Research Environments For Pedagogical Tools: Teaching and Learning with Authentic Oral English

Abstract

For most teachers of English in an academic context, the scope of teaching and learning oral English may well turn into a brain teaser, as there are many methodological, theoretical and technical options to take account of. What is eventually central to these decisions is the quality of the teaching of oral English, in relationship to the needs of advanced learners. We can rely on Coombs’ delineation of “qualitative dimensions” of the educational sphere. Since the general perspective of this article is oral English TL, as supported by corpus linguistics and from a phonological perspective, we propose to examine the notions of the nature and worth of what is taught and learned in the light of a central issue in corpus phonology: the relevance of the input data (to be processed as teaching content), and its usefulness to the learner. The present article aims at defining the notion of quality in oral English TL in terms of (i) the authenticity of the input data issued from an oral corpus and (ii) the pedagogical relevance and robustness of research-based pedagogical tools. Our stand is built, among other things, on our teaching experience at Toulouse Jean Jaures University combined with our research work in the PAC programme framework. The framework is based on an empirical approach in linguistics, and more specifically on the discipline of corpus phonology.