At the end of the day… An ELF perspective on lexical chunks in spoken business English.

• Since Sinclair (1991) identified “the idiom principle”, lexical chunks, i.e. frequently occurring clusters of words, have been recognized as an important part of language learning. This importance has been highlighted as advances in computer software have made it easier to identify patterns in language use, and most published English teaching materials are now informed by the analysis of large corpora of native speaker language. However, given that the most widespread use of English language throughout the world takes the form of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), i.e. English used as a common means of communication among speakers from different first-language backgrounds, there is a strong argument for examining the lexical chunks used in this context when considering students’ needs. This study uses VOICE (the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English), a corpus of spoken ELF interactions, to examine the occurrence of language chunks in ELF in the professional domain. A subcorpus of VOICE comprising of occurring in the professional domain (business, organizational and research contexts) was created, representing approximately 830,000 tokens of transcribed oral text. Recurring lexical chunks were identified using Wordsmith Tools (Scott 2012), and categorized according to type and function. The types of lexical chunk occurring most frequently proved to be vague expressions, e.g. “and so on” and discourse markers such as “at the end of the day”. The pedagogical implications of these findings are considered, concerning whether and how published materials might be supplemented to better meet the needs of those students who expect to use English in an ELF context. 

Keyword

English as a lingua franca

corpus linguistics

lexical chunks

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)