LINGUIST List 15.1259

Mon Apr 19 2004

Sum: Corpus Ling/Student Textbooks

Editor for this issue: Steve Moran <stevelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Stacia Levy, corpus studies, elementary and high school texts

Greetings. About a month ago I posted to the list (Linguist 15.786)
about my current research interest, corpus research of the academic
language of K-12 textbooks. The problem as I see it is often K-12
teachers are told to teach ''academic language'' without any specifics
on what that actually is. Ute Romer of University of Hanover kindly
responded by sending a couple of articles on corpus resarch being done
in Germany, comparing the language used in a small corpus of German
EFL texts and with the British National Corpus. Items studied were
''if clauses'' and present participle forms: their contexts, uses, and
forms. Discrepancies were found between ''school'' English and
authentic English. (A memorable example of an if-clause from an EFL
textbook: ''If you eat your hat, you'll be ill.'') Methods for
compiling a small corpus and pedagogical implications for improving
teaching materials were covered. Thank you, Ute.

Subject-Language: English; Code: ENG