Discourse markers in EFL and ESL: Building a bridge between SLA and contact linguistics
(2014) Conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) — Location: Zürich (24.August.2014)
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- This paper follows a recent trend which seeks to bridge the paradigm gap that exists between second language acquisition (SLA) research and contact linguistics (see, e.g., Mukherjee & Hundt 2011, Davydova 2012). While the former deals with foreign-language varieties, the latter examines (among other things) institutionalised second-language varieties. The rapprochement between these two paradigms turns out to be particularly interesting in the case of English, as it allows the comparison of many different varieties of a language that has become the most widely used lingua franca worldwide. Despite the different contexts in which English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) are learned and used, there appear to be some similarities between the two, which can arguably be linked to general cognitive principles of language acquisition. In an attempt to further pursue this line of research, I have studied the use of discourse markers, which have been described as “language which is not taught” (Hellermann & Vergun 2007), on the basis of spoken data from LINDSEI, the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (for EFL) and from ICE, the International Corpus of English (for ESL), representing a wide range of L1 backgrounds. These data are compared to a native benchmark made up of data from ICE-GB (the British component of ICE) and LOCNEC (the Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation). This combined yardstick makes it possible to avoid the bias of choosing a reference corpus that is either comparable to the EFL data (like LOCNEC) or comparable to the ESL data (like ICE-GB), given that there are currently no fully comparable spoken corpora of EFL, ESL and native English. Next to the quantitative analysis, which seeks to compare the frequencies of discourse markers in the different varieties, a qualitative analysis is carried out to investigate the way discourse markers are used in context. The focus is on the position of discourse markers in the utterance, and whether they tend to appear between or within phrases and closely-knit structures. The results of this investigation also make it possible to tackle the issue of whether discourse markers in EFL and ESL necessarily result in more fluent speech, as suggested by Hasselgren (2002).
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Gilquin, G. (2014). Discourse markers in EFL and ESL: Building a bridge between SLA and contact linguistics. Conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE), Zürich. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/198837