Dolores Ramírez Verdugo

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

How literate is EFL speech?

Language is a functional, semantic, contextual and semiotic system (Eggins 1999: 2). The system represents a choice of possible semantic, lexicogrammatical or phonological alternatives (cf. Halliday 1994: xxvi). However, these choices are not arbitrary but relate naturally to the meanings that are being encoded (cf. Halliday 1994: xiii) Literacy in spoken discourse is understood here, then, as the ability to select the most appropriate choice and transmit the intended message effectively in a particular communicative context. This ability will be conditioned not only by syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic features but also by the prosody of our speech. A wrong prosodic pattern associated to a particular utterance will probably lead to miscommunication between interlocutors. In addition, a deviant prosodic choice will indicate that the speaker, probably unconsciously, is illiterate in the foreign language, no matter the degree of literacy he or she may have acquired in the rest of his or her EFL system. This paper, under a systemic-functional perspective, explores EFL speakers’ degree of literacy in their spoken discourse based on two parallel Spanish learner and English native speaker corpora. The study focuses on the prosodic features produced by Spanish learners in the expression of basic speech functions in their English spoken discourse. The results show that Spanish learners present a high degree of illiteracy in their speech when communicating in the target language, largely due to their distinct English prosody. The paper discusses whether the scant attention prosody receives in EFL instruction, together with the counter intuitive character English prosody may have for Spanish speakers, could partly explain this lack of oral literacy.