In this lecture Professor Mann from the University of Warwick will share some insights into the nature of spoken talk. Speech does not have sentences or full stops. It functions completely differently from written text, as it is much more interactive, open to real-time processing pressures, emergent and co-constructed. It has a unique grammar and lexis and there are distinct spoken genres too. The talk will summarise some of these major differences and encourage you to reflect on distinct feature of talk and interaction.
A great deal of education is dominated by written text and not enough attention is given to the nature of spoken discourse. We need to deal with spoken language better in education and Professor Mann will outline some key considerations. We may need to consider more creative and active ways of approaching what happens in classrooms to capture and support the dynamic and active nature of spoken language.
This talk provides a personal perspective on the real nature of talk and how it can best be taught. It will be wide-ranging and eclectic and will draw on his 40 years of experience of teaching English. You will learn more about key feature of spoken English such as ‘turn initial frequency’, ‘spoken genre’, markers of identity and social and cultural forces at play in talk contexts. It will also note how social messaging ‘apps’ are best treated as hybrid genres (combining features of written and spoken characteristics and with increased multimodality).
Professor Mann will also offer recommendations about the way we can harness the power of songs, speech recognition software and AI in learning and teaching spoken English.
