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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 6; November 2000

Ideas from the Corpora


Making exercises out of Corpus Discoveries

Mario Rinvolucri

A very simple exercise that I learn from Simon Marshall is to take a normal course-book dialogue and have the students turn it into something nearer natural, spoken language. You simply ask them to cut out as many words as they can and to contract as much as they can:

eg:

Course-book dialogue Spoken Language version
When do you think you'll be ready When'll you be ready?
I 'll be ready in about ten minutes 'bout ten minutes
Ok then, I'll go and wait in the car k, 'll wait in the car.
I really won't be long, Mary. Won't be long

The is work that students tend to like and find relatively easy. The resultant dialogue is normally much closer to the way we actually speak than the stuff you find in most course-books. It is much closer to the elliptical patterns than corpus linguists Ron Carter and Mike McCarthy have found are typical of their spoken corpus material. In fact to describe these "short" forms as elliptical is to regard the written language as the standard form and the spoken language as an odd variant of it. This is clearly nonsense, as the spoken is the primary manifestation of language. We need as to be able to say that

    "t'es la?" is the standard form and that "est-ce-qu tu es la?" is the stretched-limousine, written version of the same idea.
It goes without saying that my goofy French teachers never taught me the short one- they made me sweat to learn the hard, written one. It was only when I married a native speaker of French that I heard and tardily learnt the short one, the easy one! They were daft, my teachers*, but then they had never read Carter and McCarthy.
Have you?

* this sentence is a typical oral grammar sentence: first you get the comment and the topic follows it : " my teachers".. The Carter and McCarthy research shows this construction to be very frequent in oral , UK, English.



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