Spoken language corpora and pedagogic applications

Andrew Caines, Michael McCarthy, Anne O'Keeffe

Abstract: The chapter explores the development and use of spoken corpora in language research and teaching. Major spoken corpora include the BNC 2014, ICE, ANC, and COCA. Smaller, specialised corpora and multi-modal corpora capture non-verbal behaviour and are valuable for pragmatic research. Key research findings highlight the distinctiveness of spoken grammar, the frequency of chunks, the frequency of discourse markers, situational ellipsis, and the nature of turn-construction in spoken language. Despite extensive research, these findings are underrepresented in language teaching materials. A case study is carried out of zero-auxiliary progressive verbs in spoken English, followed by some suggestions for pedagogy. The chapter also emphasises the potential of AI in transforming language teaching through automatic speech recognition and linguistic assessment, underscoring the need for ongoing collection and analysis of spoken corpora.

External IDs:doi:10.4324/9781003412212-30