Authentic Discourse and the Survival English Curriculum
Abstract
This article argues the position that classroom language models must be based on authentic native-speaker/native-speaker discourse. The argument is supported with a quantitative distributional analysis of the language of one doctor-patient interaction and examples from three others. The topics, utterance functions, and structures are quantified, and their distribution is examined to show that simulated excerpts may serve to mislead students about the nature of everyday interactions. The implications of this study are discussed in terms of a need for collection of more authentic data, distributional analysis of forms and functions of conversation, and the implementation of a “discourse behavior” syllabus for survival English, in which syllabus items are determined by the needs of a participant in a given conversation.
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Studies have often found LT materials writers' intuitions about language use to differ considerably from authentic language use, even in familiar everyday activities for which their textbooks are supposedly intended to prepare students.
“studies have often found LT materials writers' intuitions about language use to differ considerably from authentic language use, even in familiar everyday activities for which their textbooks are supposedly intended to prepare students (see, e.g., Auerbach & Burgess, 1985;Bartlett, 2005;Cathcart, 1989).”
From In Defense of Tasks and TBLT: Nonissues and Real Issues (2016) · cites this paper as Cathcart, 1989
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In Defense of Tasks and TBLT: Nonissues and Real Issues
Long, M. H. (2016) · Annual Review of Applied Linguistics · doi:10.1017/s0267190515000057 · Cited by 359 · see citing works
- Authors
- Cathcart, R. L.
- Affiliations
- Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (US)
- Corresponding author
- Cathcart, Ruth Larimer
- Venue
- TESOL Quarterly
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1989-03
- Volume
- 23
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 105
- ISSN
- 0039-8322 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1998951939
- Cited by
- 84
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2025: 4 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 40 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 1 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 1 · 2014: 2 · 2013: 1 · 2012: 3
- FWCI
- 13.21
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- TESOL Quarterly (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Linguistics and Language Analysis
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies
- Keywords
- authentic discourse, English for specific purposes, doctor-patient interaction, distributional analysis, utterance functions, conversation structure, syllabus design
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