ABSTRACT
In Reading 1, Ronald Carter refers to two orders of reality: the language studied and used inside the language classroom, and the language used to interact in different situations outside the classroom. We will explore some aspects of these two linguistic worlds in this chapter. First we will focus on some of the characteristics of spoken English that are used by English speakers in everyday contexts as revealed by analysis of data on computer corpora. We will compare these characteristics with representations of spoken English written especially for language learning in classrooms. We will then move back outside the classroom and look at research into how migrant workers in European countries actually manage to develop understandings of the spoken language in particular interactions with majority group speakers. Finally, we return to the classroom to consider tasks aimed at improving the grammatical accuracy of learners’ speech.
