observe them. You can ask a colleague to observe you, and then talk
together about what happens. The most important thing is attitude: see the
book as a learning opportunity.21 Collecting natural language data
Coursebooks and other teaching resources give teachers plenty of language data
to work with, but at times you may prefer to work with written or spoken texts
you have collected yourself. If you have a specific purposes class, you might
want to collect data that is directly relevant to their language needs. If you have a
more general class, you might want to vary their language exposure. The
following suggestions should help you to collect usable natural language data.
Most of them concentrate on spoken data, since that is the most difficult to
collect!
1 Obtain permission. If you are recording people’s speech, or taking
documents relating to an organization, you need to ask for permission. Even
for published or broadcast material, which is in the public domain, you
should make sure you are not breaking copyright by using it for teaching.
2 Be realistic about what you can record. Unless you have excellent
equipment and much skill, it will be difficult to obtain a coherent recording
of more than two or three speakers at once. Background noise may also be a
problem, depending on where you are recording. So don’t be too ambitious,
and plan for plenty of trial runs.
3 Choose the best medium for recording. A decision whether to use audio
or video may be dictated entirely by practical considerations. If you have
access to both, think about their respective advantages and disadvantages.
Video captures paralinguistic features such as gestures, but it is more
obtrusive and the sound quality may not be as good as that of an audio
recording. Unless you are particularly experienced, it is also far more
complicated and difficult to set up and actually use.
4 Choose the situations carefully. If you have a specific purposes class, can
you get direct access to any of your learners’ target situations? Or can you
interview specialists in the areas they are interested in? For a general class, are
there situations you would like to cover but which are absent from your
learners’ usual materials?
5 Record short texts where possible. Two minutes of speech will give you
about 400 words of text, and contain plenty of interesting features you can
look at with your learners. It is often easier for learners to deal with natural
language data in relatively short chunks. For example, you can record
interviews in two or three parts, or record a situation and then an observer’s
summary of it.40 LANGUAGE WORK IN THE CLASSROOM