Introducing Language in Use: a Coursebook
Activities
Grammar — From word to text
- A student brought this recipe to class one day.
Mars Bar Trifle
Ingredients:
- Chocolate Swiss Roll
- Tia Maria
- 2–3 Mars Bars
- Angel Delight (Butterscotch flavour)
- Cream (whipping)
Slice the swiss roll into a bowl.
Chop the Mars Bars and lay on top.
Soak overnight in Tia Maria.
Mix the Angel Delight and put on top.
Top with whipped cream.
- Use the Mars Bar Trifle recipe to identify word classes, phrases and groups, clauses and clause structure, and text structure.
- Find two more recipes and see if they follow the same pattern. Find other instruction texts/manuals, and see how far they follow the same patterns.
- Find multiple examples of another genre of text (e.g. postcards written to family/friends, official letters (e.g. how to pay your utility bills or the implications of non-payment), e-mails, text messages, academic essays) and, as a result of analysing the text, determine what the identifying features of each genre of text are.
- What is the longest NP in English that you can find that still makes sense? If you have read Unit 7 of Introducing Language in Use you should be able to analyse the NPs that you have found.
- You should be able to analyse these to show the structure:
- the real Advent tea with the flavour of Christmas
- Chinese Sencha tea with fine herbs and a fantastic winter aroma
- Vanilla tea with real Bourbon vanilla and a great vanilla essence
The names of these teas came from the menu for afternoon tea at Reid’s Hotel, Funchal, Madeira.
- These NPs are ambiguous. By analysing the structure you should be able to show whether each is an example of lexical ambiguity or of syntactic ambiguity.
- the new Victoria Inn bar menu
- Fulford flats blaze
- York river body name
- Why is this notice (spotted in a shop window in Gillygate*, York) ambiguous? A syntactic analysis should provide the answer.
OWN ONE
* Look at the language change page on this site.