4 - Telling tails: grammar, the spoken language and materials development

Summary

Introduction

Descriptions of the English language, and of English grammar in particular, have been largely based on written sources and on written examples. This is inevitable since examples of written English are easier to obtain. One consequence of this situation is, however, that ‘correct grammar’ has come to mean ‘correct grammar as represented by the written language’ and that many perfectly normal and regularly occurring utterances made by standard English speakers (of whatever variety – not just standard British English) have by omission come to be classified as ‘ungrammatical’.

The situation is changing, however, and a number of corpora of spoken English have now been assembled which have allowed more precise description of the properties of spoken English, thus enabling learners of English to become more aware of a wider range of forms and structures than hitherto. With reference to one such corpus this chapter seeks to outline ongoing work in the description of spoken English and to discuss some of the implications for English language teaching, and in particular materials development.

The corpus which will be referred to, the CANCODE corpus, is part of the one-billion-word Cambridge International Corpus (CIC) developed by Cambridge University Press between 1995 and 2010 . The CANCODE corpus was developed between 1995 and 2002 as part of a joint research project between the University of Nottingham and Cambridge University Press (CANCODE stands for Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English). The CANCODE corpus totals five million words, which is, as far as spoken corpora go, a large corpus – although it is still small compared with many written corpora where 100 million words is a not uncommon size. The main aim, however, was always to construct a qualitative corpus and not simply a large quantitative corpus (for a fuller account of its structure and organisation, see McCarthy 1998). The way the CANCODE corpus is constructed allows very precise contextualised description of grammar, in particular, and its design allows a discourse-based view of language to prevail in descriptions (see Hughes and McCarthy 1998 ; McCarthy and Carter 1994).