The English of Philippine Call Centre Agents Kingsley Bolton & Martin Weisser City University of Hong Kong

Outline Project Background Data Preparation Data Analysis Preliminary Results The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents1

Project Background initial research carried out by Bolton on High-level Proficiency in Second-language Use research programme at Stockholm University – interviews with call centre managers, trainers, & agents (CSAs) – collection of around 1,400 call centre dialogues current research: – re-transcription & -organisation of dialogue data – enriching of data on the levels of phonology syntax/grammar semantico-pragmatic pragmatics The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents2

Data Preparation (1) automatic conversion of original transcriptions – extraction to plain text documents – conversion to simple DART XML format manual pre-editing by student helpers – correction of conversion errors – improvement of transcription consistency, e.g. punctuation, etc. – addition of pause measurements – addition of phonological/grammatical observations The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents3

Data Preparation (2) – Original XML Format The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents4

Data Analysis (1) automatic annotation in DART (Dialogue Annotation & Research Tool) ⇒ 16,432 units/86 dialogues annotation levels included – syntactic c-units: address, decl, dm, yes, no, imp, q- wh, q-yn, frag – (surface-)polarity – semantics (topics) – semantico-pragmatics (modes) – pragmatics (speech acts) The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents5

Data Analysis (2) – Automatic Annotation Results The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents6

Data Analysis (3) extraction of CSR-related information – syntax–speech-act parings for interaction strategy analysis – n-grams (1-8 words) for analysis of formulaic patterns – grammatical feature observations for identifying ‘non-native’ features – phonological feature observations for identifying ‘non-native’ features The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents7

Preliminary Results – Phonology (1) pronoun reduction (37): e.g. may i have your first and last name please elision: – final fricatives, e.g. this might probably be familiar to yourself; and then you have to less 5 dollars and 99 cents for the home protection plan because this is free for 18 months – final plosives (24): that's right; but you will need to talk to our technical department; you need to call us the 5th of A... the fifth of July so we can remove it from your account ‘eng-dropping’ (5), e.g. what type of shows or programs do you enjoy watching The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents8

Preliminary Results – Phonology (2) devoicing: – final fricatives (8): let me just advise you that …; just give me one minute please; there was a refund submitted dental fricative replacement: you can also make a debit or credit card payment through unaspirated initial plosives: have you returned the equipment to us The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents9

Preliminary Results – Phonology (3) epenthetic vowels: – shwas (69), e.g. as what ə you check ə; you're eligible to get one plan from Earthlink ə – unreduced past tense morphemes: e.g. what's the last bill paid please contrastive ‘stress’ /strong forms (27): – whole words, e.g. because you just tell them that we will not be charging anything to them since you are the account holder; is there anybody there with you who can speak English – individual syllables: and i'm calling from Satellite TV Provider; there's no commitment here so you need not sign any contract; as soon as we receive the uh rebate form that i advised you to download (uptalk, rather than stress?) The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents10

Preliminary Results – Grammar (1) plurals – unmarked (28) – incorrectly marked (2), e.g. there is a 6 dollars leasing fee monthly – unidiomatic (1): with regards to the breakfast auxiliary use – missing (3), e.g. and we will Ø giving you a 5 dollar discount for uh 14 months – double (1): and uh that's will be your partial charge from today up to the 4th of May The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents11

Preliminary Results – Grammar (2) prepositions – added, e.g. exit out from that screen – unidiomatic: e.g. the promotion that we you can also take advantage with; and this will allow us to replace your single tuner recordable receiver to; i can assist you to that; how long have you been staying with this address; the reason why we're calling you today is uh to tell you today about this great offer wherein we can provide you free equipment, free installation, and a special programming discount (22) – missing: there are things that we can we can take care of over the phone ‘quantification’ – non-count → count, e.g. you already provided those information online; however you will need to replace one of your old equipment ə – incorrect comparison adverb: that will be 10 dollars more of what you're paying right now The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents12

Preliminary Results – Grammar (3) determiner (non-)use – missing, e.g. can also be caused by a damaged cable; do you have an address question ‘inversion/embedding’, e.g. do you know how much is the John Brown University rate so i could check here on my system The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents13

Preliminary Results – Formulaic Expressions in case ⇒ – if that will be the case – if in case this ⇒ that one, e.g. can you spell that one for me; let me just verify that one for you non-contractions (192), e.g. i would like; i will; that is, etc. The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents14

Interaction Analysis (1) – (Im)Politeness abundance of terms of address 893 (9.435%): – mainly deferential (Sir, Madam) – frequent unusual placement (‘syntax-breaking’), e.g. but i do apologize │ Sir│if you had not been provided the rebate form; you do not have the High Definition uhm eh capability at this time│Sir │with the receiver that you have lack of (polite) indirectness – relatively high number of imperatives (~5%) – indirect imperatives, e.g. and i want you to tell me if you see Main Menu on your screen The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents15

Interaction Analysis (2) – (Non-)Initiative low number of requests for directives: only.28%, e.g. for which journey do you wish to purchase a ticket; would you like smoking or non smoking (examples from Trainline corpus) mainly responding discourse markers (DMs) – acknowledging DMs 829 (8.759%) vs. initiating DMs 601 (6.35%) – agreeing DMs 66 (0.697%) The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents16

Questions? The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents17

References Bolton, K. (2010). ‘Thank you for calling’: Asian Englishes and ‘native- like’ performance in Asian call centres. In A. Kirkpatrick (Ed.). The Routledge handbook of world Englishes (pp ). London: Routledge. Friginal, E. (2009). The language of outsourced call centers: A corpus- based study of cross-cultural interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lockwood, J., Forey, G., & Price, H. (2008). English in the Philippine call centers and BPO operations: Issues, opportunities and research. In M. L. S. Bautista & K. Bolton (Eds.), Philippine English: Linguistic and literary perspectives (pp ). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Weisser, M. (2010). Annotating dialogue corpora semi-automatically: A corpus-linguistic approach to Pragmatics. unpublished Habilitation, University of Bayreuth. Weisser, M. (2011). DART – the Dialogue Annotation and Research Tool. Submitted to the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. The English of Pilippine Call Centre Agents18