From EFL to ESL: Evidence from the International Corpus of Learner English

Far from being a clear-cut distinction, the EFL – ESL distinction should be viewed as a continuum, with exclusive classroom learning in a country where the target language (TL) is not a native or second official language at one end, and exclusive naturalistic acquisition in a country where the target language is a native or second language, at the other, and a large number of intermediary stages. Broughton et al (1980: 7) provide the following illustrations: "The distinctions between English as a second language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) are […] not as clear cut as the above may suggest. The decreasing role of English in India and Sri Lanka has, of recent years, made for a shift of emphasis to change a long established second language situation to something nearer to a foreign language situation. Elsewhere, political decisions are changing former foreign language situations. Official policies in, for example, Sweden and Holland are aiming towards a bilingual position where all educated people have a good command of English, which is rapidly becoming an alternate language with Swedish and Dutch—a position much closer to ESL on the EFL/ESL continuum. " The International Corpus of Learner English (Granger et al. forthcoming), which contains data from 16 different learner populations in a wide range of learning/acquisition settings, is an ideal resource to investigate the effects of these contextual differences. In our presentation we will compare the following four populations: (1) Spanish-speaking learners, who have learnt English in a classroom setting in a non-TL environment with very little exposure to the TL; (2) French-speaking learners, who have learnt English in a similar context but with greater attention to form in the classroom; (3) Dutch-speaking learners, who have also learnt English in a non-TL environment but have had extended exposure to English from an early age via other means (television, non-dubbed films, etc.); (4) Tswana learners who, although living in a country where English is a second language, have had very little contact with native speakers of English in their daily lives but have had instruction in English from the fifth grade onwards. We will focus on one of the aspects of language which one can expect to benefit most from wider exposure, viz. phraseology, and more particularly on a subset of multiword verbs that Schneider (2004) calls ‘particle verbs’, i.e. idiomatic combinations of a verb and a particle (preposition as in look after or adverb as in give up). These verbs have been the focus of a range of recent studies based on expanding and/or outer circle varieties of English. Although distinctive uses of these verbs are presented as (largely L1-induced) infelicities or errors in the former (Milton 2001, Rong-Rong 2001, Brala 2002) and new nativized norms or creative innovations in the latter (Lowenberg 2002, Schneider 2004, Mukherjee forthcoming), the two sets of data clearly have a degree of commonality (Nesselhauf 2007), as evidenced by the joint use (though in different frequencies) of particle verbs such as discuss about, invite for or emphasize on. In our presentation we will report the preliminary findings of a large scale corpus-based investigation of these verbs in the four ICLE subcorpora referred to above. We will highlight the link between the amount of exposure to English and the frequency and type of particle verbs used, thus showing to what extent the EFL-ESL continuum defined for the subcorpora on the basis of the learning/acquisition setting is reflected in the learner production. By doing so, we hope to shed light on the recent field of “learner Englishes” and open up new avenues for research in this domain.