4 Telling tails: grammar, the spoken language and materials development
4.11 Conclusions
The following conclusions might be drawn from current explorations into the description for pedagogic purposes of spoken English:
(i) The development of such work is in its initial stages.
(ii) A description of features of language is not the same as the pedagogic classroom presentation of those features. Concocted, made-up lan- guage can be perfectly viable, but classroom language may also be modelled on naturalistic samples and, to differing degrees, accord- ing to judgements of learner need.
(iii) A discourse-based view of grammar underlines the importance of grammatical choices; particularly in the domain of spoken gram- mar it is better, therefore, to work with the notion of regularities and patterns rather than with absolute and invariable rules.
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(iv) Learners need to be helped to understand the idea of variable pat- terns. Classroom activities should therefore encourage greater lan- guage awareness and grammatical consciousness-raising on the part of the learner and try to stimulate an investigative approach so that learners learn how to observe tendencies and probabilities for themselves.
(v) As argued by Timmis (2002), we should not lose sight of learners’ own feelings, aspirations and motivations which involve, as Timmis illus- trates, finding ways of making their voices heard. Timmis does not underestimate the complexities but he underlines the extent to which learners and teachers can aspire to speak like native speakers.
(vi) And, finally, ideological factors cannot and should not be left in the background. Most spoken corpora constructed so far are based on the discourse of native speakers. Do teachers want to teach and do learners want to learn native speaker English? Is the native speaker the most appropriate paradigm? Is it unrealistic to expect non-native speakers to be able to or even want to express feelings, attitudes, interpersonal sensitivity in the target language? And indeed the term ‘native speaker’ in itself is not without problems of definition (see some eloquent arguments by Prodromou (2003;
2008) for the use of the term SUE – successful user of English – as a preferable term). In this regard it is important that corpora become extended to include greater international representativeness and data involving interaction between non-native speakers; without such a dimension it may be difficult in future to defend exclusively British or American English native-speaker-based corpora against charges of narrow parochialism.
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