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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