Constructing learner speech: On the use of spoken data in Applied Construction Grammar
(2018) International Conference on Constructionist Approaches to Language Pedagogy (CALP-3) — Location: Texas, Austin (15.February.2018)
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- Abstract
- In a book published in 2005, Linell describes the “written language bias in linguistics”, showing how the discipline of linguistics mainly relies on the investigation of writing rather than speech. He claims that most theories of language were developed with written language in mind. Although Construction Grammar (CxG), as a theoretical framework, is perfectly suitable to accommodate spoken phenomena, one must recognize that speech has not received the attention it deserves among construction grammarians, as already pointed out by Fried & Östman (2005: 1753) over ten years ago, when they referred to CxG’s “bias away from spoken language” (see Ginzburg & Poesio 2016 for a similar, but more recent, remark). The situation has started to change for the study of native language (see, e.g., Fischer 2010, Fischer & Alm 2013). ‘Applied Construction Grammar’ (De Knop & Gilquin 2016), on the other hand, with its focus on second/foreign language teaching and learning, has hardly touched upon learner speech, being mostly based on experimental data and/or written corpus data (exceptions include Ellis & Ferreira-Junior 2009 or Eskildsen 2014). In this presentation, I would like to plead for more research on speech in the field of Applied Construction Grammar. Among the reasons for this, I will discuss the distinctive use of constructions in speech and writing, learners’ general lack of stylistic awareness, and the way spoken data could act as a springboard to acquire constructions. Using corpus data from the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI; Gilquin et al. 2010), I will then show what the typical spoken learner English constructicon looks like, and how its exploration can reveal new types of constructions, typical of speech and not usually recognized in CxG. Possible pedagogical applications of these findings will also be considered.
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Gilquin, G. (2018). Constructing learner speech: On the use of spoken data in Applied Construction Grammar. International Conference on Constructionist Approaches to Language Pedagogy (CALP-3), Texas, Austin. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/126260