New resources for new challenges: Comparing vocabulary knowledge in ESL and EFL
(2018) International Congress of Linguists (ICL20) — Location: Cape Town (2.July.2018)
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- English as an institutionalized second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) are both non-native varieties, but they present different acquisitional contexts (mainly naturalistic for ESL and mainly instructional for EFL). While each of these varieties has been studied for several decades now, it is only recently that they have started to be systematically compared with one another (see, e.g., Mukherjee & Hundt 2011). However, because they have traditionally been dealt with in different disciplines, namely contact linguistics for ESL and second language acquisition for EFL, we still lack fully comparable corpora for their comparative analysis. Consequently, most of the studies so far have had to rely on less than perfect data, being either very small sets of data (e.g. ESL student writing from ICE and EFL student essays from ICLE in Hundt & Vogel 2011) or data differing along one or several variables (e.g. ESL spontaneous conversations from ICE and EFL informal interviews from LINDSEI in Gilquin 2015). The compilation of a new spoken ESL corpus, the New Englishes Student Interviews (NESSI) corpus, collected according to the same design criteria as LINDSEI, a spoken EFL corpus, will make it possible, for the first time, to properly compare ESL and EFL in speech, a register claimed to be less subject to standardizing forces than writing and thus more likely to display innovations (Seidlhofer 2001). In this talk, I will present this new resource and will describe the results of a study carried out on its first compiled component, the Hong Kong subcorpus, which will be compared with the (mainland) Chinese subcorpus of LINDSEI. The point of comparison will be lexical: using a combination of automated measures of lexical complexity and manual examination of a picture description task included in both corpora, I will test whether the differences in acquisitional context between ESL and EFL students have consequences for their vocabulary knowledge. I will also show how the rich metadata accompanying both corpora can be put to good use to enhance our understanding of the links between ESL and EFL, and more generally between contact linguistics and SLA.
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Gilquin, G. (2018). New resources for new challenges: Comparing vocabulary knowledge in ESL and EFL. International Congress of Linguists (ICL20), Cape Town. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/221610