(BAAL News Spring 2007)
The Banbury Road Corpus [BRC] comprises six exchanges between a student (‘Marc’) and his teacher (‘Robert’), recorded during a course at Cool English Ltd, Oxford, in June 2003. The BRC’s importance for forensic linguists has somewhat overshadowed its relevance for post-neo-Vygotskian [PNV] accounts of SLA. Before considering the corpus itself in this light, it is convenient to summarise some key PNV constructs.
joint utterance-building
Utterances are created by dialogic partners, not individuals. The following dialogic exchanges [DEs] are therefore functionally identical:
1) A:
That ref needs a bloody guide –
B: – dog.
2) A: That ref needs –
B: – a bloody guide dog.
3) A: That –
B: – ref needs a bloody guide dog.
4) A:
B: That ref needs a bloody guide dog.
Silence, as in 4), cannot be interpreted as non-participation: in a congruent dialogue (Dente 2004), each participant contributes equally, by definition, to utterance building. The issue of whether this principle holds where one partner is absent, dead or a figment of the other’s imagination (Sassi 2005) need not concern us here.
non-congruent exchanges
PNV theory rejects Sackbottle’s (1998) asymmetry: contributions to non-congruent DEs cannot be judged for coherence on the basis of the topic choice of one or other speaker. According to the directionally unbiased meaning-making principle [DUMM], DE structure is commutative (Carambo & Spelczek 2004). Every utterance is both ground on which the interlocutor’s contribution is figure, and figure on that contribution’s ground. Silence and problems of referential indeterminacy in non-congruent DEs (di Sosta 2005) are outside our present scope.
directionally unbiased restructuring
PNV analyses of interlanguage [IL] also reject target-language [TL] hegenomy. Restructuring is atelic, and can involve anti-TL movement, as in the case of ‘Zeke’ (Tarbaby & Cooch 1994), who remodelled his French-English IL into something structurally close to Laotian.
the brc: a pnv analysis
DE1
Robert (holding up a shoe): Marc, what’s this?
Marc: Is Tuesday.
A non-congruent DE. In DUMM terms, Marc does not necessarily ‘give the wrong answer’; we can equally well say that Robert asks the wrong question.
DE2
Robert: Marc, what are you wearing?
Marc: I am wearing to the pub.
We must not be hoodwinked by mere syntactic ‘progress’. Though much richer than DE1, this exchange is still non-congruent.
DE3
Robert: Morning, Marc. How are you?
marc: [74 seconds’ silence]
Marc’s response has been interpreted elsewhere as a case of prodrop followed by a VP with no surface realisation. We analyse it as a move towards establishing an uncluttered Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).
DE4
(Students are exchanging assembly instructions for a cardboard pyramid. Marc and his partner are speculating in Spanish on the availability of the French girl in the front row.)
Robert: Marc, speak English.
Marc: No quiero hablar ingles.
The first congruent DE – a great step forward. The ZPD is now established.
DE5
Robert: Marc, you take the part of the hotel receptionist and give Helmut the information on the blue card.
Marc: Yo no work bloody Helmut.
A rich and complex DE: a triumph for task-based interactive scaffolding.
DE6
Robert: Marc, you’ll drive me insane.
Marc: Bagarov.
Presumably a reference to a fellow-student. A brief return to non-congruent mode, and a timely reminder that restructuring is directionally unbiased.
conclusion
Clearly, with congruence and scaffolding now established, further satisfactory progress could normally have been expected. Unfortunately, Robert became unwell after DE6 and was replaced by a colleague, Paul. During a game of Lingobingo™, Paul made an insensitive remark regarding a subcategorisation rule for which Marc had evidently not yet established a ZPD. Infuriated, Marc burnt down the school, and there were no further additions to the corpus.
references
Carambo, A. and T. Spelczek (2004) Figure and Ground in the Lyrics of Maria Theotocopouli and the Souvlaki Babes. Didcot Academic Press.
Dente, A. (2004) La Congruenza: Otto Condizioni di Felicità. Naples, Edizioni Alla Spina.
di Sosta, D. (2005) ‘Can Schrödinger’s Cat Purr?’. Journal of Experimental Epistemology 3/2.
Pickelhaube, J. and D. Dessourds (2003) Das Kamel als Erlösungssymbol in Klopstocks Dichtung. Berlin: Heuschreck.
Sackbottle, C. (1998) Who’s Talking? Peebles, Scotland: Ranunculus Press.
Sassi, C. (2005) Hamlet and the Ghost: a Congruence Theory Reading. Barking: Monkey’s Paw Publishers.
Tarbaby, K. and X. Cooch (1994) Un Belge Pas Comme les Autres. Louvain: Pigepas & Quedalle.