Funktionale und stilistische Merkmale gesprochener fortgeschrittener Lerner:innensprache: Methodische und konzeptionelle Überlegungen am Beispiel von GeWiss

Abstract

Abstract This article discusses some methodological and conceptual issues arising from the analysis of advanced-level spoken language corpora. This discussion is based on GeWiss, a corpus of spoken academic discourse comprising L1 and L2 data of German collected in academic settings in Poland, the UK, Bulgaria, and Germany, as well as L1 data of Polish, English, and Italian. The data were collected using an ethnographic comparative approach; a range of speech events with comparable institutional and functional features in the philologies (student presentations, research papers, and oral examinations) were identified, recorded, transcribed, and tagged. In addition to POS tagging and lemmatisation, in selected sub-corpora some pragmatic features were also annotated. These include metadiscursive actions as well as references and quotations. The corpus therefore comprises ‘natural data’, derived from various contexts, of speakers with varying degrees of academic socialisation and competence in academic German. The paper discusses the various factors that have to be taken into account when analysing and evaluating the GeWiss L2 data with regard to style and register of metadiscourse as well as references and quotations in L2 student presentations. It is argued that any attempt to assess these data needs to reflect upon the concepts of ‘norm’, ‘appropriateness of usage’, (stage and context of) academic socialisation, and the context of the speech event. This also applies to the evaluation of the L1 data, which is why they cannot be used as a simple reference point for the purpose of a (mainly quantitative) ‘contrastive interlanguage analysis’ (Granger 2015). A qualitative approach needs to be used at least initially to identify and assess specific features of L2 data. This is shown using examples of metadiscursive and referencing speech actions. While there seem to be some stylistic and register features that can be regarded as inappropriate irrespective of the context of the speech events, others seem to be more context-sensitive. The paper argues that in addition to linguistic analysis and the intuitions of the L1 researcher, some kind of rating procedure would help to establish better concepts of ‘norm’ and ‘appropriateness’ of such natural corpus data originating in different academic contexts and traditions.