Learner Language, Discourse and Interaction: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Spoken English (Studies in English Language)

How do language learners interact with those who already speak the language they are learning? It is more than just a question of learning vocabulary and grammars – learners also need to learn how to put together conversations in their new language and to vary the way they interact across different contexts. This book shows, using millions of words of data, how this happens. It is the first large scale, corpus-based exploration of the discourse macro-structures in conversational interaction between L1 and L2 speakers, and explores three corpora to show, in spoken interaction with L1 speakers across a range of tasks, the dynamics of discourse construction. Considering factors including cultural background, task and proficiency, it characterises the repertoire of discourse functions used in these interactions and shows how they vary according to a range of variables. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Tony McEnery is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University and Advisory Professor at Shanghai International Studies University. He is the author of Corpus Linguistics (with Hardie, CUP, 2011) and Fundamental Principles of Corpus Linguistics (with Brezina, CUP, 2022). He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Isobelle Clarke is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at Lancaster University. Isobelle has developed three methodologies for the analysis of short texts.

Gavin Brookes is Reader and UKRI Future Leader Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. His recent books include Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication (with Collins, 2023) and Obesity in the News (with Paul Baker, 2021). He is a Fulbright Scholar and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.