A Corpus-Assisted Comparison of Teachers’ Utterances with Casual Conversation

The study identified the differences between two registers, teachers’ utterances and casual conversation, and drew out pedagogical suggestions contributable to making the language used in English classes more assimilated with the natural spoken English used outside the classroom. The analyses are implemented by comparing two corpora, TUC (teachers’ utterance corpus) and FFD OANC (Face-to-Face Domain of Open American National Corpus). As per the results, compared with casual conversation, teachers’ utterances appear to have (1) topics centered on language teaching, not every day affairs, (2) higher proportions of lexical words, (3) lower levels of lexical variety and grammatical complexity, (4) less past-tense sentences, and (5) some exceptionally frequent grammatical words resulted from habitual use of particular expressions. While conforming to rigorous textbook controls, set out by the national curriculum, teachers should exert themselves to compensate for the lack of casual conversation features, by widening and diversifying their speech.