Corpus Perspectives on the Spoken Models used by EFL Teachers

Book excerpt: Corpus Perspectives on the Spoken Models used by EFL Teachers illustrates the key principles and practical guidelines for the design and exploitation of corpora for classroom-based research. Focusing on the nature of the spoken English used by L2 teachers, which serves as an implicit target model for learners alongside the curriculum model, this book brings an innovative perspective to the on-going academic debate concerning the models of spoken English that are taught today. Based on research carried out in the EFL classroom in Ireland, this book: explores issues and challenges that arise from the use of "non-standard" varieties of spoken English by teachers, alongside the use of Standard British English, and examines the controversies surrounding sociolinguistic approaches to the study of variation in spoken English; combines quantitative corpus linguistic investigations with qualitative functional discourse analytic approaches from pragmatics and SLA for classroom-based research; demonstrates the ways in which changing trends and perspectives surrounding spoken English may be filtering down to the classroom level. Drawing on a corpus of 60,000 words and highlighting strategies and techniques that can be applied by researchers and teachers to their own research context, this book is key reading for all pre- and in-service teachers of EFL as well as researchers in this field.