Complexity in Spoken Academic Language: A Corpus-based Approach

Session Submission Type: Paper

Summary

This presentation uses academic lectures taken from the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language to identify features of spoken language complexity. The study then proposes an empirically-based developmental sequence that can be used by future researchers to understand how complexity develops in monologic spoken academic language.

Abstract

Grammatical complexity has a long history in the field of applied linguistics as it has helped researchers understand both theoretical and pedagogical concepts related to language development (e.g., Housen et. al., 2012; Norris & Ortega, 2009). Although the majority of complexity research has adopted different syntax-based units to measure complexity (e.g., T-units, C-units, AS-units), more recent methods of identifying grammatical complexity have taken a corpus-based lexico-grammatical approach to identify features that are prevalent in a given register of use and to relate the identified features to the concept of grammatical complexity. For example, Biber, et. al., 2011 identified the noun phrase as the locus of complexity in written academic language and proposed an empirically-based developmental sequence of complexity in academic writing. The developmental sequence has been corroborated in recent work on academic writing (e.g., Biber et. al., 2015; Staples et. al., 2016) and constitutes a promising avenue to understand second language writing development. This presentation takes a similar methodological approach to grammatical complexity with a specific focus on spoken academic language. Using academic lectures taken from the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language (T2K-SWAL), the presentation shows how the locus of complexity in academic lectures is found primarily at the clausal level (various dependent clause types such as that-clauses and adverbial clauses) as well as in voice and aspect distinctions of certain classes of verbs (communication, likelihood, and certainty verbs). Using the same method that was used by Biber et. al., 2011 to identify grammatical complexity in written academic language, a comparison of these identified features with both face-to-face conversation as well as academic writing provides a proposed developmental sequence that can be used by future researchers to understand how complexity develops in monologic spoken academic language.

Strand

• Corpus Linguistics (COR)

Presenters

• Bill Crawford, Northern Arizona University/Dept. of English

• Eniko Csomay, San Diego State University