Orders of reality: CANCODE, communication, and culture

This article is concerned with the topic of language awareness in relation to spoken texts and their cultural contexts. The topic has become more relevant in recent years, as we have witnessed the development of more and more corpora of spoken English; more exciting developments in the work of COBUILD; the growth of the British National Corpus, with its spoken components; and the development of CANCODE by the author and Michael McCarthy at Nottingham University, with the support of Cambridge University Press. The data in this paper are drawn from everyday situations of language use collected for CANCODE and developed with an eye to their potential relevance for ELT.