Speaking in Academic Contexts

Features of academic spoken English


Spoken language is different from written language for many reasons. One important reason is that it usually has to be understood immediately whereas written language can be read many times. For that reason, spoken language has many different features.

Spoken language has the following characteristics (Halliday, 1989, p. 31):

  • Variation in speed - but it is generally faster than writing
  • Loudness or quietness
  • Gestures - body language
  • Intonation
  • Stress
  • Rhythm
  • Pitch range
  • Pausing and phrasing

As well as this, there are differences in the actual language used (Biber, 1988; Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad & Finegan, 1999; Chafe, 1982; Cook, 1997; Halliday,1989).

Less Complex

Spoken language is less complex than written language.

Spoken language is grammatically less complex than written language. It has fewer subordinate clauses, fewer "that/to" complement clauses, fewer sequences of prepositional phrases, fewer attributive adjectives and more active verbs than written language.

Spoken texts are longer. This means that there is more repetition. According to Ure (1971), the percentage of different words in a text is generally below 40% for spoken texts and above 40% for written texts.

Spoken texts also have shorter, less complex words and phrases. They have fewer nominalisations, more verb based phrases, and a more limited vocabulary. Spoken texts are lexically less dense than written language - they have proportionately more grammatical words than lexical words.

Spoken language has more words that refer to the speaker, more quantifiers and hedges, and less abstractness.

Spoken language has:

  • more verb based phrases
    (e.g. having treatment (W), being treated (S), hospital care (W), go to hospital (S))
  • more predicative adjectives
    (misleading statistics (W), statistics are misleading (S))
  • more pronouns (it, they, you, we)
  • more lexical repetition
  • more first person reference (I)
  • more active verbs than written language
  • fewer complex words and phrases

Spoken texts are:

  • more fragmented - more simple sentences and more use of coordination and, but, so, because rather than subordination (embedding)
  • lexically less dense
  • longer



with a typical spoken variant:


and a more natural spoken version:


The main difference is the grammar, not the vocabulary.

Another example from (Halliday, 1996, p. 347).

The written text:


is more lexically dense than the spoken version:


Other equivalents are given below (1989, p.81):




Violence changed the face of once peaceful Swiss cities.

The cities in Switzerland had once been peaceful, but they changed when people became violent.



Opinion in the colony greeted the promised change with enthusiasm.

The people in the colony rejoiced when it was promised that things would change in this way.

 Active verbs

In formal written English, we often use a passive when we do not want to specify who the agent is. In spoken English we can use a subject such as "people", "somebody", "they", "we", or "you".


They're installing the new computer system next month.
The new computer system is being installed next month. (more formal)