Triangulating Diamond Talk: Identifying Technical Spoken Vocabulary in English for Baseball Purposes

Abstract

Traditionally considered the all-American sport, baseball has progressively been internationalized in recent years. Non-native English-speaking players comprised 29.8% of the 2017 opening-day Major League Baseball team rosters, representing a record 19 nations and territories (MLB, 2017). In 2012, international players filled 3,382 spots on team rosters at the minor league level (MLB, 2012). Additionally, English is the lingua franca for premiere international baseball events. To address the increasing globalization of baseball, a new subtype of English for Occupational Purposes, namely, English for Baseball Purposes, is needed in order to teach and learn the technical vocabulary essential for communicating within this discourse community (Coxhead, 2013; Nation, 2012). This study reports on the construction of the Baseball English Corpus (BECO), and offers specialized vocabulary sets based on this corpus and the recommendations of ethnographic interview participants who are core users or stakeholders of Baseball English. By utilizing a mixedmethodology design to finalize the technical spoken baseball word and phrase lists (Chung & Nation, 2003; Tangpijaikul, 2014), this study also provides insights into various methods for identifying a technical corpus based lexicon as well as some pedagogical implications for Baseball English teachers and learners.