Stefan Diemer

The use of communication strategies in BELF has been analyzed mainly in face-to-face and videomediated interactions, as well as in computer-mediated communication. This study focuses on customer communication in the social network Instagram. Instagram is a key company advertising and webcare channel for companies that address an international and young customer base. In these international settings, English is the main medium of interaction. The basis for this study is a collection of Instagram posts and comments by 20 European companies from 2018. The data is analyzed qualitatively with a focus on customer engagement strategies and meaning negotiation. Customer engagement through emotional and plurilingual framing in the initial posts is comparable to rapport strategies in international teams using BELF. Culture-specific images may prompt intercultural negotiations in the comments section, engaging customers further. The use of plurilingual resources is frequent. Business-specific vocabulary is foregrounded, with both company and customers partaking in domain-specific discourse. This leads to meaning negotiation and interactive clarification strategies, which have also been documented in other BELF contexts. In sum, customer interactions on Instagram show how the intercultural and plurilingual environment is used to engage customers and create rapport, and how meaning in a business context is negotiated successfully.

Please contact me for access.

The chapter examines discourse strategies used in conversation openings in CASE, the Corpus of Academic Spoken English (2018), containing English as a Lingua Franca conversations via Skype. Although there are similarities to telephone conversation openings, openings in CASE show differences in content and structure, accommodating the particular setup of Skype conversations and the computer-mediated discourse environment. The different sequences in Skype conversation openings are organized and negotiated cooperatively by participants. They are signalled by significant overuse of the following transition markers (TMs) between sequences: discourse markers, pauses and hesitation markers, laughter, repetitions, and lengthening. The quantitative analysis confirms that TMs occur significantly more often in transition zones between opening sequences than in both non-transition zones and openings as a whole.

Please contact me for access.

The article discusses linguistic creativity in informal Skype conversations between university students from eight different European countries. The basis for the study is the Corpus of Academic Spoken English (CASE, forthcoming), a corpus of Skype conversations in an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) context. With the help of qualitative examples, the article examines innovative language use and proposes a taxonomy for functionally accepted innovations, distinguishing instances of L1 influence, approximations and ad hoc innovation. Our findings point towards an assertive and creative perspective on language use, which seems to have a positive influence on the communicative setting, e.g. illustrated by code-switching in combination with laughter. CASE participants use non-standard forms and innovations freely, accommodating to each others' language use. They also establish their own ephemeral communication strategies and showcase and emphasize their respective language and cultural backgrounds.

Please contact me for access.

This article analyzes how code-switching (CS) is used as a key strategy in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) interaction. We use data from CASE, a corpus of ELF Skype conversations in an informal setting between students from nine European countries. CS in our data is commonly used as a communication strategy. A quantitative analysis shows that it occurs in the majority of conversations and across all nationalities. Participants mostly switch to their own L1, frequently also to their interlocutors’ L1, rarely to other languages. CS co-occurs with other discourse features, in particular other instances of CS and laughter. Based on a qualitative analysis, we distinguish three motivations and functions of CS: On an interpersonal level, CS can underline group membership or cultural identity and create rapport, often in combination with laughter. CS is used to improve communication at the discourse level by conveying concepts that are untranslatable and possibly unknown to the interlocutor, in metalinguistic commentary, or to close lexical gaps. CS can also be used for addressee specification. Through its combined qualitative and quantitative approach, the article aims at contributing to the analysis of the context as well as the motivations and functions of CS in ELF.

Reference:
Brunner, Marie-Louise, Stefan Diemer, and Selina Schmidt. 2018. "I mean ... we have good coffee in Italy ... why do we need Starbucks?" - 'America' in the Construction and Negotiation of European Identities. In: (Pop) Cultures on the Move: Transnational Identifications and Cultural Exchange Between East and West, ed. by Astrid Fellner,  Tetiana Ostapchuck, and Bärbel Schlimbach, 17-33. [SARAVI PONTES 8]. Saarbrücken: Saarland University Press.

Spoken computer-mediated communication (CMC) presents a complex challenge for corpus creation. While big-data approaches work well with written data, rich conversation corpora pose major problems at the recording, transcribing, annotation and querying stages (Diemer, Brunner & Schmidt 2016). Many features of spoken and especially audio-visual corpora are not covered by current transcription standards (Nelson 2008). They may be a matter of debate (e.g. gestures and gaze, Adolphs & Carter 2013) and raise organizational issues. This article presents examples of rich data from CASE, the Corpus of Academic Spoken English (forthcoming), compiled at Saarland University, Germany. CASE consists of Skype conversations between speakers of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). CASE data allows research on a wide range of linguistic features of informal spoken academic CMC discourse. Its multimodal nature illustrates both benefits and challenges of rich data, particularly during transcription and annotation. The article presents the organisation and transcription scheme developed for CASE. CASE is designed with multiple layers, including a discourse-oriented basic layer, as well as XML, orthographic, and part-of-speech-tagged layers. The paper discusses the challenges and limitations of transcription and annotation in view of the audiovisual corpus data, especially with regard to paralinguistic (e.g. laughter) and non-verbal (e.g. gestures) discourse features. We illustrate the advantages of the proposed organisation and transcription scheme with regard to the multimodal data set in the context of several quantitative and qualitative case studies.

Please contact me for access.

The article discusses linguistic creativity in informal Skype conversations between university students from eight different European countries. The basis for the study is the Corpus of Academic Spoken English (CASE, forthcoming), a corpus of Skype conversations in an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) context. With the help of qualitative examples, the article examines innovative language use and proposes a taxonomy for functionally accepted innovations, distinguishing instances of L1 influence, approximations and ad hoc innovation. Our findings point towards an assertive and creative perspective on language use, which seems to have a positive influence on the communicative setting, e.g. illustrated by code-switching in combination with laughter. CASE participants use non-standard forms and innovations freely, accommodating to each others' language use. They also establish their own ephemeral communication strategies and showcase and emphasize their respective language and cultural backgrounds.

This paper examines two examples of online food discourse to illustrate how the medium changes parameters established in print recipes: food blogs for written and Skype talks for oral computer-mediated discourse about food. The language of food blogs will be analysed with the help of examples from the Food Blog Corpus (Diemer and Frobenius 2011),[i] compiled at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. This corpus includes 100 blog posts in total from The Times Online. Skype conversations about food between non-native speakers of English are taken from CASE, the Corpus of Academic Spoken English (Diemer et al. forthcoming),[ii] also compiled at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. For the purpose of this analysis, a subcorpus of food-related conversations was extracted, containing seven conversations (5.5h) between 14 German and Italian participants in total. The two corpora were examined in terms of contextualisation (reference to place, time, and personal background), register (audience, and linguistic features), as well as personal opinions and lifestyle comments. The paper suggests that both discourse types make use of the multimodal online environment and add evaluative content, for example integrating positively connoted terms to describe food-related issues. The paper also illustrates possible trends towards an increasing inclusion of non-expert language features, such as vagueness and a reduction of presuppositions, and of cultural and personal references, integrating individual background information.

Abstract:

This paper examines two examples of online food discourse to illustrate how the medium changes parameters established in print recipes: food blogs for written and Skype talks for oral computer-mediated discourse about food. The language of food blogs will be analysed with the help of examples from the Food Blog Corpus (Diemer and Frobenius 2011),[i] compiled at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. This corpus includes 100 blog posts in total from The Times Online. Skype conversations about food between non-native speakers of English are taken from CASE, the Corpus of Academic Spoken English (Diemer et al. forthcoming),[ii] also compiled at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. For the purpose of this analysis, a subcorpus of food-related conversations was extracted, containing seven conversations (5.5h) between 14 German and Italian participants in total. The two corpora were examined in terms of contextualisation (reference to place, time, and personal background), register (audience, and linguistic features), as well as personal opinions and lifestyle comments. The paper suggests that both discourse types make use of the multimodal online environment and add evaluative content, for example integrating positively connoted terms to describe food-related issues. The paper also illustrates possible trends towards an increasing inclusion of non-expert language features, such as vagueness and a reduction of presuppositions, and of cultural and personal references, integrating individual background information.

Résumé:

Cet article analyse deux types de discours gastronomiques en ligne (écrit et oral) afin de montrer l’impact des supports informatiques sur les paramètres des recettes en ligne. Le premier cas à l’étude, soit le langage utilisé dans la blogosphère culinaire, est constitué d’exemples tirés du Food Blog Corpus (Diemer et Frobenius 2011) [iii] provenant d’un corpus de 100 billets du Times Online compilé à l’Université de la Sarre à Sarrebruck, en Allemagne. Quant au deuxième cas, il s’agit d’une étude de conversations portant sur des thématiques culinaires échangées par le biais de la plateforme Skype. Ces conversations font partie du corpus CASE (Corpus of Academic Spoken English: corpus de l’anglais oral langue seconde) et ont été compilées à la même université. De ce corpus, sept conversations culinaires ayant eu lieu entre 14 locuteurs allemands et italiens ont été sélectionnées (5,5 heures de temps de diffusion) pour fins d’analyse. Ces deux corpus ont été analysés à propos de références géographiques, temporelles et personnelles, le registre (lectorat ou public visé; paramètres linguistiques), ainsi que les opinions ou les commentaires relatifs au mode de vie. Nous observons une utilisation multimodale des environnements virtuels dans les deux cas et notons également, entre autres, l’emploi de termes positifs dans la description de thèmes culinaires. Nous analysons aussi la tendance croissante d’emplois d’expressions vagues, l’amenuisement de présuppositions, l’emploi de références culturelles et personnelles tout en intégrant les renseignements individuels.

Using practical examples from our research, this talk traces the history of English-language food discourse from its beginnings in Old English through medieval and modern cookbooks to its newest variations: food blogs and Skype conversations. Numerous examples from Old and Middle English illustrate a long-term trend towards a less and less professional audience, which continues in an online context where the focus shifts further towards lifestyle and personal opinion, creating food-related communities that interact in a global and intercultural context.

The talk (in French) presents the use of web-based examples for English as a Second Language/Français langue seconde (ESL/FLS) teaching in an intercultural context, including hands-on activities which enhance students' intercultural and language competence in Anglophone and Francophone cultural settings. We will discuss how to use web tools like Google Trends and online text corpora such as GloWBE or the Corpus français, and how to include social media, memes, and international marketing campaigns, as well as examples from other English and French varieties in order to both motivate students and to contribute to their intercultural sensitization. We will also consider intercomprehensive methods of teaching French through English.

MLA Convention 2015
Panel “Language Use in Multilingual Contexts” (Applied Linguistics Division), convened by Lawrence Williams (lawrence.williams@unt.edu)

Title
It’s all in the corpus: Corpus-based approaches to English cultural and intercultural studies in the EFL classroom

Authors
Marie-Louise Brunner & Stefan Diemer
Saarland University, Germany

Abstract
The paper proposes the use of web-based examples for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching in an intercultural context. We present and discuss hands-on activities which enhance students’ language use in Anglophone cultural settings. Based on the Web as a Corpus approach (Hundt et al. 2007, Diemer 2009), Google Trends, international marketing campaigns, and New Englishes are introduced as teaching resources for the intercultural EFL classroom (Brunner & Diemer 2014).
By searching and comparing lexical items, students can discover regional, seasonal and (inter-)cultural variation on the basis of Google Trends profiles. International marketing campaigns draw attention to problems such as differing connotations, cultural adaptations, consumer habits and wordplay in a multilingual context. Corpus data also serves to exemplify new and increasingly international English varieties (Davies 2013). With our web-based approaches we aim to provide teachers with various possibilities of motivating students while at the same time contributing to their intercultural sensitization.


Select Bibliography
● Brunner, Marie-Louise & Stefan Diemer. “Web-Trends, Korpora und globale Webung: Ideen für den interkulturellen Englischunterricht.” (“Web trends, corpora and global advertising: Ideas for intercultural English Language Training”). 2nd Conference on English and Multilingualism. Goethe University Frankfurt. 22 Mar. 2014. Workshop.
● Hundt, Marianne, Nadja Nesselhauf, and Carolin Biewer, eds. Corpus linguistics and the web. No. 59. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Print.
● Davies, Mark. Corpus of Global Web-Based English: 1.9 billion words from speakers in 20 countries. Brigham Young U. 2013. Web. 03 Mar. 2014.
● Diemer, Stefan. “Das Internet als Korpus?: Aktuelle Fragen und Methoden der Korpuslinguistik.” (“The web as a corpus? Current issues and Methods in Corpus Linguistics”). Saarland Working Papers in Linguistics 3 (2009) : 35-56. Web. 03 Mar. 2014.