This year at IATEFL, Olivia Goodman from our Language Research Team and Dr Robbie Love from the University of Leeds will be giving a talk on how spoken British English has changed over time, on Thursday April 4th at 12:05-12:35 in Hall 1B. If you’re at IATEFL, please do come along! Here, Olivia gives further insights into what you can expect.
Our talk focuses on how spoken British English has changed over the last 20 years and considers what these changes mean for materials writers, teachers and learners in ELT.
Keeping up with language change
We all know that spoken language is constantly evolving, and teachers and learners want to know what those changes are; the challenge we face is keeping up to date. To address this challenge, Cambridge University Press and Lancaster University teamed up to build the Spoken BNC2014 – a new, 11.5-million-word corpus of transcribed spoken British English conversation, gathered from 2012-2016.
Having this data means that we are able to find out how English is really used today, and more importantly compare it to data from 20 years ago to investigate how language has changed over time. It’s important that we use these insights to inform materials development so that real-life language is used in the classroom. Every day, teachers and learners who may never have heard of corpus linguistics are using corpus-informed material, and so they encounter natural, authentic and up-to-date language.
Our IATEFL talk
In this talk, we demonstrate how Cambridge University Press is using real language data to keep up with language change in ELT materials development. From our research we’ll share findings of what has changed over time in spoken British English, with a particular focus on how the use of adverbs has shifted: not just in frequency, but in syntax and function too.
This evidence of change has surprised materials writers, challenged preconceptions and has changed the representation of language in materials in a number of ways. We therefore encourage teachers by equipping them with knowledge to teach authentic language and keeping them informed of language change, where they may not necessarily have much exposure to how English is changing and evolving.
We conclude by discussing the broader principles we have demonstrated through the changes in adverbs, reflecting on wider applications for language pedagogy and how teachers may use the Spoken BNC2014, which is available to the public free of charge.
We are excited to share this research with you all, so please do attend our talk if you’re at IATEFL. We’ll have more information to share on the topic after the conference too. Read about another talk from Ben Knight on evaluating progress in language learning and find out what to expect on our stand at IATEFL 2019.