Embedded Files
Pre-listening discussion
Pre-listening discussion
- Do you ever listen in on conversations in English when you're out in public?
- Imagine you're in a coffee shop, and you're listening to a conversation in English between two people on the table next to you. Would you find it easier or more challenging than, for example, a TED talk? Why?
- What kind of language do people use when chatting with friends? What happens to things like vocabulary and grammar, pronunciation, accent/dialect, cultural references?
Task one - listening and discussion
Task one - listening and discussion
Now listen to the conversation via the BBC Sounds website (you'll need to login, or register if you haven't yet set up a BBC account). As usual, we'll listen once in open class and then you will have some time to listen with headphones at your own speed. The whole audio is only 3.48 mins long, so take your time over stretches of text that are fast-paced or contain a lot of difficult language.
Becky and her daughter Mia are discussing their experiences as a mixed race family; Becky is British and Mia's father is from Sri Lanka. After listening, discuss in groups:
- How would you describe Becky's relationship with her daughter Mia?
- How do Becky and Mia feel about their experience visiting Sri Lanka?
- What kind of person is Mia?
- Does she give the impression of feeling positively or negatively about her Sri Lankan/British identity?
Task two - language comprehension
Task two - language comprehension
- Check the transcript to see how accurately you understood the conversation. Which parts did you mis-hear?
- Read the paragraphs in red, which refer to Mia. How many instances can you find where she uses the work like? How does its meaning change?
- Can you find any examples of Becky using this word?
What does 'like' mean?
Language analysis - slurs
Language analysis - slurs
The term paki first started appearing in English in the 1960s (OED, 2019) as a term of racist abuse for people from Pakistan, although it was (and still is) used to refer to dark skinned people from South East Asia generally. Although it is short hand for Pakistani (someone from Pakistan), it differs from colloquialisms like Aussie (from Australia) or Brit (Britain) because of its racial connotations. When Mia refers to the conversation she had with her father, she talks about how happy he was when he found out that she and her sister weren't referred to in this way. He says: 'when I was your age, I'd been called that so many times'.
The film East is East (1999) is a British comedy which depicts racial tensions in the North of England in the 1970s. This one's available on YouTube, and would qualify as good independent listening study material.
Task three - working with wordlists
Task three - working with wordlists
A 'wordlist' in linguistics is the list of most common words in a text. We're going to look at some wordlists from the British National Corpus (BNC), which contains nearly 100 million words from a cross section of sources in the English language. As such, a wordlist from the BNC can tell us pretty reliably what the most common words are in the whole language.
- What would you guess is the most commonly used word in the English language?
- Now check your guesses using the Sketch Engine. You'll need to follow the Institutional Login, and click go to generate the wordlist.
- What kinds of words are most common in the top 50?
- Now try searching more specific parts of speech: what are the most common nouns, verbs etc.?
- If you can remember back as far as week three's reading lesson, what do the most common English words all have in common?
Task four - using lexical profilers
Task four - using lexical profilers
We're going to take a closer look at the language used in the dialogue between Mia and Becky. Paste the text from the transcript into the window below and click the yellow submit button on the right. The profiler will then tell you how much of the text is made up of the most common 1,000 words in English.
Compleat Lexical Tutor (Cobb, 2019) is a vocabulary profiler like Vocab Kitchen, which we looked at earlier in the course. Lexical Tutor is more powerful though, and can tell you lots of cool stuff about any text that you dump into it. It's also a regular in the 'most unattractive website design' competition, and repeat winner in the 'most unhelpful tab titles' category. Enjoy!
A lemma is a word plus all its grammatical forms. All the words above belong to the lemma 'go'.
Not to be confused with a llama.
Summary
Summary
In terms of vocabulary, the conversation between Mia and Becky wasn't very difficult. in fact, we tend to recycle the same core words when we talk spontaneously with people with whom we have an emotional attachment, with whom we speak to frequently, and with whom we have an equal power relationship. The conversation might be difficult to understand though for other reasons. Although the pool of vocabulary we draw on is small, the conversation is full of interruptions, unfinished sentences and sudden jumps in topic. There are also region specific abbreviations (e.g. soz for sorry), cultural references and proper nouns (e.g. Chichester), many of which would cause confusion for other English speakers.
Independent study
Independent study
Browse through the listening project archives and find a conversation that you think looks interesting, Take notes as you listen and give a summary to your group.
- Who was the conversation between, and what were they talking about?
- What kind of language were they using?
- Could you empathise with any of the speakers?
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