Spoken Grammar

Sometime in March the day after the Oscar
ceremony, one of my Facebook friends posted:

Mazal
Tov to the King's Speech!

to which I replied:

Leo Selivan and Strangers No More - the best short
documentary about Rogozin
School in Tel Aviv

16 hours ago · Like

(I was rooting for the film to win since a
little over a week earlier I had visited the school with a delegation from the UK). 

My comment prompted a somewhat sarky reply
from another Facebooker (the name has been changed):

Sarky Facebooker I didn't realise that there an Oscar
category for documentaries about the Rogozin
School in Tel Aviv. Seems
like a case of over-specialisation to me.

13 hours ago · Like ·  1 person

Admittedly my sentence was not very well
formed and had I been writing it, say for this blog, I should have written “and Strangers No More, a documentary about the Rogozin School in Tel Aviv,
which won in the Best Short Documentary category”. But considering the chatty nature of
Facebook posts my post doesn't seem too inchoate. After all, we don’t “write” on
Facebook but rather “talk”, i.e. the Facebook language is more characteristic
of spoken rather than written English. And when we speak we tend to omit and swallow
words (“Hungry?” instead of “Are you hungry?”), interrupt ourselves (“I
wouldn’t be upset you know – I mean it’s your choice – if you asked her out”),
repeat ourselves (“My sister, she has a friend there now, he is staying with
her”) and make other deviations from the norms of English grammar. Speaking is less structured and somewhat untidy.

The Facebook episode made me investigate the subject of spoken grammar in more depth. First of all, although
I refer to it as “spoken grammar”, there is actually no agreement among theoreticians
if it actually exists. There are three main ways of looking at the subject:

1. Spoken language has no grammar

2. Spoken grammar = written grammar

3. Spoken English has its own grammar.

The first view holds that spoken language
is not governed by grammar rules - it is messy and lacking order. According to
the second view, while the vocabulary we use in speaking and writing may be
different (for example, more formal register in writing, more phrasal verbs in
speaking etc) the same grammar rules apply to both.

Finally, the last view has received increased
attention in the last few years with a few books published on the subject (see,
for example, Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. 1999.
Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman). They have challenged the
notion that grammar rules should be dictated by a written model of the language
and proposed that spoken language is governed by a special grammar with its own
rules and conventions

The main features of spoken grammar:

Ellipsis

Omission of one or more words in
clause.

Any luck? Instead of “Did you have any
luck?”

Repetition

Spoken language is produced spontaneously,
in real time, and we do not have time to plan what we are going to say. This
often results in repetition and additions. For example, a quantifier is often placed after its noun
or pronoun:

Parisians, most of them speak some English.

Or we often add a "tail” at the end:

It’s a funny place, this town.

Vagueness

"Vague language is more likely to be
the sign of a skilled and sensitive speaker than a lazy one" claim Carter & McCarthy (2006, p. 202)¹. Some examples of vagueness in spoken English
include:

 -ish,
kind of / kinda, .., or something, … and things like that

Historical present

The use of present tenses to narrate past
events in order to achieve a more dramatic and vivid effect.

I get to my car and then I realise that
I’ve left my car keys at home so I go back home and guess what?…

Discourse markers 

Discourse markers used in Spoken English
are quite different than those in written English

Well…, anyway…I mean… You know

NB. "You know" is the most frequent word
combination in English

    

Formulaic language

Exchanges in a conversation often consist
of formulaic expressions rather than full sentences.

That’s fine. What time? What about…?

How to focus in class

To practise the features of spoken grammar
in class, you can do the following activities:

- arrange formulaic expressions to make a
short dialogue

- look at different uses of well (e.g. to
end a conversation, to introduce a story
etc).

- add sort of,
kind of or something like that to a dialogue to make it sound more vague

- describe a picture using stuff, things and bits and no other nouns - but as many
adjectives and verbs as you can

- watch a scene from a film and note down
all examples of spoken language.

Here is an example of an activity which
aims to draw students’ attention to ellipsis:

Short questions in spoken language

In
spoken language it’s common to leave out certain words (very often auxiliary
verbs or pronouns) in general questions. Can you put back the missing words in
the short dialogues below?

a)       “Hungry?” – “No. I’m fine thanks.”

b)       “Sleep well?” – “Yes, thanks.”

c)       “You going to the party tomorrow?” – “Might be”

d)       “Tired? – “Yes,
I’ve been working all day.”

e)       “More
coffee”? –“Yes, please.”

f)       
“Any luck? – “Nope. I’ll
try again tomorrow”.

What do you
think the speaker in (f) is asking about?

Click HERE to download a handout with a
number of other Spoken grammar activities and exercises.

Why focus in class

Natural sounding language

By highlighting the above-mentioned
features of spoken grammar we expose our students to real language, not
coursebook English. This is especially important on the courses where the main
input students get is through reading.

Motivating

Dealing with the language that is not often
found in conventional teaching materials is relevant to our students’ lives.  It is the language they hear in the movies and
songs, and use when chatting on Facebook and Skype.

In order to counter “levelling out”

“Levelling out” is a common phenomenon in
translation, referred to as one of the translation universals. Corpus studies
show that translated texts tend to be more similar to one another than texts in
the source language, which is particularly evident in register (level of
formality). In other words, both formal and informal texts in the source
language tend to lean towards the centre of the continuum in translation. A
similar phenomenon can be observed amongst learners of English. They often use
informal language when writing formal essays or letters and they tend to use
more formal language in speaking. Since we help our learners to sound more
formal in writing, I see no reason why we should not try and help make their
speaking more informal, where appropriate.

Can you think of other reasons why we should
focus on spoken grammar in class? Do you agree that we should spend time on it
at all? I would like to hear your thoughts on the subject.



_____________________



¹ Carter,
R. & McCarthy, M. (2006). Cambridge Grammar
of English, Cambridge,
CUP