Perspectives on Spoken Discourse

The collection of research papers is addressed to teachers of English and advanced language students. The first article, by James Rock, presents the Common European Framework of Reference in the light of teaching spoken English in a university context. In his second article, Rock provides an overview of studies on phraseology in the non-native speaker setting. The third paper, by Caterina Pavesi, examines learner English written on the computer and seeks to ascertain the status of this English on the written-spoken continuum, while in the fourth article, Pierfranca Forchini re-evaluates the language of films, hitherto labelled as a form of language which is unrepresentative of authentic speech and thus of little value in the study of spoken discourse. Forchini's empirical research, using Multi-Dimensional Analysis, shows that movie language is surprisingly similar to conversational discourse, providing scientific justification for using films to teach features of spoken discourse.