Scripted speech in the EFL classroom: The Corpus of American Television Series for teaching spoken English
Scripted speech in the EFL classroom: The Corpus of American Television Series for teaching spoken English

Author(s): Stefanie Dose
Subject(s): Education, Foreign languages learning, Media studies, Pragmatics, Philology
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: pedagogical corpora; spoken English; television language; authenticity;
Summary/Abstract: This paper discusses the design and purpose of a new corpus which is particularly geared towards EFL ( English as a Foreign Language) teachers and students: the Corpus of American Television Series ( CATS). Using scripted speech as a model for spoken English is not uncontroversial, as the dialogues of television series are performed in the spoken medium, but their origins are in writing. This gives rise to a unique mixture of spoken and written language features which still lacks systematic description, particularly in comparison with authentic, naturally occurring speech. As one of the first steps in a larger project, the analysis in the present paper focuses on the discourse marker you know. The initial results indicate that television dialogue is an auspicious compromise between artificial textbook dialogues and the overwhelming ‘messiness’ of genuine language data, and thus has great potential for the EFL classroom.

• Details
• Contents