Interview

Michael McCarthy

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Another of your main areas of interest is corpus research and use, a field that is having a growing impact on all aspects of English language learning. How did you first get involved in that area?
I was very fortunate to get a job in 1982 as a lecturer at the University of Birmingham in the UK. I became a (rather junior) colleague to an inspiring and fantastic group of people headed by Professor John Sinclair, who, to this day, is the most brilliant linguist I have ever encountered. Associated with him were legendary names such as Malcolm Coulthard, Michael Hoey, and David Brazil, and it was where I met my writing partner of so many years, Ron Carter.

It was an amazing environment in which to work. Sinclair was developing corpora for the production of dictionaries (the COBUILD dictionary was the first, ground-breaking product). But not only did he convince us corpora were a good thing on which to base the language input for materials and resources, he also showed us how researching corpora could change forever our theory of language in use. His inspiration led me to understand the power of lexis in the organization of language, quite different from the dominance of syntax, due to the influence of Chomsky. Without Sinclair, my later work on spoken corpora, and my books and materials on vocabulary and spoken language would never have happened. I'm now a corpus addict!

What, for you, has been the single most interesting revelation to come out of corpus studies?
Probably the power of 'chunks' in language. When you research corpora, especially spoken ones, you realize that some phenomena are so frequent and all-pervasive in language that we simply can't ignore them. For instance, the two-word chunk "you know" is the 15th most frequent item in the language, more frequent than single words such as they, have, so, what, and many other 'core' items. Other chunks are also massively frequent, for example, "things like that", "a lot of people", "know what I mean", and so on.

What the corpus insights into chunks show is us that they are extremely frequent, that they are responsible for some of the most basic interactive meanings in conversation (e.g. showing shared knowledge, making vague references, organizing the talk, etc.), and that, without them, fluency would be impossible. We simply have to have a repertoire of ready-made, off-the-peg chunks to structure our utterances; we cannot possibly invent every utterance anew, every time. So I think chunks should be at the centre of vocabulary learning. Vocabulary is not just single words. That's been a big insight for me as a corpus researcher.

Tell us about your latest coursebook, Touchstone. You've said that it looks very similar to most other coursebooks. But it has some fundamental underlying differences, doesn't it?
It does look like other course books, that's because we don't want to scare people, and we know that teachers are busy people, who don't want to think they need a six-week training course before they can use a piece of material. So it's got all the familiar things you expect in a course: grammar presentations, vocabulary, pronunciation activities, speaking and listening activities, writing, and so on. It has the familiar four levels.

But there are important differences, which we, the authors, think make it very exciting. First there's the fact that it's based on the North American segment of the Cambridge International Corpus, which means we've got evidence of how people really speak and write from millions of words of English as it has been used by a wide range of users. The corpus has informed us in our choice of vocabulary, our priorities in the grammar, and, above all, on our special sections on speaking strategies in every unit.

As well as seeing how people perform strategies such as asking follow-up questions, responding with more than just yes or no, we can actually see the words and phrases they use to achieve these strategies (what we call our Strategy-Plus language). And we share some of the exciting information we find in our corpora with the teacher in the teacher's edition, as well as having occasional fun 'In Conversation' boxes in the student material, where you learn just how common (or uncommon) some things are in the language.

Then we have our 'Vocabulary Notebook' in every unit, where we focus on helping learners to become good vocabulary learners and to be more autonomous, because we know that we can never (no course book can) teach enough vocabulary, and that it's important to foster good learning habits. And there are many other features too that make Touchstone familiar but special and different.

When can we expect to see future books in the series?
Book 2 will be out in the spring of 2005, and Book 3 at the end of 2005. Book 4 will follow soon after in 2006.

Do you have any thoughts on how the Japanese government's move towards introducing English into the primary school curriculum - assuming they actually follow through with it - will play out?
I'm no expert on either Japan or primary education, as I've always taught adults, but I will say this. Kids may be quick to pick things up, but adults can focus their learning more efficiently (I'm always amazed that it takes 10 years to give to a kid all the literacy and numeracy skills that an illiterate and innumerate adult can be taught in two years) and adults can achieve greater depth. Also, adults usually know why they're learning the language; such motivation may be absent from small kids. But I wish Japan every success in this venture.

Imagine for a moment that you have a bottomless bag of cash and unlimited personnel resources. What aspect of English language learning or teaching would you want to spend the rest of your career working on or researching?
I'm lucky. I can already devote much of my time to researching and writing. But, if I had bottomless funds, surprise-surprise, I'd go on building spoken corpora (which are very costly to collect and transcribe) from as many places as I could around the world where English is used (and not just in English ­ I'd love a big Spanish spoken corpus too) and buy a very powerful computer, and continue to research everyday communication, because that's where the exciting insights are to be gained.

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