on • intent• discourse structure (gist, reformulation etc.)• discourse context• common ground

• Backchanneling and repetition (Dewey, 2006)

• Let-it-pass (Firth, 1996)

What is ’steam reforming’? It is a commercial way to produce hydrogen. I don’t know if we’re supposed

to know the code during the lab.

That’s not what I wanted to say.

First I’ll go through the time frame.

That was my question.

We have to check the distillation process.

DISCOURSE FEATURES L1 L2 L3 L4 G1 G2 G3 G4

Clarification of terms and concepts

3 1 3 1 - 4 - -

Clarification of details and content of task

- 26 9 16 6 5 15 33

Metadiscursive comment on discourse structure

1 9 4 5 13 3 3 -

Metadiscursive comment on discourse context

9 10 12 11 12 35 8 -

Metadiscursive comment on intent 3 8 1 1 11 4 4 -

Metadiscursive comment on common ground

60 64 17 - 26 68 76 63

Backchannelling 57 177 174 88

Repetition (other repetition) 11 19 7 8

Let-it-pass - - - - - - - -

Speakers ’let-it-pass’ when breakdown is inconsequential. (Firth, 1996)

14

Communicativeness 3: Irritation test

• Inevitably artificial and lecture-like rather than interactive– Methods:

• Two, three examples of each non-standard usage.• From two different voices with slightly recognizable Swedish

and German accents.• Others’ voices used (for ethical reasons).• Only aural input. Recordings played along with a response

sheet.• 101 respondents from engineering courses.

15

Irritation

COMMUNICATIVENESS IRRITATION

Sentence 1

□ Perfectly OK □ Comprehensible but wrong □ Incomprehensible □ Not irritating at all □ A bit irritating □ Very irritating

Sentence 2 □ Perfectly OK □ Comprehensible but wrong □ Incomprehensible

□ Not irritating at all □ A bit irritating □ Very irritating

Sentence 3

□ Perfectly OK □ Comprehensible but wrong □ Incomprehensible □ Not irritating at all □ A bit irritating □ Very irritating

0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

1600

1800

Communicativeness Irritation

17

Additional comments: 1

Language is peripheral:

18

Additional comments: 2

• Irritation:

19

General conclusions/ answers

• There are commonalities. (RQ1)

• Some shared with previous findings. (RQ2)– (No who/which, invariable isn’t it tag etc.)

• Little breakdown in communication (breakdown caused only by nonS question formulation). (RQ3)

• Suggestions of irritation at varying degrees toward all thirteen features. (RQ4)

• Rich discourse: (RQ5 and 6)– Clarification techniques (unlike Penz)– Increased explicitness (similar to Mauranen, Dewey and Cogo)– Back chanelling, repetition (similar to Dewey and Cogo)– No ’Let-it-pass’ (dissimilar to Firth, Meierkord and House)

ReferencesDewey, M. and A. Cogo. (2006). Efficiency in ELF communication: from pragmatic motives to

lexico-grammatical innovation. Nordic Journal of English Studies 5 (2): 1-36.Firth, A. (1996). “The discursive accomplishment of normality: on ‘lingua franca” English and

conversation analysis.’ Journal of Pragmatics 26: 237-259.Jenkins, J. (2000). The phonology of English as an international language: new models, new

norms, new goals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Jenkins, J. (2007). English as a lingua franca: Attitude and identity. Oxford: Oxford University

Press. Mauranen, Anna. (2003). “The Corpus of English as Lingua Franca in Academic Settings”. TESOL

Quarterly 37 (3): 513-527. Mauranen, Anna. (2004). “English as Lingua Franca- an Unknown Language?” Paper presented at

Identity, Community, Discourse: English in Intercultural Settings International Conference. Tampere, Finland.

Mauranen, Anna. 2006. “A Rich Domain of ELF— the ELFA Corpus of Academic Discourse”. Nordic Journal of English Studies 5(2): 145-159.

Meierkord, C. (2004). Syntactic variation in interactions across international Englishes. English World-Wide 25(1): 109-132.

Penz, H. (2008). “What do we mean by that?” –ELF in Intercultural Project Work. Paper presented at the ESSE conference. August 22-26. University of Aarhus: Aarhus, Denmark.

Publications (on the present project/material)Björkman, B. (Forthcoming-2009). ’ From code to discourse in spoken ELF’. In Mauranen, A. and

Ranta, E. (Eds.). English as a Lingua Franca: Studies and findings. Cambridge Scholars Press: Newcastle.

Björkman, B. (Forthcoming-2009). ’English as a lingua franca at a Swedish technical university: an effective medium?’ Proceedings of the Annual BALEAP Conference (2007): 'EAP in a globalising world: English as an academic lingua franca‘. Peter Lang.

Björkman, B. (2008). ‘English as the lingua franca of Engineering: the morphosyntax of academic speech events’. Nordic Journal of English Studies 7(3): 103-122.

Björkman, B. (2008). 'So where we are': spoken lingua franca English at a Swedish technical university. English Today, 24 (2), 11-17.

Björkman, B. (2007). 'We' and 'you': pronouns and genre competence in oral technical descriptions. In Lainio, J., & Leppänen, A. (Eds.), Linguistic Diversity and Sustainable Development (pp. 89-109). Swedish Science Press.