Date: 21-Jul-2006
From: Britta Schneider <Britta.Schneiderulc.jyu.fi>
Subject: Progressives, Patterns, Pedagogy
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2939.html
AUTHOR: Römer, UteTITLE: Progressives, Patterns, PedagogySUBTITLE: A corpus-driven approach to English progressive forms, functions,contexts and didacticsSERIES: Studies in Corpus Linguistics 18YEAR: 2005PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
Britta Schneider, The Language Centre of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Progressives, Patterns, Pedagogy, by Ute Römer, is the first corpus-drivencomparative study of progressives occurring in the speech of native Englishspeakers and textbooks used for the instruction of English as a ForeignLanguage (EFL) in German secondary schools. The study is based on carefulanalysis of more than 10,000 progressive forms of spoken British Englishtaken from the British National Corpus and The Bank of English, and from asmall corpus, compiled by the author herself, of progressive formsoccurring in German EFL textbooks.
The purpose of the book, is (i) to highlight differences between actuallanguage use and textbook language with regard to the distribution ofprogressives, their preferred contexts, functions, and typicallexical-grammatical patterns, and (ii) to elaborate a concept for teachingprogressives while accounting for the three main criteria in languagepedagogy: typicality, authenticity, and communicative utility.
SYNOPSIS
The book is organized in eight chapters. The first chapter, which is alsothe shortest one, introduces the reader to the phenomena of progressives inthe English language and explains why, despite a plethora of theoreticalstudies and descriptions of progressives in grammar and reference books,this study is necessary: Most of those accounts, Römer argues, lacklarge-scale empirical studies to adequately describe the distribution andfunctions of different progressive forms. Also, existing theories on theuse of progressives have been based on a collection of invented samplesrather than authentic language use. Römer's empirical study of progressivesin contemporary spoken British English will thus address the followingquestions: “How are progressives actually used in spoken English? How aretheir different forms distributed? In which lexical or syntactical contextsdo they usually occur? What do different progressive forms typicallyexpress? and Is it possible to identify a “generally valid” behavior ofprogressives or do different verbs show largely dissimilar context andfunction patterns?” (p. 2).
In chapter two, Römer presents the three main theoretical conceptsunderlying her research. First, she introduces and defines corpus-drivenlinguistics (CDL) as opposed to corpus-based linguistics (CBL) and, basedon recent corpus linguistic research (Mindt 1991, Hunston & Francis 2000),argues that CDL may be more than just a methodology to empiricallyinvestigate a language and that corpus-driven language analysis may in factlead to a rethinking of traditional linguistic categories such as thetraditional division of grammar and lexis. Second, the author points at theimportant role of context to her study of progressives, based on the roleof context in linguistics first elaborated by Firth (1957) and lateroperationalized by Sinclair's innovative corpus linguistic research (1991).Firth's observations of contexts of speech sequences are central to today'scorpus-driven analysis of language whereas the concepts of collocation andcolligation have been extended by Sinclair with the concepts of semanticpreference and semantic prosody. The third theoretical cornerstone ofRömer's study is pedagogical grammar (PG) and its suggested benefits in theforeign language classroom. Römer's approach to the study of progressivesthus aims to be a holistic one, integrating the empirical analysis ofcorpus data, observation of patterns and contexts and the teachability ofEnglish progressives in a communicative-oriented foreign language classroom.According to the author, large corpora of authentic texts can not only leadto observations about “how language really works but also how it best oughtto be taught” (p. 11).
The third chapter concludes the theoretical part of the book. Aftermentioning some terminological and definitional problems with reference tothe progressive aspect, Römer first provides the reader with an overview oftwo theoretical studies (Comrie 1976, and Williams 2002) investigatingfrequencies and functions of the progressive form in English. The chapterthen moves on to give a detailed account on how linguistic and empiricalgrammar dealt with the progressive form. Comparing four grammars withrespect to their degree of theoreticalness and empiricalness, Römer seemsto favor Mindt's Empirical Grammar of the English Verb System (2000)because it follows a corpus-driven approach of analysis while focusing onthe functional analysis of the progressive aspect. The third chapter closeswith a discussion of selected empirical studies on the progressive byfocusing on overall frequencies of occurrence, functions, and context ofthe progressive form. Römer observes that all studies reviewed follow avery individual approach and hence provide very different and largelyincomparable results.
Chapter four is the core of the empirical analysis of two subcorpora: theBNC_spoken (which makes up approx. 10 % of the BNC, a collection of over4,000 British English text samples, with an overall size of over100,000,000 words) and the BoE_spoken (part of The Bank of English, amonitor corpus whose size is periodically increased, with an overall sizeof 418,449,873 words at the time of analysis). After the selection of thecorpora, the author selected 100 verbs based on their frequency ofoccurrence in spoken British English for further analysis. In order toaccess a large number of progressives in context from the spoken part ofthe two corpora, the author used WordSmith Tools and Lookup. After saving amaximum of 100 concordances lines in KWIC format for each verb form, allconcordances had to be filtered to delete all instances in which the verbform was not part of a progressive construction. For easier access, allremaining concordance lines were then entered in a Microsoft Accessdatabase. In a next step, the corpus data had to be encoded in order toaccount for a) context features: tense form distribution, TO BEcontraction, subject, preposition, object, time adverbial, place adverbial,other adverbial, negation, question, if-clause, relative clause, and b)central function features of the progressive such as time reference,repeatedness, and continuousness, plus additional function features likegeneral validity, politeness/softening, emphasis/attitude, shock/disbelief,gradual change/development, habituality, and framing.
In the meticulous analysis of the lexical-grammatical contexts ofsignificant progressive collocations in spoken British English thefollowing observations could be made:
– the most frequent form in both corpora is the present progressive withequally large shares between 're/are V-ing and 's V-ing and 'm V-ing,followed by past progressives– short forms of the auxiliary TO BE plus V-ing, e.g. 're selling are morecommon in both corpora but are on the whole quite comparable– personal pronouns (I, you, he/she/it, we, they) most typically combine assubjects with the progressive, followed by noun phrases introduced by the,people, and names of people– progressives occur mostly in affirmative contexts– one third of all progressive tokens are directly followed by apreposition; the most frequent prepositions are up, about, with, out, for,in, to and on.– progressives are frequently modified by adverbials of time and place,e.g. just, now, when, at and still
The difficult detection, description and analysis of progressives in spokenBritish English and their functions led to the following observations:
– the majority of progressive forms in BNC_spoken and BoE_brspok refer toactions or events in the present; while past and future references are alsoquite high but roughly the same in numbers.– two basic functions of progressive forms could be identified: the largemajority of corpus examples refer to a) continuous, about 35 percent to b)repeated and about 18 per cent of the progressives to c) non-continuousactions or events. This result is quite remarkable in the light of earlieraccounts of progressive functions which almost exclusively refer to thecontinuous as the central characteristic of the progressive. Progressivestherefore are found to express continuousness, repeatedness or a sense ofsoftening or downtoning.– seven additional function features were identified, listed in order offrequency: “general validity”, “politeness or softening”, “emphasis orattitude”, “gradual change and development”, “old and new habits”,“framing”, and “shock or disbelief”. While the two functions features“general validity” and “framing” occurred across verb types, the other fivefunction features are strongly lexically determined.
The last parts of chapter four provide an in-depth analysis of therelationship between progressives and individual verb forms, aimed atestablishing the connection between a grammatical construction and itslexical item (lexicogrammar). Pursuing the question of “How lexical isgrammar?”, Römer is able to determine a number of typical co-occurrencepatterns of particular verbs and particular context and function features.The analysis shows some significant variation in the distribution of 9,468progressive tokens among preselected 99 verb types (cf. p. 114) .Particularly frequent are progressives such as wondering, happening,hoping, expecting, suggesting, and going. The author classifies theseprogressive-favoring verbs into two groups: mental activity verbs (wonder,hope, expect) and communication verbs (talk, tell, say, ask). Also stativeverbs like listen, look, stay, and cost seem to favor progressive formswhereas dynamic verbs, such as follow or sort, do not.
The further study of co-occurrence of particular verb forms and particularcontext and function features of the pre-selected and analyzed 99 verbforms lead to many interesting observations and the author's conclusionthat it is impossible to treat the progressive as an exclusivelygrammatical construction, independent of lexis.
In chapter five, the second part of Römer's empirical analysis ofprogressive forms and their functions and context, the author investigatesthe treatment of progressives in German English as a Foreign Language(GEFL) textbooks and learner's grammars that are commonly used in Germansecondary schools. The use of the progressive is considered as beingdifficult in the acquisition process of German speaking learners sincethere is no direct translation or grammaticalized equivalent in the Germanlanguage. Two textbook series of two leading publishing companies on theGerman EFL market as well as two learner's grammars and grammar booklets(Grammatische Beihefte), which accompany the textbooks, were selected foranalysis: Learning English Green Line New (GLN), published by Klett Verlag;English G 2000A (EG 2000), published by Cornelsen Verlag; Learning EnglishGrundgrammatik by Klett Verlag; and Cornelsen English Grammar, by CornelsenVerlag.
The German English as a Foreign Language Textbook Corpus (henceforth GEFLTC), consisting of two subcorpora English G 2000 and Green Line New,contains 108,424 tokens or words in 494 text files. Out of the 100high-frequency English verbs used in the investigation of progressives inspoken British English, only 33 and 37 respectively were found in the twosubcorpora. Following the analytical model presented in chapter four, theGEFL TC corpus data is then analyzed in respect to context and functionfeatures. While the two textbook series treat context and function featuresof the progressive somewhat differently, the sequence of introduction ofprogressive tense forms is the same in both textbooks and follows the orderof frequency of occurrence in spoken British English. However, the range ofprogressive functions presented in the two textbooks are rather restrictedand monolithic, with the expression of continuousness paired withnon-repeatedness being the central use of the progressive form. Römerestablishes therefore that repeatedness, the second central functionfeature in real spoken English progressives, is not sufficiently treated inthe textbooks. Of the total of seven additional functions identified in thecorpora of spoken British English, only two are discussed in the learningmaterials (“framing” which is far less common in the corpus evidence, and“emphasis/attitude”, restricted to collocations with the adverb always).Other instances of the very common and frequently occurring “emphatic”function of the progressive are not covered. Another aspect that is,according to Römer, missing in the textbook treatment of the progressive isa more exhaustive lexical-grammatical perspective on verbs that mostfrequently occur in progressive forms and functions.
Chapter six presents an evaluation of the progressive in “school” Englishthrough the lens of the earlier discussed corpus evidence. Similar toprevious analyses, the author looks first at context phenomena and languagepatterns like progressives and distribution of tenses, subjects, objects,prepositions, negations, adverbials before turning to function featuressuch as progressives and time reference, central functions among others.The central findings of this in-depth description of similarities anddifferences between real spoken British English and “school” English are inline with what, according to Römer, previous studies suggest when comparingsome central lexical-grammatical features in natural language corpora andlanguage teaching materials (for example, Tongini-Bonelli 2001 or Mauranen2004). In a list at the chapter's end, the author illustrates as many as 23rather significant pattern deviations with verbs and progressives on thecontext side, and 15 on the function side. Based on the results of herstudy, Römer concludes that the English taught in the German ELT classroomis not the same as the English used by native speakers.
Chapter seven seeks to bridge the gap between pedagogical descriptions ofthe English language for the foreign language classroom and languagereality by suggesting moderate changes to existing teaching material byincorporating corpus evidence on the most salient features of theprogressive in British spoken English. These changes would lead to lessprecious classroom time to be spent on not so common language patterns andrather unimportant meanings of language items. Römer, inspired by the worksof Sinclair, Francis, Hunston, Tognini-Bonelli, Leech and Mindt, proposesthe “development of a corpus-driven communicative didactic lexical grammarof progressives” (p. 287) following a progression from the presentprogressive, past progressive, present perfect progressive, and pastperfect progressive while observing the learner's individual learning path.The progression and sequencing of progressive forms, functions and contextshould be guided by the frequency of occurrence in the corpus data. As faras the presentation of the new learning material on progressives isconcerned, the author suggests to introduce the skill of concordancing tothe language classroom so that intermediate or advanced learners can workout the most typical patterns of progressive use for themselves. Asmentioned at the very beginning of her study, the pedagogical descriptionof the progressive has to take into account typicality, authenticity, andcommunicative utility.
In conclusion, chapter eight gives an outlook of what could be done inorder to facilitate future comparative research between natural languagecorpora and textbook corpora, for example, extending the now existing GEFLTC corpus with EFL textbooks from other non-English speaking countries.Römer also proposes more research on spoken EFL classroom discourse asinitiated by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975). Another component that theauthor would have liked to investigate is language learner output in formof learner EFL corpora. With respect to regional varieties of spokenEnglish, the author mentions the unavailability of appropriate spokencorpora. Last but not least, Römer points out that further research is alsoneeded on the teaching of progressives and other lexical-grammatical areasof spoken English from the perspective of Second Language Acquisition.
EVALUATION OF THE BOOK
With Progressives, Patterns, Pedagogy, Ute Römer has put forward a veryspecific and systematic comparison of the progressive occurring in naturalspoken language corpora and a German English as a Foreign Language corpus.The corpus-driven analysis of huge quantities of natural occurring languagedata and the compilation of a GEFL corpus is a very important step inbridging the gap between existing language teaching materials andcorpus-driven pedagogical language description of salient lexical-grammarpatterns of the target language. The study is therefore a highlysignificant contribution to the field of corpus-driven language teaching inthat it compares the functions and contexts of naturally occurringprogressive forms to the progressive taught in German English languageclasses. Besides the impressive data base, the merits of this unique studylie specifically in the detailed and systematic theoretical description anddiscussion of language patterning. It is also the author's explicitintention to make her research available to researchers from otherlinguistic disciplines and encourages them to contribute to and complementher GEFL TC corpus from very different branches of applied linguistics.Occupying a theory-neutral position in her way of doing linguistics, Römerfollows through from a strict corpus-driven linguistic angle, putting thecorpus first and approaching it without any fixed theoretical concepts.Although the wealth of data discussed in this book may appear to futurereaders a mercy and a curse at the same time, the author helps the readerin coping with the meticulous research by providing excellent summaries atthe end of each chapter and sub chapter.
On the first pages of chapter four, Römer addresses a central problem withregard to the validity of authentic native-speaker English as basis for acomparison with “school” or learner English. Although the author defendsher position to stick with native-speaker English as the language teachingnorm (p. 40), the growing acceptance of global or international English asEFL teaching norm cannot be denied. However, the author's clear preferencefor authentic native English as the target norm is greatly amended for byher call for more EFL learner language corpora.
To sum up, the greatest asset of this book is that the presented analysisof the English progressive lends itself for similar studies on otherlexicogrammar items, the results of which may then be used to rewriteexistent grammar-oriented pedagogical descriptions of language from alexical-grammatical perspective. In particular, lists of verbs (pp. 88-102)that frequently occur in a special lexical-grammatical context areimmensely valuable for language teachers and the development of languageteaching material and references. The author has indeed gone to greatlengths to present the wealth of data and interpretations in a holisticand, as far as language style is concerned, attractive way that hopefullymakes this research accessible to a wide research and teaching community.
REFERENCES
Comrie, B. (1976) Aspect. Cambridge: CUP.
Firth, J.R. (1957) Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951. London: OUP.
Hunston, S. & G. Francis (2000) Pattern Grammar. A Corpus-driven Approachto the Lexical Grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Mauranen, A. (2004) Spoken corpus for an ordinary learner. In J. McH.Sinclair (Ed.), How to Use Corpora in Language Teaching (pp. 89-105).Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Mindt, D. (2000) An Empirical Grammar of the English Verb System. Berlin:Cornelsen
Mindt, D. (1991) Syntactic evidence for semantic distinctions in English.In K. Aijmer & B. Altenberg (Eds.), English Corpus Linguistics: Studies inHonour of Jan Svartvik (pp. 182-1096). London: Longman
Sinclair, J. McH. (1991) Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: OUP.
Sinclair, J. McH & R. M. Coulthard (1975) Towards an Analysis of Discourse.The English Used by Teachers and Pupils. London: OUP.
Tongini-Bonelli, E. (2001) Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam: JohnBenjamins.
Willimans, C. 2002 Non-progressive and Progressive Aspect in English.Fasano: Schena Editore.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Britta Schneider holds a PhD in Foreign Language Teaching from MonashUniversity, Australia, and a MA degree in Romance Philology from theUniversity of Siegen, Germany. She is currently a Lecturer of English forAcademic Purposes (EAP) in the Language Centre at the University ofJyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests are in second/foreign languageacquisition, foreign language teaching and learning, as well as usinglanguage corpora in language teaching.
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