“Erm you know that thing over there…” A General Service List of Conversational English for ELT
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35588/ayr.v6i2.6758Keywords:
English Language Teaching , Data-Driven Learning, Conversational British English, Corpus Linguistics, EFLAbstract
This study proposes and analyses a General Service List of Conversational English based on the spoken British National Corpus 2014. Most general service lists are based on written data (Brezina & Gablasova, 2015), overlooking the inherently unique features of conversations. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a general service list of conversational British English. After compilation, the data has been sifted manually to eliminate stopwords, e.g., swear words and months. The aims of this research are threefold: 1) identifying and describing the core lexis of conversations; 2) identifying the heavy-duty vocabulary necessary for full comprehension; and 3) identifying the relation between the coverage of the core lexical and the core conversational vocabulary. This study suggests heavy-duty vocabulary and provides a description of it. In particular, the results suggest that conversational English uses a high degree of recycling of core vocabulary, which is simple in structure and operates at the phatic level of interaction. These findings are particularly interesting for EFL materials design and the teaching of conversational English, enhancing the authenticity of conversations in the EFL classroom. This paper concludes with implications for the selection of vocabulary items in EFL contexts, especially with a focus on listening activities in EFL teaching materials.
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