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What is Fluency? : From corpus to classroom

What is Fluency? : From corpus to classroom. Ronald Carter School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, UK. A corpus-based approach. Corpus (pl. corpora): a large, principled collection of texts, spoken and/or written. BNC; WSC; MICASE.

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What is Fluency? : From corpus to classroom

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  1. What is Fluency? :From corpus to classroom Ronald Carter School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, UK

  2. A corpus-based approach • Corpus (pl. corpora): a large, principled collection of texts, spoken and/or written. • BNC; WSC; MICASE. • Based on the one billion word Cambridge International Corpus (CIC) of both BrE and AmE, including CANCODE, an extensive written corpus, a business English corpus and a dedicated academic corpus.

  3. Facts and figures … Using a corpus gives us useful statistics about: • frequency • differences between spoken and written grammar and vocabulary • social and contextual aspects

  4. Textbook Dialogue Fergus: What did you do last weekend ? Eliot: I went shopping. Fergus: Who did you go shopping with? Eliot: I went shopping with my friend Fergus: What did you buy? Eliot : I bought some clothes

  5. Fluency, confluence and strategic competence: • Dyu: did you, [0.9 secs] er, did you you see David at the meeting, er, last night, no, the night before, wasn’t it? (CIC corpus) • …so er what did Marketing do they did it that way and they introduced, [mm, right], yeah, and last year they introduced [0.8 secs] eight new products in just six months, eight that’s erm [1.1.secs]huge, it is, isn’t it? [yeah]You know what I mean? (CIC corpus)

  6. 20 most frequent turn-opener tokens (CANCODE sub-corpus; social conversations) 1.Yeah 11.Mm Oh And  I No  [laughs] Well Yes But You it's So It What Right The that's 10.Erm 20.That

  7. Fluent spoken language • Fewer pauses and hesitations? • Longer uninterrupted runs? • Higher rate of speech? • Complete sentences and long words? (models of written discourse) • Automatic speech • absence of ‘sentences’ • ‘incomplete’ utterances • flexible structures. (not necessarily complete sentences) • jointly produced and confluent utterances • use of small words. Small words are big words (well, right, just, at all, sort of, I mean) that often have interactive pragmatic functions. • Chunks and automaticity

  8. From Words to Collocations to Chunks • Single words • Collocations (lean meat; *strong car) • Idioms and phrases (having forty winks) • Formulaic language (chunks) (Have a nice day) a sequence , continuous or discontinuous, of words or other elements, which is or appears to be prefabricated: that is stored or retrieved whole from memory...’ (Wray, 2002) • Formulaic sequences: how fixed is fixed?

  9. Words v. Chunks

  10. Top 20 2-word chunks (spoken)

  11. Top 5 6-word chunks (spoken)

  12. Seven and beyond? • Chunks bigger than six or seven words are rare – the magic number 7 • Bigger chunks are ‘learned texts’, e.g. quotations, proverbs, etc. • Issues of working memory (single tone units!) • Fluency as a social AND cognitive phenomenon

  13. Two Main Types of Chunk

  14. Functions of Chunks 1. Discourse marking (linking and structuring) (well; right; if you see what I mean; and then; so) 2. Prefaces and politeness (I wondered if; I don’t know if..) 3. Hedging, boosting and vagueness (sort of; as a matter of fact, to be honest with you and stuff like that) Materials development and drills?

  15. Native/non-native fluencies: Extract 1 1 A o:h yea:h 2 (0.9) er:: yest- (0.4) yesterday, 3 (0.3) oh yeah. 4 (0.2) my seven days is almost all days 5 (0.4) i worked. (1.0) [a part time j- ] 6 B a:h [you have a part time] job? 7 A yes.

  16. Native/non-native fluencies (cont) Extract 2 1 A so: where do you (0.6) often 2 (0.8) go (.) to buy sh- (0.4) clothes? 3 B (1.0) nn: i almost never go to buy clothes.= 4 A =wow. ((both speakers laughter)) wow.= 5 B =but nn:: (1.4) [yeah sometimes] 6 A [you:r ] wife? 7 B (0.3) sometimes my wife will buy me a shirt.= 8 A =oh good.

  17. Cambridge ESOL oral examination data, Advanced English (CAE) level (at C1 of the CEFR) <Examiner> First of all we'd like to know a little bit about you. Erm where do you both live? <Candidate 01> I II live in (place name) in South Korea yes. <Candidate 02> And I live in (place name). It's in Switzerland and it's near Zurich. <Examiner> (Candidate name) how long have you been studying English? <Candidate 01> Well actually I study English mm in junior high school and high school for six years around for six years. <Examiner> Different classes. Good. Now I'd like you to ask each other something about things you particularly like about living in this country and entertainment and leisure facilities in this area. [intervening text] <Candidate 02> Erm I like to go erm to see a movie. <Candidate 01> Mm. <Candidate 02> I see a lot of them since I've been here and I like to go to pubs and+ <Candidate 01> Ah. <Candidate 02> +together with friends and= <Candidate 01> =Yeah me too actually. (c) Cambridge Assessment

  18. Cont... • Showing confidence through recognising silences • Taking control through turn initiation • Ability to repair breakdowns and maintain turns • Holding on to the turn by: • Smooth turn boundaries (Low-rise boundary tones) • Filled pauses • Repetition • Avoiding long silent pauses • Multi-modal means.

  19. Fluency and competence: social and cognitive Learning to speak fluently does not always imply an uninterrupted flow of speech that is sequentially and grammatically irreproachable. The ‘good’ speaker ‘knows’ how to hesitate, how to be silent, how to self correct, how to interrupt and how to complete expressions or leave them unfinished.... (Sajavaara, 1987) Linguistic knowledge is what is stored in memory; fluency is access to this store. (Wood, 2010)

  20. Fluency and Spoken English: Other issues • Fluency as a temporal phenomenon (speech rates, tempo and whole units) • Fluency as an interactive phenomenon and primarily about the speaker and listener. Fluency is confluence. • Chunks (formulaic language) and small words. • Fluency and fluencies and strategic competence. • Pedagogies for fluencies (drills, memorisation, modelling etc in relation to automaticity) • Pauses and silences and ‘language levels’. • Fluency, ELF (nativeness) and testing issues.

  21. English in the World • First Language Speakers: • Mandarin Chinese: 1.2 billion • English: 508 million • Hindi: 487 million • Spanish: 417 million • Russian: 277 million • Bengali: 211 million • Additional or Second or Foreign Language Speakers: • English: 2 billion by 2020. • Chinese: 30 million by 2020. • Spanish: 25 million by 2020. from Graddol (2007)

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