Learner Language, Discourse and Interaction

How do language learners interact with those who already speak the language they are learning? It is more than just a question of learning vocabulary and grammar – learners also need to learn how to put together conversations in their new language and to vary the way they interact across different contexts. This book shows, using millions of words of data, how this happens. It is the first large-scale, corpus-based exploration of the discourse macro-structures in conversational interaction between L1 and L2 speakers, and explores three corpora to show, in spoken interaction with L1 speakers across a range of tasks, the dynamics of discourse construction. Considering factors including cultural background, task and proficiency, it characterises the repertoire of discourse functions used in these interactions and shows how they vary according to a range of variables. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Tony McEnery is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University and Advisory Professor at Shanghai International Studies University. He is the author of Corpus Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2011), with Andrew Hardie, and Fundamental Principles of Corpus Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2022), with Vaclav Brezina. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Isobelle Clarke is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at Lancaster University. She has developed three methodologies for the analysis of short texts.

Gavin Brookes is Reader and UK Research and Innovation Future Leader Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. His recent books include Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication (Routledge, 2023), with Luke C. Collins, and Obesity in the News (Cambridge University Press, 2021), with Paul Baker. He is a Fulbright Scholar and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.