Introducing English as a Lingua Franca: an Online Tutorial

Table of Contents

1. What is English as a Lingua Franca?
2. The tutorial: who it's for and what it aims to do
3. The tutorial: how it works
4. Analysing talk (the slightly theoretical bit)
5. Recording and transcribing: why record, why transcribe, what to transcribe
6. Notation
7. Three examples of classroom talk with accompanying transcripts
8. The activity - section one: form a group
9. The activity - section two: select your recording equipment
10. The activity - section three: record your discussion
11. The activity - section four: transcription and analysis
12. The activity - section five: discuss your transcript
13. Photos of the project team
14. References
15. Further reading
16. Acknowledgements
17. How to print and cite this resource
18. Creative Commons Licence

The tutorial: how it works

This tutorial describes a group activity that, depending on specific instructions from your module tutor, you could do all or partly in class, or all or partly in your own time.

The activity has five sections: form a group, select your equipment, make a recording of a discussion, transcribe part of your discussion, compare and discuss your transcriptions.

If your classroom has a computer per student (with a recording device, sound editing software and headphones) and a printer (for printing the transcripts to use in section five), you could do everything in class over roughly four hours, not including the time you will need to read through the background information in this tutorial and these instructions.

If you are working in classrooms without PCs, you could organise your group (section 1) at the end of one class then, after class, decide on your recording equipment (section 2). In the second class, you could do section 3. After the second class, you could do section 4, then in the third class, you could finish the activity by doing section 5.

If you are working on the activity in your own time, once you have decided who is in your group, you could agree on the times and dates of your meetings to complete each stage of the activity.

Here is a rough estimate of how long each section of the activity might take (again, not including the time taken to read through the background information and instructions):

section 1 - form a group

Your module tutor might assign you to a group or you might be allowed to choose your group members (making sure that you represent a mixture of at least two main languages spoken). Fifteen minutes?

section 2 - select your recording equipment

Depending on whether you own your equipment or need to borrow and learn how to use it, from zero to sixty minutes??

section 3 - record your discussion

Depending on how long you decide to talk in your group, about twenty minutes? Then fifteen to thirty minutes to decide which 30 seconds of your discussion you should all have a go at transcribing.

section 4 - transcribe and analyse your talk

Transcribing 30 seconds of your discussion might take about sixty minutes. Thinking about the analysis questions and making some notes ready for the next section might take another sixty minutes (or as long as you have!).

section 5 - discuss your transcript

Perhaps up to sixty minutes?

Before finding out more about each of these sections, you could read our brief introductions to: analysing talk; the reasons for recording and methods of transcription; and the symbols that some transcripts use to show non-linguistic features such as pauses, volume and speech rate.