Over the past three years, the Language Research Team at Cambridge University Press, along with linguists at Lancaster University, have been building the largest ever public collection of transcribed British conversations, totalling 11.5 million words. In this post, Dr Claire Dembry explains what has been found so far and how you can use it in your own teaching!
In the world of ELT we ask questions. Questions like, what should we teach students to allow them to quickly improve their spoken English? Where can you find out about what spoken English is like today? Do you google it? One awesome solution may be to look in a corpus – a huge collection of English language.
We can find out a lot from analysing a corpus and these are just some of the fascinating insights we’ve already found out from looking at every day British English speech:
1. The use of split infinitives like “to actually get“ has almost tripled over the last three decades, with other common examples including “to really want” and “to just go”.
2. Americanisms (American words or phrases) like awesome and cheers have replaced some of the more typically British sayings like marvellous and cheerio. Can you think of any more examples?
3. Transforming nouns into verbs is now a huge phenomenon in British English – have you heard people say things like “I’ll text her”, “why don’t you message them?”, or “I’ll google it”? All of these are examples of how speakers of British English have started swapping noun + verb constructions (e.g. send a text) for just a verb (e.g. text).
We’ve been able to find all of this out by analysing the newly created corpus, the Spoken BNC2014. This is an 11.5 million word collection of spontaneous British English conversation collected between 2012 and 2016. The recordings used for the project were gathered by members of the public who used their smartphones to record everyday conversations with their families and friends. These included: a newlywed couple reminiscing about their recent honeymoon, students drinking in their halls, a father and daughter chatting in the car and grandparents visiting family for the day.
The corpus is intended to be used by linguists and language educators around the world. It will help linguists to understand what influences language change over short periods of time, as well as how best to teach learners of English through publishing textbooks with an up-to-date view of real spoken English. But how can you make sure that your students are getting the most out of this kind of research? And how can you make use of this great new collection of spoken language?
This fantastic resource isn’t just available for researchers at Cambridge University Press and Lancaster University, but to everyone (click here to find out more)! So, why don’t you try using the corpus in your own lessons? Corpora can be a great resource for creating worksheets and can also be used by students themselves to look for patterns in language.
Here are some suggestions for how you could use the Spoken BNC in your teaching – try them out and let us know what you think by commenting on this post below.
1. Missing word or phrase
Students have to guess the missing word or phrase based on the context of the rest of the sentences. For example, search in the corpus for the word ‘say’, – collect example sentences and remove the word or phrase. Ask students what’s missing – how do they know? What word class does the word belong to? How is it used in the sentence?
2. How is it used?
Students read a sample of sentences that all include one word. Students then have to describe how the word is used. For example, noticing common word patterns, how it’s used most often etc.
3. Spot the error
Take some example sentences and change one word/phrase to make it an error. Students then have to correct the errors.
4. Match the word with its collocations
Create a list of words that you’re focussing on and a list of words they most frequently collocate with. Students match the word with its group of collocates.
5. How is spoken language different to written?
Find example sentences from a spoken corpus and some from a written corpus (see below for suggestions for other freely available corpora). Ask students to choose which sentences are spoken and which are written. How did they decide? Then you could use these as a basis to explore further differences of certain words/phrases and functions. For example, in spoken, the limited range of linking devices as well as expressions like ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’. As you can see, using corpora in the ELT classroom can help learners see language in different, real-life contexts and therefore help them better understand when and how to use it themselves. Corpora are also useful when preparing teaching materials as there is an existing bank of example sentences that you can take to the classroom.
Take a look at this Uses of corpora document for full examples of the exercises above and also for a list of freely available corpora!
The Spoken BNC2014 was gathered by the ESRC-funded Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press. Click to access the corpus.