Lancaster University

Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages

MA in Applied Linguistics for ELT
Investigating Spoken English – April 1999

Luiz Otavio de Barros Souza

luizotaviobarros@gmail.com

A Background.

In this essay I will describe and evaluate what I do to enable learners of

English as a foreign language to become competent speakers of the
language. However, rather than address this issue from a teacher’s
perspective, I have chosen to draw on my recent experience in course
design and teacher education. This second option not only seems more
immediately relevant to my current professional interests, it might also
provide a broader scope for discussion of relevant issues, within the
boundaries of the assignment title. Perhaps the first logical step is to
set the scene for the rest of the essay by briefly describing what my job
in Sao Paulo (Brazil) involves, and why one of its aspects would be of
interest for a discussion on teaching spoken English.

The job description of an academic coordinator in the Cultura

Inglesa/Sao Paulo can be summarised in terms of two major
professional roles: teacher development and course/materials design.
Teacher development involves in-service training of various kinds,
ranging from biannual refresher courses to RSA Certificate/Diploma
tuition. In this essay, however, we will be concerned with the latter role.
In course/materials design, our job is to liase with marketing
department / branch managers and, based on ongoing student and
teacher feedback, ensure that the courses being delivered in different
branches adequately meet the clients’ needs. This entails setting out
course-specific pedagogical principles, choosing coursebooks in
accordance with those principles, devising supplementary materials etc.
and monitoring, through lesson observation, what sense approximately
500 teachers (!) are making of all that.

©Luiz Otavio Barros. All rights reserved. 1

I am in charge of a very small slice of a forty-thousand-student pie: post
FCE1 (or advanced) courses, as shown in the diagram opposite:

Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in

English
Arels Diploma in spoken English CPE 3

Arels Diploma Course 2 CPE 2
 
Arels Diploma Course 1 Certificate of Proficiency 1

Arels Higher Exam Oxford Higher Exam / Cambridge

Certificate in Advanced English

ACE 3 MAC 3
 
ACE 2 MAC 2
 
Advanced Conversational Mainstream Advanced
English 1 Course 1
 
FCE

After an average of 600 hours of English (approximately five years of

instruction), students can choose what kind of advanced course they
want to take. They can either follow the four-skill programme (MAC) or
alternatively embark on the ACE course (shaded). The overwhelming
majority (80%) of the students, however, usually opts for the former
and, interestingly, the latter has one of the highest dropout rates in the
institution. So much so that pashing out the course on a permanent
basis has been considered more than once or twice.

As its name suggests, the overall aim of the ACE course is to develop
students’ speaking and listening skills at advanced level, and that is
exactly how the course is marketed. Luiz Otavio Barros. However, in the
past three years, I have been provided with a great deal of both “soft”
and “hard” evidence that inside the classroom most ACE students are
not getting what they paid for. What exactly this evidence is falls way
beyond the scope of this paper, but why that is happening is very
relevant. To answer that question one could come up with a plethora of
plausible reasons, including a lack of political interest in such a small
market share (3%). For present purposes, however, I will ignore non-
academic variables and assume that the problem is essentially one of
©Luiz Otavio Barros. All rights reserved. 2
course design and syllabus specifications, for which I am ultimately
responsible.

Claiming that a course aims to develop students’ spoken English is easy

to do in marketing terms. Elusive concepts such as fluency (Knowles
1996) have always lent themselves particularly well to that end. Now,
grounding the same claim in sound and well-informed academic terms
is not nearly as easy. It seems to me that first we ought to decide what
it is that we want the term spoken English to mean. This is exactly what
the next section is concerned with.

B Speaking in a foreign language.

The versatility of the term speaking in ELT2 is astounding. Since the

early 1950s when the written medium lost its supremacy in the
profession and speaking gained prominence (Brown and Yule 1983:2),
the notion of spoken English seems to have lost itself amidst a sea of
marginally related concepts. That includes, for example, audio
lingualism, whose now largely discredited Behaviourist theory of
learning advocated the extensive use of techniques primarily concerned
with the teaching of oral language. That is perhaps a classic example of
how "different pedagogical goals may be subsumed under the general
rubric of teaching the spoken language" (Tarone1986:15). Therefore, it
should come as no surprise that developing motor perceptive skills
(Bygate 1987:5) by engaging learners in repetition, pattern practice and
the like was (and, to a lesser degree, still is I daresay) generally regarded
as teaching spoken English.

With the dawning of the almighty communicative era came the

recognition that there is more to teaching speaking than simply
encouraging learners to produce correct grammatical forms in spoken
language. Grammatical competence had lost intellectual momentum
and the early 1980s witnessed the emergence of a new model which
acknowledged the primacy of "sociolinguistic competence" and "strategic
competence" (Canale and Swain 1980) as further subsets of the wider
©Luiz Otavio Barros. All rights reserved. 3
notion of “communicative competence”, which seems to be current
orthodoxy in ELT. Needless to say, for classroom activity to merit the
label “communicative", learners should be provided with opportunities
to "produce extended spoken discourse" (Tarone 1986:24), thereby
creating a "reasonable facsimile of communicative behaviour" in the
classroom (ibid.:26), of which the three aforementioned competencies
are an integral part . Luiz Otavio Barros.

There are grounds for arguing, however, that creating a facsimile of

communicative behaviour in class is one thing, enabling students to
produce extended spoken discourse quite another. Communicative
behaviour is by no means synonymous with speaking. In real life people
communicate through a host of different channels and there is no
compelling reason to dismiss writing in the language classroom, for
example, as “non-communicative”. Admittedly, there are certain skills
that seem to be unique to oral communication, such as turn taking,
agenda management and facilitation/compensation strategies, for
example (see Bygate 1987 for a comprehensive study). Nevertheless,
enabling learners to draw on those skills and strategies is not
synonymous with teaching spoken English.

What I am suggesting is that the profession is still relatively oblivious to

the fact that “speech is not spoken writing” (ibid.:10). One cannot claim
to be teaching spoken English without a keener awareness of what
spoken English is like and how it differs from written English. Since this
is probably one of the main flaws of the ACE course, it makes sense to
turn to this issue now.

C Spoken English and Written English.

It is easy to fall into the trap of teaching spoken English as if it were

written English with a few “spoken expressions” thrown in. Enabling
students to produce and recognise naturally occurring spoken language
is another business altogether. It is generally agreed that the overriding
function of spoken language is the maintenance of social relationships
©Luiz Otavio Barros. All rights reserved. 4
(Brown and Yule 1983:11). In other words, spoken discourse has a
predominantly interactional function, so from that perspective it seems
logical that there should be a preponderance of interactional tasks in a
course aimed at teaching spoken English. But that is not what usually
happens in the ACE course – and in most allegedly “speaking-oriented”
classrooms, I daresay. For one thing, the EFL classroom by its very
nature is not the ideal setting for conversational discourse aimed at
“working out social relationships” ( Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992:75).
Therefore, it is not surprising that so much emphasis tends to be placed
on transactional tasks, where the transmission of information is the
main goal (same reference). Luiz Otavio Barros.

Limited engagement in interactional tasks means little exposure to

interactional discourse. Little exposure to interactional discourse, in
turn, usually entails overexposure to transactional discourse, which
tends to bear more resemblance to written English, as the continuum
below3 shows:

Spoken English
Written English

Primarily transactional primarily interactional

 complex syntax and precise  loosely organised syntax

vocabulary and less specific vocabulary
 long turns  short turns
 subordination  paratactic phrases
 marking out done by lexical  marking out done by
phrases (e.g.: firstly, pausing, rhythm and
moreover, to sum up.) intonation
 information packed densely  information packed less
 competence densely
 performance

If the assertion that most native speakers do not produce “ideal strings
of complete, perfectly formed sentences” is true (Brown and Yule
1983:21), then there are grounds for arguing that most ACE students
are not being trained to sound like native speakers at all. Some of those

©Luiz Otavio Barros. All rights reserved. 5

students have a very impressive command of the language, but usually
speak as if they were addressing a public meeting, drawing heavily on
transactional discourse. The problem is compounded by the fact that at
least half of our ACE clientele is made up of adolescents, whose dialects
invariably end up even further removed from their native-speaking
peers’. (ibid.:7)

Now, even if we accept the primacy of interactional discourse in the

classroom, we are still left with a number of unresolved issues. For one
thing, I don’t think advanced learners can be easily persuaded that
rather limited (and occasionally deviant) syntax is often all that is
required for an adequate performance in spoken English, as evidenced
in these excerpts of naturally-occurring spoken data taken from the
BCET4: Luiz Otavio Barros.

[BCET:A:51]
C: Can I just use your lighter ? I’ve ran [run] out of matches.
B: Oh aye ahhh (+NV)
C: Ta.

[BCET:A:A:25-6]
B: Mind you, it’s not bad really, banking business, I suppose, it’s a clean
job.
C: Yeah, it’s that kind of image. I don’t really go for that, you know.
((2 sec))
C: Do you know what I mean though, I mean it suits you.
B: Yeah.
C: I mean, I’m not being insulting or anything, but I can’t see myself
being a bank manager.

(reported in Tsui 1994: 25 /

33)

After five or six years of English, it is only natural that ACE learners
should resent being taught how to speak using broken sentences and
simple structures and vocabulary. Additionally, it could be argued that
interactional discourse might be better suited to elementary and early
intermediate learners, for whom immediate communication needs are
still the main concern. The advanced student should, instead, be
encouraged to produce longer stretches of discourse, to foster

©Luiz Otavio Barros. All rights reserved. 6

interlanguage development and system revision, a claim which,
admittedly, does seem to hold up to some extent.

From a pragmatic point of view, there is a further problem. As the

course structure on page 2 shows, at different points students can sit
for as many as five international exams, four of which include a
speaking component. Although the marking criteria vary slightly from
one exam to the other, there is an important common denominator: the
primacy of accuracy, range of vocabulary and discourse management5.
This, in turn, tends to have a considerable backwash effect on teaching
and it is therefore hardly surprising that teachers and learners attach
greater importance to transactional discourse.

Although interactional discourse may at first glance appear unnameable

to teaching, I would like to suggest that a workable compromise might
lie in Nattinger and DeCarrico’s (1991) findings regarding the
pervasiveness of lexical phrases in spoken discourse. Luiz Otavio
Barros. They define lexical phrases as:

“[…] multi-word lexical phenomena that exist somewhere

between the traditional poles of lexicon and syntax,
conventionalized form/function composites that occur more
frequently and have more idiomatically determined meaning
than language which is put together each time.” (p.1)

Nattinger and DeCarrico’s premise is that nativelike usage is much

more conventional, idiomatic and ritualised than is commonly believed
(ibid.:15). That might explain why after many years of instruction, much
of the language ACE students produce remains foreign sounding and
often pragmatically odd. For example, the average ACE student is more
likely to say something along the lines of “It’s better if there are more
people” than “the more people the better” or “well, to summarise, he
never went back” rather than “well, to make a long story short, he never
went back.” In other words, those students seem to be largely unaware
of what it is that native speakers do actually say, as opposed to what
they could say. Hence students’ failure to select “form/function
composites required for particular circumstances” (ibid.:11).

©Luiz Otavio Barros. All rights reserved. 7

As I see it, a viable pedagogical strategy would be to place heavier
emphasis on the systematic teaching of prefabricated chunks of
language. A formulaic speech syllabus made up of attestable examples
of naturally-occurring language use would go a long way towards
enabling students to break through the “spoken writing” learning
plateau I described earlier. Additionally, since lexical phrases are readily
accessible as completely or partially assembled units, learners would
more easily process language in real time by stringing memorised
chunks of speech together in certain frequent and predictable
situations. Luiz Otavio Barros. A sample lexical phrase syllabus for ACE
might look like the model opposite:

©Luiz Otavio Barros. All rights reserved. 8

ACE (1 ? 2 ? 3 ? ) lexical phrase syllabus

Polywords Institutionalised Phrasal constraints Sentence builders

expressions
Qualifiers For the most part, by and As far as I (know, can tell The catch here is that…
large …)
Summarisers In a nutshell, all in all That’s about the size of it To (tie, wrap…) this up My point is that X
Topic markers / By the way, guess what ? As I was (saying, That reminds me of X
shifters mentioning)
Agreement markers I’ll say
Approval markers So far so good There you go
Disapproval markers You (creep, jerk etc.)
Disagreement Not on your life
markers
Markers of surprise
Fluency devices At any rate, so to speak If you see what I mean What I mean is X
Relators Along the same lines (this one)as well as(that X ties in with Y
one)
Evaluators Strictly speaking I’m a great believer in X
Exemplifiers As it were For (instance, example) It’s like X
Advice Look before you leap
Closing It’s been nice talking to you.
Parting So long
Narrative framers Once upon a time
Temporal relators Last but not least A (day,year…) ago
Assertion Word has it that X
Request I’d rather you didn’t X
Comparators The (hott)er the better

9
Aside markers I guess I got off the track Forget about X
here.
Denying Don’t look at me ! I’m not to blame for

10
D Black sheep (or ship? ) of ELT

While researching for this essay, I came across a surprisingly small

number of publications that discussed speaking in the light of
pronunciation6 or vice versa. Conceptual links between the former
and the latter were usually put aside in favour of discussions on,
say, communication strategies or speaking and interlanguage
development. The following excerpt from Brown and Yule7 (1983) is
illustrative of the trivialization of phonology brought about by the
Communicative era:

“We have not paid attention in this book to the

teaching of pronunciation and intonation. This is
partly because our aim here is to focus on developing
the students’ ability to use English to communicate
[…] In this stressful task the student needs all the
support he can get from the teacher, not criticism of
relatively extraneous features like pronunciation.” (p.
53)

“Extraneous” as pronunciation is still generally considered to be, it

has not disappeared altogether, at least not from the ACE course
anyway. The amount of attention devoted to syntax, lexis and
pronunciation varies from classroom to classroom, but three years
of ACE coordination have provided me with inferential evidence that
the ratio below is reasonably accurate:

Syntax

Lexis

Phonology

In terms of classroom activity, the small slice of the pie can be

translated into: a- planned attention to segmental features by
means of “minimal pair practice” a la ship or sheep; and b- indirect
11
error correction, through paraphrasing and reformulation of
students’ non-standard utterances. The beliefs operating in a are
relatively easy to identify. Pronunciation is still primarily associated
with the articulation of individual sounds and the expression of
referential (or transactional) meaning, with the former acting as
“building blocks” (Pennington and Richards 1986: 208) to the
latter. As for b, the underlying assumption seems to be that
instruction in phonology is of no avail, so the learning of
pronunciation should be left to a process of “osmosis” (Laroy
1995:3). Improving the ACE course would certainly involve a
reappraisal of these beliefs, and this is what we now turn to.

In section C I argued that in order to teach spoken English (rather

than written English in speaking), we should readjust the balance
between transactional and interactional discourse in the classroom,
placing increased emphasis on the latter. Luiz Otavio Barros. I
think a likely –and most desirable- by-product of such a shift in
perspective would be a broader focus on pronunciation in the
context of discourse, as discussed by Pennington and Richards
(1986):

“[Pronunciation should be seen] not only as a part of

the system for expressing referential meaning, but
also as an important part of the interactional
dynamics of the communication process […] Sounds
are a fundamental part of the process by which we
communicate and comprehend lexical, grammatical
and sociolinguistic meaning.” (p. 208)

Pennington and Richards’ contention, which is central to the

approach I am advocating, can be usefully illustrated through the
following sample of naturally-occurring conversation between
native speakers of English:

A: So the meeting’s on Friday.

B: Thanks.
A: No, I’m asking you.

12
 (Coulthard and Brazil 1981: 84, cited by Tsui
1994:84)

We can draw at least two implications from the foregoing

discussion. First, if the ACE course is to be designed and marketed
as a conversation course, it must be teach spoken English, and
therefore phonology ought to play a much more prominent part
than it has done so far:

Lexis

Phonology

Syntax

Similarly, the current focus on individual segments needs to be

complemented by a “macro focus” (Pennington and Richards 1986:
209) on voice-setting and prosodic features:

Voice setting
Prosodic features
features and
coarticulatory
phenomena

Segmental
features

13
Drawing on this frame of reference, the pronunciation syllabus of
the ACE course might be specified in a similar way to the prototype
on the next page.

Phonology

Lexis
Syntax

14
ACE pronunciation syllabus

segmental

English short vowels.

English long vowels.
Short vs long vowels: variation in context; variation
due to the presence or absence of stress.
Centring and closing diphthongs.
Initial and final plosives.
Voiceless and voiced fricatives.
Affricates.
Weak syllables.
Lip rounding: rounded, spread and neutral lip
position.
Producing harsh, breathy and creaky voice
qualities.
Word stress: primary and secondary stress.
Complex word stress: prefixes and suffixes.
Stress in compound words.
Word class pairs (e.g.: noun- project verb- project).
Weak forms: grammatical words.
Connected speech: assimilation across word
boundaries.
Elision: consonant and vowel blending and syllable
loss.
Linking: intrusive R.
Functions of English tones: fall, rise, fall-rise,rise-
fall.
Attitudinal function of intonation.
Accentual function of intonation: given vs new
information.
Accentual function of intonation: contrastive stress.
Grammatical function of intonation: tone-unit
boundaries.
Discourse function of intonation: attention
focussing.
Discourse function of intonation:shared vs new
information.

Supra Segmental

15
We must bear in mind at all times, though, that however principled
and well informed a new syllabus might be, teachers will not
necessarily follow it. This connects interestingly with the
aforementioned laissez-faire attitude to pronunciation, premised on
the assumption that many of the pronunciation features outlined
on page 12, particularly in the suprasegmental domain, are
“impossible to teach” (Roach 1983:141). The next section examines
this assumption.

E A lost case ?

I personally take the view that pronunciation can –and indeed

should- be explicitly taught in the EFL8 classroom. Perhaps not
surprisingly, though, almost every argument in support of overt
instruction can be counterbalanced by an equally powerful
argument against it. That being the case, in this section I will
present both sets of views and invite the reader to judge for
him/herself whether or not I am overstating the case against the
laissez-fare approach.

The first “anti-teaching” argument is the age factor. Most ACE

students are adults and late teenagers, way past the “sensitive
period” (Lamendella 1977, cited by Long and Larsen-Freeman
1991:156) for the acquisition of phonology. Indeed, the widespread
notion that the child is in a much better position for acquiring a
native-like accent has received ample corroborative evidence from a
substantial body of research (see Long and Larsen-Freeman
1991:156-161)9.

I am by no means suggesting that a native-like accent (whatever it

is and whichever speech community it might be based on) should
be the primary goal of pronunciation training. Many teachers claim
16
that since a native-like accent is unattainable for the average adult
learner it would be more realistic to settle for intelligibility, for
which little or no explicit instruction might be needed anyway.

Unintelligible Intelligible Native-like

I see, however, two problems with the notion of being intelligible in

English. First, intelligible to whom? In a monolingual context,
students’ deviant sounds are much more likely to be understood by
the teacher and peers, who share the same L1, than by speakers of
other languages. That per se would not be a problem if we could
assume that all learners would seldom use English to communicate
with such speakers, which is hardly the case. Second, while it is
perfectly reasonable for a four-skill course such as MAC (see page
2) to settle for intelligibility, a speaking course at advanced level, it
could be argued, should be more ambitious in its specification of
goals. Students who have been in the Cultura Inglesa for as long
as 5 or 6 years and embark on ACE for a further three terms expect
to sound more than merely “intelligible” by the end of the course.

It is debatable, of course, whether that will happen because of

instruction, rather than irrespective of it. After all, in the domain of
pronunciation there is not likely to be a “one-to-one relationship
between teaching and learning” (Pennington and Richards
1986:219). It could be convincingly argued, however, that the same
applies to syntax and lexis. Luiz Otavio Barros. Every experienced
teacher knows that a learner who is taught, say, the present perfect
in year 2 is unlikely to internalise the structure and deploy it
confidently before year 4 or 5. There is no reason to assume that
the proceduralisation of phonology would be significantly different,
especially because research has shown that “the development of
phonological schemata for the target language may not develop at

17
the same rate as the corresponding motor skills required for
performance” (Leather 1983, cited by Pennington and Richards
1986:214).

It follows that we must be more specific as to what teaching

pronunciation might entail: a- endless hours of chorus and
individual repetition and an emphasis on short-term mastery; or b-
a focus on comprehension and awareness rather than immediate
(re)production. The first approach is responsible, I think, for the
fairly widespread perception that pronunciation teaching is useless
because it has no effect on performance. The second approach
seems to be a much more sensible alternative. It would involve
raising students’ awareness of any given pronunciation feature by
means of consciousness raising tasks (see Ellis 1997:160). These
tasks gradually enable learners to “notice” (Schmidt 1990, cited by
Skehan 1998:48) instances of the target feature in subsequent
input and eventually incorporate those features in their spoken
production when they are developmentally ready to. In other words,
training students to pay attention not only to the message being
communicated but also to how that message is being said could
enable them to process future input more effectively, which might
have a delayed, but perhaps more pervasive, effect on their
production.

Nonetheless, even if we opt for a more organic approach such as

the one above, we are still left with two unresolved issues. The first
one is related to the teachers’ own lack of linguistic awareness.
While it is true that virtually all ACE teachers have an impressive
command of English, many of them still possess a rather
rudimentary knowledge of English phonology, particularly at the
suprasegmental level. Clearly, a teacher cannot possibly raise
students’ awareness of pronunciation features he/she does not
know him/herself. In this case, a detailed syllabus coupled with
user-friendly tasks and adequate training would probably do the
trick. The other unresolved issue has to do with the quantity and

18
quality of the input students are exposed to. In the foregoing
discussion I argued that through consciousness raising, students
could be trained to attend to phonology in the input. I was
assuming, of course, that for noticing and renoticing to take place,
students would be exposed to plenty of input containing the target
features. That seems to be the case in most ESL, rather than EFL
contexts. In the latter, there is relatively less out of class exposure
to the language and a good deal of classroom input is usually
provided by non-native teachers. These teachers, at least in the
Cultura Inglesa, are generally very reliable models of L2 as far as
syntax is concerned, but often less so in terms of phonology.

F Final thoughts: ignorance is bliss. Or is it ?

This essay was a very tentative attempt to answer the following

question: what should a course emphasising speaking enable
students to do ? Through an analysis of the current state of affairs
in the ACE course and a few fleeting glimpses into the nature of
spoken discourse (given the scope of this essay, I could not possibly
claim to have had more than a few glimpses into such a huge area),
I proposed a dual course syllabus incorporating lexical phrases and
pronunciation. My contention was that such a syllabus might, and
I say might, help learners to move away from “spoken writing”
towards what we might call naturally occurring spoken language.

However, syllabus design would only be the tip of the iceberg.

Writing this essay has made me realise that I am faced with far
more insurmountable problems than I thought I was: the need for
extensive course-specific teacher training (coupled with the lack of
political interest in such an enterprise); the lack of commercially
available materials compatible with what the new syllabus might
look like; and, as if all this were not enough, a parallel mainstream
advanced course selling four skills for the price of two, as it were.

19
So much for awareness.

4347 words.

20
References

Brown, G. and Yule, G. 1983. Teaching the Spoken Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Bygate, M. 1987. Speaking. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Canale, M. and Swain, M. 1980 “Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to

Second Language Teaching and Testing.” In Applied Linguistics 1, pp. 1-47.

Ellis,R. 1997. Second Language Acquisition Research and Language Teaching. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Knowles, G. 1996 “The Concept of Fluency”. Unpublished paper.

Laroy, C. 1995. Pronunciation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Larsen-Freeman,D. and Long,M.H. 1991. An Introduction to Second Language Acquisition

Research. London: Longman.

Murphy, J.M. 1991. “Oral Communication in TESOL: Integrating Speaking, Listening and
Pronunciation.”. In TESOL quarterly, 25(1), pp. 51-75.

Nattinger, J.R. and DeCarrico, J.S. 1992. Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Pennington, M.C. 1998. “The Teachability of Phonology in Adulthood: A Re-examination.” In

IRAL, XXXVI(4323), pp. 323-341.

Pennington, M.C. and Richards, J.C. 1986. “Pronunciation Revisited”. In TESOL quarterly,
20(2), pp. 207-225.

Roach, P. 1983 English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Skehan,P. 1997. A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Tarone, E. 1986. “The arm of the chair is where you use for to write” Developing Strategic
Competence in a Second Language. In Meara, P.(ed.) Spoken Language Pp. 15-27.
London: Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research.

Tsui, A.B.M. 1994. English Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

21
 Endnotes

1 FCE stands for First Certificate in English, the most popular exam
of the Cambridge main suite. Despite its name, this is actually the
third exam of the whole lot, at upper-intermediate level.
2 ELT stands for English Language Teaching.
3 The continuum was an attempt on my part to make sense of the

issues involved. I put it together drawing on the discussion

presented by Brown and Yule 1983:4-24.
4 Birmingham Collection of English Texts
5 The term Discourse Management has replaced Fluency in the

Cambridge Main Suite.

6 In this essay I will use the terms pronunciation and phonology

interchangeably.
7 Whose views were, paradoxically, particularly useful in other

sections of this essay.

8 EFL stands for English as a Foreign Language
9 Whether there is a critical period for the acquisition of syntax still

remains highly controversial. See Long and Larsen-Freeman 153-

167.

22