Competition to get at Oxford and Cambridge Universities has become so intense that a ‘mini industry’ has been built around it, offering advice, tips and support through the application process. Parents are paying up to
£3,500 for a package of tuition, mock interviews and help with completing application forms. Sales of books on how to get into Oxbridge are rocket-ing. (The Times, 1 October 07)
(Quality assurance in education) A recently published book by a professor of English at Warwick University has sparked off a heated debate about the quality in education. The cause of disagreement seems to be the Quality Assurance Agency considered by some as a ‘safeguard designed to maintain and improve academic standards’ and by others as ‘a cancer that gnaws at the core of knowledge, value and freedom in education’ and, consequently,
‘the worst thing to happen to higher education in recent times’. (The Guardian, 17 Jan, 08)
After reading the materials and refl ecting on the situation in their own countries, the interviewers will be instructed to single out two controversial issues – one they approve of and are going to support during the interview, and one they disapprove of and are going to criticize. In the next stage – the interview proper – they are to elicit similar information from their respondents:
Interview Script
Elicit from your partner a brief overview of the education system in his/
1.
her country:
a. Positive/negative aspects b. Current reforms
c. People’s attitude towards education, etc.
Express a positive stand on an educational issue, initiating a discussion.
2.
e.g. All children should have a fair chance of gaining admission to language schools.
Express a negative stand on an educational issue, initiating a discussion.
3.
e.g. Teachers should not have a legal right to restrain pupils with force outside schools.
Compare practices.
4.
e.g. admission to universities; or, quality assurance programs.
Find out which of the following stereotypes is relevant to your partner’s 5.
nation (to be enumerated).
Various degrees of accommodation are expected to be displayed in the above interaction, depending on the respondents’ communicative abilities.
To keep the conversation going, they will have to resolve problems con-cerned with information gaps and comprehensibility, accommodation of communication patterns, overcoming inter-cultural differences, rapport building and avoiding threats to face. In short, the common topic and strat-egy elicitation techniques will serve as a framework for the researchers involved in the project.
Additional data are to be derived from the post-interview stage, when both interviewers and interviewees will be instructed to evaluate indepen-dently the conversation in general, the contribution of their interlocutors and their own contribution, as well as any problems or peculiarities.
In the second stage of the study, the collection of transcripts in Corpus A will be analysed by each team independently. We hope that the combina-tion of participant observacombina-tion and objective analysis will lead to the discovery and explication of the recurrent communicative strategies employed by the respondents. A coding system will be developed to account for such dimensions as interpretability, discourse management, interpersonal control, positive and negative face, assertion (Gardner and Jones 1999: 204) plus any other variables that might emerge. The strategies identifi ed will be tagged for intercultural consideration and comparison, with a view to reaching inductive generalizations. The latter are expected to fi lter out idiosyncratic features and explicate recurrent communication strategies. The resulting Corpus B will help outline cer-tain similarities and differences in the socio-cultural norms of speaking, in particular, the preferred strategies by speakers using English as an international language.
We realize that a large-scale project of this kind will consume much time and collaborative effort. What makes it worthwhile is the multifaceted application of its fi ndings. As pointed out earlier, the text collection in Corpus A can serve as a source of linguistic evidence and information.
Corpus B and the respective inventory of communication strategies, in turn, will enable applied linguists, teachers and textbook writers to work towards developing learners’ strategic competence. All in all, the project will help raise people’s general strategic awareness and contribute to the use of EIL in a more effective way.
118 Corpus-Based Approaches to English Language Teaching
Notes
1 The distinction commonly made between EIL (English as an international language) and ELF (English as a lingua franca) is deemed irrelevant for the pur-poses of this paper.
2 According to Kachru’s (1985) classifi cation of English varieties into Inner, Outer and Expanding Circles.
3 ICLE – International Corpus of Learner English (http://cecl.fl tr.ucl.ac.be/
Cecl-Projects/Icle/icle.htm)
4 CADIS – Corpus of Academic Discourse (http://www.unibig.it/Cerlis)
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