Developing a coding scheme for annotating opinion statements in L2 interactive spoken English with application for language teaching and assessment

Abstract

Evaluative meanings are known to be difficult to identify and quantify in corpus data (Hunston 2004). The research in this area has largely drawn on the annotating schemes offered by the frameworks of Appraisal (Read and Carroll 2012; Fuoli 2018) or stance (Simaki et al. 2019). However, these annotation schemes have been applied predominantly to written production and to first language use. This study, therefore, proposes an annotation scheme for identifying and classifying linguistic expressions of opinion with particular application for second language (L2) language teaching and language assessment contexts. In addition, the coding scheme also specifically deals with spoken interactive communication, with particular attention paid to aspects such as the co-construction of opinion statements (Hovarth and Eggins 1995). The paper outlines the components of the coding scheme along with their theoretical underpinning, addresses some of the challenges in applying the codes and annotating real-life data, and discusses future possibilities and considerations related to the application of the coding scheme.