The use of a spoken corpus for materials development: different approaches for different purposes

This paper discusses the application of different approaches to the use of a spoken corpus for the creation of materials for an online English course. Issues concerning the often problematic use of spoken corpora are addressed, with particular attention given to how the loss of essential meaning-making devices can be dealt with in materials development. While more ‘traditional’ KWIC concordances play an important role in the analysis of the corpus and are useful for certain exercises, a new methodology is presented. This concerns the application of functional-notional annotation to texts, combined with the use of the multimodal concordancer MCA. The result is the retrieval of concordances that give focus to the way in which language is used to communicate in the texts, allowing the development of materials that encourage the learner to take into account how non-verbal elements and context also play a role in meaning-making.