Fluency and the use of foreign words in interviews with EFL learners
(2017) International Conference Fluency & Disfluency across Langages and Language Varieties — Location: Université catholique de Louvain (15.February.2017)
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- The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) contains informal interviews with intermediate to advanced level learners of English as a foreign language. The interviews follow the same set pattern and are made up of three main tasks: a personal narrative based on a set topic (an experience that taught them a lesson, a country that impressed them, or a film or play they liked/disliked), a free discussion mainly about university life, hobbies, foreign travel or plans for the future and a picture description. Although the interviews are all conducted in English, 'foreign' words, i.e. words from other languages than English, sometimes feature in both the interviewers' and the learner interviewees' contributions. Foreign words have been specially marked up in the LINDSEI corpus (<foreign> WORD(S) </foreign) and can therefore be retrieved automatically using WordSmith Tools for example. In an investigation of the 'communication strategies' (Tarone 2005) used by the learners in half the Norwegian component of the LINDSEI corpus, Nacey and Graedler (2013: 352) discussed the use of foreign words ('code-switching') as an L1-based compensation strategy. They argued that, contrary to what other studies had shown, code-switching was a highly effective strategy in the interviews analysed as it contributed to 'a smooth flow of conversation'. This was however not taken any further. They only suggested that one of the reasons why code-switching was so effective was that the interviewers understood the learners' L1, i.e. Norwegian. More recently, De Cock (2015) explored the use of foreign words in five of the subcorpora included on the LINDSEI CD-ROM (Gilquin et al. 2010), namely LINDSEI_Dutch, LINDSEI_French, LINDSEI_German, LINDSEI_Italian and LINDSEI_Spanish (each of these subcorpora contains between 140,000 and 80,000 words of interviewee and interviewer speech). The study reveals a rather complex picture of learners' use of foreign words. The foreign words, which come overwhelmingly but not exclusively from the learners' mother tongue, fall into four main categories: (1) lexical bridges, which help learners bridge vocabulary/lexical gaps (words/expressions that appear to be unknown or inaccessible to them; e.g. 'cotizar', 'des algues', 'lasser'), (2) cultural/institutional bridges, which denote aspects of the education system, events, folklore, places, etc. typically associated with some of the regions/countries mentioned in the set topic and free discussion parts of the interviews (e.g. 'Tour de France', 'Parco Nazionale del Gran Paradiso', 'Vlaamse Opera', 'Abitur', 'gilles de Binche'), (3) pragmatic/discourse bridges, which fulfil basic pragmatic/discourse functions in the learners' L1 (e.g. 'ja', 'allez', 'si', 'enfin', 'bueno'), (4) foreign words used in direct speech reporting or in metalinguistic discussions (e.g. 'all she could say was <foreign> ich liebe dich </foreign>' - LINDSEI_DU , 'in Spanish they they call it <foreign> chela </foreign>' - LINDSEI_SP). The analysis shows that not all the foreign words investigated could actually be labelled as 'communication strategies' defined as ‘systematic technique[s] employed by a speaker to express his meaning when faced with some difficulty’ (Corder 1981: 103). Pragmatic/discourse bridges are a case in point as their use is largely spontaneous and unintentional (e.g. 'because we are (er) two: <foreign> enfin </foreign> we we are three: children in my family and (er) two of us . are studying here so (er)' LINDSEI_FR). This paper sets out to turn a 'fluency' spotlight on the use of foreign words in LINDSEI_Dutch, LINDSEI_French, LINDSEI_German and LINDSEI_Italian. The focus is on these four subcorpora as foreign words occur in at least three quarters of the interviews included in the components and are thus fairly evenly distributed. It is noteworthy that the interviewers in the subcorpora on the LINDSEI CD-ROM either share the learners' L1 (e.g. LINDSEI_Dutch and LINDSEI_Italian) or are native speakers of English with at least some knowledge of the learners' L1 (e.g. LINDSEI_French and LINDSEI_German), which might arguably have some impact on the successful use of foreign words in the interaction (cf. Nacey and Graedler above). The aim is to examine whether or not and to what extent the foreign words used as lexical bridges, cultural/institutional bridges and pragmatic/discourse bridges could be labelled as (dis)fluency devices in the informal interviews with EFL learners under investigation. In other words, can the foreign words under study be seen to contribute (or not) to the smooth flow of the interviews? Central to the notion of fluency used here are real-time pressure/processing and interaction management constraints (Rühlemann 2006). The various elements that typically co-occur with each of the three types of bridges are highlighted (e.g. 'I don't know how you say it in English', 'sort of/kind of', filled and unfilled pauses tend to co-occur with lexical bridges) as are turn positions and interviewers' reactions. The notion of fluency in interaction and fluent meaning co-construction (André & Tyne 2012) is also explored in the specific context of informal interviews, which do not share two of Clark’s (1996) typical features of face-to-face conversation, namely self-determination (in informal interviews the turn-taking system is pre-specified, Lazareton 1992) and self-expression (the interviewer has the right and obligation to ask questions and the interviewee has the obligation to answer these questions and to keep talking, Fiksdal 1990). References André, V. & Tyne, H. (2012) Compétence sociolinguistique et dysfluence en L2 In Kamber, A. & Skuipen-Dekens (eds) Recherches récentes en FLE. Bern: Peter Lang, 21-46. Clark, H. H. (1996) Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corder, S. P. (1981) Error analysis and interlanguage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Cock, S. (2015) An exploration of the use of foreign words in interviews with EFL learners: a(n) (effective) communication strategy? Paper presented at LCR 2015, Nijmegen September 2015. Fiksdal, S. (1990) The Right Time and Pace: A Microanalysis of Cross-cultural Gatekeeping Interviews. New Jersey: Ablex Norwood. Gilquin, G., De Cock, S. & Granger, S. (eds) (2010) The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage. Handbook and CD-ROM. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain. Lazaraton, A. (1992) The Structural Organization of a language Interview: A Conversation Analytic Perspective. System 20/3, 373-386. Nacey, S. & Graedler, A.-L. (2013) Communication strategies used by Norwegian students of English. In Granger, S., Gilquin, G. and Meunier, F. (eds) Twenty Years of Learner Corpus Research: Looking Back, Moving Ahead. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 345-356. Rühlemann, C. (2006) Coming to terms with conversational grammar: ‘Dislocation’ and ‘dysfluency’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 11 (4), 385–409. Tarone, E. (2005) Speaking in a second language. In Hinkel, F. (ed.) Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning. London: Routledge, 485-502.
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De Cock, S. (2017). Fluency and the use of foreign words in interviews with EFL learners. International Conference Fluency & Disfluency across Langages and Language Varieties, Université catholique de Louvain. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/40295