Investigating Spoken English

Combining coverage of the key concepts and tools within phonetics and phonology with a systematic introduction to Praat, this textbook provides a lively and engaging 'way in' to the discipline. The author first covers the fundamentals of the articulatory and acoustic aspects of speech and introduces Praat as the main tool for examining and visualising speech. Next, the unit of analysis is gradually expanded (from syllables to words to turns and dialogues) and excerpts of real dialogues exemplify the core concepts for discovering how speech works. The final part of the book brings all the concepts and notions together with commentaries to the transcription of several short excerpts of dialogues. This book will be essential reading for students on undergraduate courses in phonetics and phonology.

Teaching and Researching Speaking provides an overview of the main approaches to researching spoken language and their practical application to teaching, classroom materials, and assessment. The history and current practices of teaching and researching speaking are presented through the lens of bigger theoretical issues about the object of study in linguistics, social attitudes to the spoken form, and the relationships between spoken and written language. A unique feature of the book is the way it clearly explains the nature of speaking and how it is researched and puts it into the context of a readable and holistic overview of language theory. This new edition is fully updated and revised to reflect the latest developments on classroom materials and oral assessment, as well as innovations in conversation analysis. The resources section is brought up-to-date with new media and currently available networks, online corpora, and mobile applications. This is a key resource for applied linguistics students, English language teachers, teacher trainers, and novice researchers.

This book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in researching or just learning more about the changing role and status of English across Europe. The status of English today is explained in its historical context before the authors present some of the key debates and ideas relating to the challenge English poses for learners, teachers, and language policy makers.

This influential and widely used book has been extensively revised and includes a new chapter on linguistic discrimination on the basis of class, race and ethnicity.

In this activity-based text, Rebecca Hughes invites the reader to examine the differences between spoken and written English. Instead of presenting a bewildering array of 'facts' about variety in English, she encourages the reader to actively investigate the differences between these two modes of communication by comparing actual speech patterns with literary ones. This indispensable guide to the basic methods of analysis provides both an overview of the relationship between speech and writing and an introduction to a central theoretical issue in language studies. By the end of the book, readers will have had the opportunity to consider material from an extensive selection of spoken and written varieties - including boxing commentaries, detective novels and film scripts - while being encouraged to formulate their own opinions with regard to lexis and structure. In addition, the tasks that have been incorporated into the end of every chapter provide suggestions for further self-study and follow-up work.

Grade level: 10, 11, 12, i, s, t.

Investigating a Corpus of Historical Oral Testimonies guides the reader through the process of sourcing a relevant oral history archive for linguistic analysis, constructing a representative corpus out of this archive and analysing this using corpus tools. Focusing on the oral history archive at the Irish Bureau of Military History, this book shows how corpus linguistics can illuminate themes worthy of investigation that may otherwise remain hidden. This is exemplified through the investigation of how certainty is constructed in this archive through a number of expressions and which serves as a template for both how oral history can aid linguistic understanding and how corpus linguistics can contribute to oral history investigation. Highlighting why oral history archives are worthy of linguistic analysis and showing what readers can gain from blending linguistic tools and competencies with oral history data, this book is essential reading for all researchers and students working in the areas of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and oral history.