I would like to echo Terre's recommendation for the Longman Grammar. They have a very affordable student version, available through Pearson. It's a corpus based grammar, and it gives frequency patterns in different registers, including conversation. It also has a wonderful chapter on "The Grammar of conversation." You can take a functional approach to this. It's not just that speaking is "wrong," but that the goals of writing influence a different kind of language.
Michael Halliday has a book on Spoken and Written Language, though it can be hard to get. (Try interlibrary loan.) His "Spoken and Written Modes of Meaning" is available in the first volume of his collected works ("On Grammar"). He also has a book on Complementarities that addresses this, but that, too, is hard to get.
Peter Elbow has been working on a project he calls "Enlisting the Virtues of speech." I don't know if the book is out yet. Joseph M. Williams' "Lessons in Clarity and Grace" also looks at ways in which orally pleasing versions might be clearer and more graceful than what often shows up in writing. The ear often tells us things that the prescriptive grammars don't address.
If you're not afraid of the overly technical, I recommend "Intonation in the Grammar of English" (Equinox).
Students bring very sophisticated language resources to the task of writing, so it seems to me wrong to simply say that you can't write the way you speak or that the way you speak is wrong. The question might be how to stimulate development of writing voices that are comfortable and effective--formal and informal, personal and impersonal, in a wide range of registers and genres.
Craig
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Teresa Lintner
Sent: Wednesday, December 21, 2011 11:10 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Spoken vs. formal written English
Hi Steve,
The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English would be a good resource.
One thing I do with my ESL students at the beginning of the semester is to present them with two short essays on the same topic, one written in SPEWD (I love that acronym!) and the other in academic English. Then I ask them to analyze the two essays using a rubric that helps them recognize the differences between the two registers. A revelation for my Gen 1.5ers is realizing that "gonna" is actually "going to."
Terre
Teresa Lintner
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Cambridge University Press
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From: Stephen King <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: 12/20/2011 06:57 PM
Subject: Spoken vs. formal written English
Sent by: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
<[log in to unmask]>
Can anyone direct me to a text that focuses, at length, on the differences between spoken and written versions of language? It seems to me that a great many of my community college students, especially those who have been out of school for some time, use a version of English that could be characterized as "Spoken English Written Down." (A colleague suggested the acronym "SPEWD.") I have my own list of those differences, but am looking for other resources. Many thanks in advance!
Steve King
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