Paper 016: Investigating Publisher Application of Corpus Research on Recent Language Change To ELT Coursebook Development

CURRY, Niall (Coventry University, UK); LOVE, Robbie (Aston University, UK); GOODMAN, Olivia (Cambridge University Press, UK)

Keywords: ELT, materials development, corpus linguistics, adverbs, spoken British English, language change

Abstract

Corpus linguistics (CL) has come to occupy an important space in the language teaching industry (see e.g. Römer, 2011), but the specific ways in which English Language Teaching (ELT) publishers use CL research to inform materials development are under-studied, meaning that it is not known whether CL is being used by publishers to its full potential. This study investigates the use of CL research by a major international ELT publisher – Cambridge University Press – by (a) conducting a case study into recent change in adverbs in casual spoken British English; (b) sharing the findings with editors from the publisher; and (c) investigating how the editors use the corpus-informed findings in developing coursebooks. We address two main research questions:
1.
How has the use of adverbs changed in casual spoken British English between the 1990s and 2010s?
2.
What is the role of the editorial process in developing corpus-informed coursebooks?

Through our analysis of the Spoken BNC1994 (BNC Consortium, 2007) and the Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al., 2017), we find evidence of major recent changes in the usage of frequent adverbs. Overall, adverbs are significantly more frequent in the more recent dataset. Furthermore, there is evidence of noteworthy functional and syntactic shifts in a number of adverbs including ‘like’, ‘so’, ‘just’, ‘well’ and ‘literally’, which, we argue, warrant discussion and presence in the English language teaching classroom.

Following the corpus analysis, we conducted in-depth interviews with the editors and a review of the materials they subsequently produced using the corpus findings (Cowan et al., 2018; Kilbey et al., 2018; Goldstein & Jones, 2019). We evaluate how our findings are represented in the materials, finding some evidence of effective use of corpora in materials development but revealing limitations in current corpus research approaches which prevent editors from employing CL research more effectively.

References
BNC Consortium. (2007). The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). Distributed by Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, on behalf of the BNC Consortium. URL: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
Cowan, A., Ward, C., & Ting, T. (2018). Talent Level 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldstein, B., & Jones, C. (2019). Evolve Level 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kilbey, L., Ward, C., & Ting, T. (2018). Talent Level 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (2017). The Spoken BNC2014: Designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3), 319-344. DOI: 10.1075/ijcl.22.3.02lov
Römer, U. (2011) ‘Corpus Research Applications in Second Language Teaching’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 31, 205-225.

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