‘Academese’, ‘church chat’ and the fear of alienating the congregation
Exploring church preaching as a lexical environment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jalpp.33771Keywords:
academic vocabulary, jargon, lexical environment, preaching, vocabulary, vocabulary profileAbstract
This study is concerned with communication in religious settings, with a specific focus on the professional practice of preaching. The paper addresses concerns raised within preaching research that preaching in mainline denominations is too academic and/ or draws too heavily on theological jargon; however, little empirical evidence for this has been presented. To learn more about preachers' communicative engagement with their congregations in this regard, the study focuses on preaching vocabulary in three denominations (the Church of England, the Baptist Union of Great Britain and the Catholic Church for England and Wales), using the concept of lexical environment to profile 150 contemporary sermons given in England in the UK and drawing on interviews with practising preachers. Findings indicate (1) that preaching makes only limited use of academic and potentially difficult religious vocabulary, and (2) that preaching is an inclusive, sensitive and carefully attuned lexical environment where preachers' lexical practices appear to help them achieve their discursive aims. The study furthermore shows how preachers are lexically aware and engage actively with vocabulary at various stages of sermon preparation. In addition, this study goes some way to show how applied approaches to linguistics can be of service to homiletics.
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MICASE (2016) Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. Ann Arbor: English Language Institute, University of Michigan. Available online: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/
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Thompson, P. (2006) A corpus perspective on the lexis of lectures, with a focus on economics lectures. In K. Hyland and M. Bondi (eds) Academic Discourse Across Disciplines, 253–270. Bern: Peter Lang.
Troeger, T. H. (2006) ‘A house of prayer in the heart’: How homiletics nurtures the church’s spirituality. HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies 62 (4): 1239–1249. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v62i4.399
Vann, J. R. (2011) Worship Matters: A Study for Congregations. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
Wallgren-Hemlin, B. (1997) Att Övertyga från Predikstolen [Persuading from the Pulpit]. Nora, Sweden: Bokförlaget Nya Doxa.
Waznak, R. (1998) An Introduction to the Homily. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.
Wesley Allen, O. (2010) The Renewed Homiletic. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress.
West, M. (1953) A General Service List of English Words. London: Longman, Green and Co.
Ashworth, J. and Farthing, I. (2007) Churchgoing in the UK: A research report from Tearfund on church attendance in the UK. Teddington, UK: Tearfund. Available online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/03_04_07_tearfundchurch.pdf
Brown, R. (2009) Can Words Express Our Wonder? Preaching in the Church Today. Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press.
Browne, C., Culligan, B. and Phillips, J. (2013) New General Service List. Available online: http://www.newgeneralservicelist.org/
Buttrick, D. (1987) Homiletic: Moves and Structures. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
CARM (2014) Dictionary of Theology. Available online: https://carm.org/dictionary-theology-0
Coggan, D. (1958) Stewards of Grace. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Coxhead, A. (2000) A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly 34 (2): 213–238. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587951
Craddock, F. B. (2001) As One Without Authority. St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press.
Davies, J. (2014) In Season and Out of Season: Crafting Sermons for All Occasions. Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press.
Davies, M. (2008) Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Available online: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
Drever, E. (2003) Using Semi-Structured Interviews in Small-Scale Research: A Teacher’s Guide. Glasgow: The SCRE Centre.
Du Bois, J. W., Chafe, W. L., Meyer, C., Thompson, S. A., Englebretson, R. and Martey, N. (2000–2005). Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, Parts 1–4. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.
Gardner, D. and Davies, M. (2014) A new academic vocabulary list. Applied Linguistics 35 (3): 305–327. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amt015
Gilner, L. (2011) A primer on the General Service List. Reading in a Foreign Language 23 (1): 65–83.
Guthrie, C. F. (2007) Quantitative empirical studies of preaching: A review of methods and findings. Journal of Communication & Religion 30 (1): 65–117.
Horst, M. (2009) Revisiting classrooms as lexical environments. In T. Fitzpatrick and A. Barfield (eds) Lexical Processing in Second Language, 55–66. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781847691538-007
Hyland, K. and Tse, P. (2007) Is there an ‘academic vocabulary’? TESOL Quarterly 41 (2): 235–253. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1545-7249.2007.tb00058.x
Immink, G. (2004) Homiletics: The current debate. International Journal of Practical Theology 8 (1): 98–121. https://doi.org/10.1515/IJPT.2004.006
Kohnen, T. (2010) Religious discourse. In A. H. Jucker and I. Taavitsainen (eds) Historical Pragmatics. Handbooks of Pragmatics 8: 523–547. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Koncar Bizjak, A. (2008) Contemporary sermons: From grammatical annotation to rhetorical design. Odense Working Papers in Linguistics 29: 503–521.
Laufer, B. (1994) The lexical profile of second language writing: Does it change over time? RELC Journal 25 (2): 21–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/003368829402500202
Laufer, B. and Nation, P. (1995) Vocabulary size and use: Lexical richness in L2 written production. Applied linguistics 16 (3): 307–322. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/16.3.307
Laufer, B. and Nation P. (1999) A vocabulary size test of controlled productive ability. Language Testing 16 (1): 36–55. https://doi.org/10.1191/026553299672614616
Lessard-Clouston, M. (2010) Theology lectures as lexical environments: A case study of technical vocabulary use. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 9 (4): 308–321. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2010.09.001
Lloyd-Jones, M. D. (2012) Preaching and Preachers. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Lord, J. L. (2010) Finding Language and Imagery: Words for Holy Speech. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.
Macmillan Education (2007) Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. London: Macmillan.
Malmström, H. (2015) ‘Listen and understand what I am saying’: Church-listening as a challenge for non-native listeners of English in the United Kingdom. International Journal of Listening 29 (1): 50–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2014.880928
McClure, J. S. (2007) Preaching Words: 144 Key Terms in Homiletics. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
Meara, P., Lightbown, P. M. and Halter R. H. (1997) Classrooms as lexical environments. Language Teaching Research 1 (1): 28–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/136216889700100103
Meyers, R. R. (2004) With Ears to Hear: Preaching as Self-Persuasion. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock.
MICASE (2016) Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. Ann Arbor: English Language Institute, University of Michigan. Available online: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/
Morris, L. and Cobb T. (2004) Vocabulary profiles as predictors of the academic performance of teaching English as a second language trainees. System 32 (1): 75–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2003.05.001
Nation, I. S. P. (2001) Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139524759
Nation, P. and Kyongho H. (1995) Where would general service vocabulary stop and special purposes vocabulary begin? System 23 (1): 35–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/0346-251X(94)00050-G
Newman, J. A. (2016) A Corpus-Based Comparison of the Academic Word List and the Academic Vocabulary List. Available online: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7079&context=etd
Smith, R. (2004) The lexical frequency profile: Problems and uses. In K. Bradford-Watts, C. Ikeguchi and M. Swanson (eds) JALT2004 Conference Proceedings, 439–451. Tokyo: JALT.
Thompson, P. (2006) A corpus perspective on the lexis of lectures, with a focus on economics lectures. In K. Hyland and M. Bondi (eds) Academic Discourse Across Disciplines, 253–270. Bern: Peter Lang.
Troeger, T. H. (2006) ‘A house of prayer in the heart’: How homiletics nurtures the church’s spirituality. HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies 62 (4): 1239–1249. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v62i4.399
Vann, J. R. (2011) Worship Matters: A Study for Congregations. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
Wallgren-Hemlin, B. (1997) Att Övertyga från Predikstolen [Persuading from the Pulpit]. Nora, Sweden: Bokförlaget Nya Doxa.
Waznak, R. (1998) An Introduction to the Homily. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.
Wesley Allen, O. (2010) The Renewed Homiletic. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress.
West, M. (1953) A General Service List of English Words. London: Longman, Green and Co.
Published
2019-05-20
Issue
Section
Articles
License
Equinox Publishing Ltd.
How to Cite
Malmström, H. (2019). ‘Academese’, ‘church chat’ and the fear of alienating the congregation: Exploring church preaching as a lexical environment. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice, 12(1), 50-71. https://doi.org/10.1558/jalpp.33771
