Increasing Naturalness in the Language Learning Classroom

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.

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.

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