1st Edition
Increasing Naturalness in the Language Learning Classroom Towards a Corpus-Informed Principled Communicative Approach
This volume links corpus research to classroom practice and critically assesses how the integration of a corpus-informed methodology affects pedagogical choices, teaching materials and classroom activities. Focusing on the language classroom, and drawing on examples from English, French, German and Hungarian, this book demonstrates that such methodology is applicable to languages with very different properties.
Drawing on both larger, general and smaller, more specialised corpora, including both spoken and written data, this volume:
• presents the key features of natural language according to corpus linguistics, establishing principles and methods to observe and practice natural-sounding language use;
• suggests the characteristics of a coherent, corpus-informed methodology and contrasts this with existing methodologies;
• explores ways in which this methodology can enhance language learning and discusses the types of activities that are most effective;
• explains how this methodology be integrated into teacher training.
Bridging the long-persisting gap between corpus-informed language teaching research and applied classroom reform, this book is key reading for researchers in applied linguistics and language pedagogy, as well as teacher trainers and practitioners.
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1
Setting the framework: From the traditional Communicative Approach to the Principled Communicative Approach
PART 1
Key findings from corpus linguistics in the service of the Principled Communicative Approach
Chapter 2
What is naturalness
Chapter 3
General features of naturalness (1): Textual-situational well-formedness
Chapter 4
General features of naturalness (2): Frequency of occurrence and multi-word units
Chapter 5
General features of naturalness (3): Patterns
Chapter 6
General features of naturalness (4): Linguistic creativity
Chapter 7
Specific features of naturalness (1): Key elements of written communication
Chapter 8
Specific features of naturalness (2): Key elements of spoken communication
PART 2
Enhancing the toolkit of the Principled Communicative Approach: Corpus-informed teaching materials, pedagogical corpora, activities and model texts
Chapter 9
Corpus-informed textbooks
Chapter 10
Pedagogical corpora (1): Written corpora
Chapter 11
Pedagogical corpora (2): Spoken corpora
Chapter 12
Observing and practising natural language use in pedagogical corpora
Chapter 13
Combining corpus tools and representative model texts
Chapter 14
Putting it all together: Towards a corpus-informed Principled Communicative Approach
Index
Biography
Szilvia Szita is Head of Department of Hungarian Studies at Strasbourg University, France, and the President of KorSzak / CorPed, an international research group on corpus linguistics and pedagogical practices at the University of Pécs, Hungary.
