ABSTRACT

In recent articles and books, we have reported some of the findings of our research into the grammatical characteristics of the five-million-word CANCODE (Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English) spoken corpus (Carter & McCarthy, 1995a, 1995b, 1997; Carter, Hughes, & McCarthy, 1998; Hughs & McCarthy, 1998; McCarthy, 1998). Although these works have tended to focus on specific aspects of spoken grammars, a common thread unites them: the belief that spoken grammars have uniquely special qualities that distinguish them from written ones, wherever we look in our corpus, at whatever level of grammatical category. In our work, too, we have expressed the view that language pedagogy that claims to support the teaching and learning of speaking skills does itself a disservice if it ignores what we know about the spoken language. Whatever else may be the result of imaginative methodologies for eliciting spoken language in the second-language classroom, there can be little hope for a natural spoken output on the part of language learners if the input is stubbornly rooted in models that owe their origin and shape to the written language. Even much corpus-based grammatical insight (for example, the otherwise excellent early products of the University of Birmingham COBUILD corpus project) has been heavily biased toward evidence gleaned from written sources. Therefore, we believe it is timely to consider some of the insights a spoken corpus can offer, and to attempt to relate them more globally to the overall problem of designing a pedagogical spoken grammar. We do this in the form of 10 principles that might inform any spoken grammar project, and which, we feel, give us a distinct purchase on this relatively recent area of pedagogical interest.2 Each of the 10 principles will be

1 The editors would like to thank Cambridge University Press for permission to cite

examples from their corpus. 2 Although we claim that widespread interest in spoken grammars is recent, we do not

wish to dismiss the pioneering work of grammarians such as Palmer and Blandford (1969), who were way ahead of their time in seeing what was important for a grammar of spoken language (for examples and a brief discussion, see McCarthy, 1998, pp. 17-18).