Foreign words in interviews with EFL learners: bridging lexical gaps?
(2015) ICAME36 — Location: Trier Universität (27.May.2015)
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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 sometimes feature in both the interviewers' and the learner interviewees' contributions. This poster sets out to examine and compare the use of foreign words in five of the subcorpora included on the LINDSEI CD-ROM (Gilquin et al. 2010): interviews with Dutch-, French-, German-, Italian- and Spanish-speaking EFL learners (LINDSEI_Dutch, LINDSEI_French, LINDSEI_German, LINDSEI_Italian, LINDSEI_Spanish). These subcorpora contain between 140,000 and 80,000 words of interviewee and interviewer speech. Foreign words have been specially marked up in the LINDSEI corpus (<foreign> WORD(S) </foreign). They were retrieved from the subcorpora using WordSmith Tools and carefully examined in context. The study investigates the extent to which foreign words are used in the five learner varieties, whether or not the majority of the learner interviewees in each subcorpus under study resort to these items, the origin of the foreign words used (do the foreign words systematically come from the learners' mother tongue or do they sometimes come from another (foreign/second) language?) and the type of gaps the foreign words help learners bridge across the three interview tasks. The analysis reveals that, besides helping learners bridge vocabulary/lexical gaps (words/expressions that appear to be unknown or inaccessible to them; e.g. 'cotizar', 'des algues', 'lasser'), the foreign words in LINDSEI very often serve as cultural/institutional bridges (e.g. 'Tour de France', 'Parco Nazionale del Gran Paradiso', 'Vlaamse Opera', 'Abitur', 'gilles de Binche') and pragmatic/discourse bridges (e.g. 'ja', 'allez', 'si', 'enfin', 'bueno'). Although the main focus of the study is on the foreign words used by the EFL learners, the analysis also explores the use of these words by the interviewers (most of whom are native speakers of English in the subcorpora under study) in the interactions: whether or not the interviewers initiate the use of some foreign words, how they react to the foreign words used by the learners, whether or not they repeat learners' foreign words and whether or not they provide the learners with any (lexical) help. 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.
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De Cock, S. (2015). Foreign words in interviews with EFL learners: bridging lexical gaps? ICAME36, Trier Universität. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/47676