Creating a corpus of English spoken as a lingua franca between Japanese and cultural others: For the future purpose of developing authentic materials for conversation and intercultural training

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26370659
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Foreign language education
• Research Institution: Joetsu University of Education
• Principal Investigator: BROWN Ivan 上越教育大学, 大学院学校教育研究科, 准教授 (80436774)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 英語会話 / 会話分析 / Conversation Analysis / 異文化コミュニケーション / コミュニケーション能力 / 共通語としての英語 / コーパス作成 / 教材開発

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In this project we collected over 100 hours of audio-visual recording data of English spoken in naturally-occurring intercultural interactions involving Japanese and people of other backgrounds, with a view to creating a searchable corpus. Over 40 hours of data were transcribed in simple format, and over an hour of data was further transcribed in conversation analysis (CA) format. We used CA to identify communicative practices used in concrete contextualized instances. These identified practices included topic management, conversational story-telling, conversational repair, discursive construction of identities, and shifting participation frameworks , through verbal and nonverbal means. It is envisaged that future work can employ the data, analyses and insights gained from this project in creating sociologically, interactionally and linguistically realistic teaching materials for English education in Japan.

Free Research Field

英語教育・異文化コミュニケーション