An exploration of the use of foreign words in interviews with EFL learners: a(n) (effective) communication strategy?
(2015) Third Learner Corpus Research Conference — Location: Radboud University, Nijmegen (11.September.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, i.e. words from other languages than English, sometimes feature in both the interviewers' and the learner interviewees' contributions. This paper 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 that 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'). 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). The paper examines the foreign words that can be seen to function as pragmatic/discourse bridges in greater detail, focusing on their typical syntactic and turn positions and on their pragmatic/discourse functions (e.g. response forms, self-correction). The possible impact of interviewer variables such as status, mother tongue and knowledge of other foreign languages on the learner interviewees' use of non-English words is also analysed (e.g. do learners tend to use more words from their own mother tongue if the interviewer is proficient in this language?). Although the main focus of the paper is on the foreign words used by the EFL learners, the analysis also explores the use of foreign words by the interviewers (most of whom are native speakers of English) 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. In a study of the 'communication strategies' (Tarone 2005) used by the learners in half the Norwegian component of the LINDSEI corpus, Nacey and Graedler (2013: 352) discuss the use of foreign words ('code-switching') as an L1-based compensation strategy. They argue that, contrary to what other studies have shown, code-switching was a highly effective strategy in the interviews analysed as it contributed to "a smooth flow of conversation". They suggest that one of the reasons why code-switching was so effective is that the interviewers understood the learners' L1, i.e. Norwegian. This paper investigates whether or not the foreign words used by the learners in LINDSEI_Dutch, LINDSEI_French, LINDSEI_German, LINDSEI_Italian and LINDSEI_Spanish can also be labelled as effective communication strategies. A fundamental distinction is made between foreign words used as lexical and cultural/institutional bridges and foreign words used as pragmatic/discourse bridges since the use of the latter is regarded as largely unintentional and unconscious. The paper concludes by discussing the pedagogical implications of the findings for the teaching and assessment of speaking skills in an EFL context. References 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. 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. 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. (2015). An exploration of the use of foreign words in interviews with EFL learners: a(n) (effective) communication strategy? Third Learner Corpus Research Conference, Radboud University, Nijmegen. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/46833