Summary Details

Query:	corpus studies, elementary and high school texts
Author:	Stacia Levy
Submitter Email:	click here to access email
Linguistic LingField(s):	Applied Linguistics
Summary:	Greetings. About a month ago I posted to the list 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.

LL Issue:	15.1259
Date Posted:	16-Apr-2004
Original Query:	Read original query
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