The Linguistic Toolkit for Teachers of English - Discovering the Value of Linguistics for Foreign Language Teaching

This coursebook demonstrates the relevance of linguistic expertise for the EFL classroom. It explores a wide range of topics (phonetics/phonology, lexis, corpus linguistics, text linguistics and the power of language) always keeping one central question in mind: Why should a future teacher of English know about this? With its highly accessible style and layout, a wealth of examples and exercises as well as a large range of additional innovative online materials this textbook sets out to convince its readers that they will be better teachers if they are good linguists.

In contrast to literary or cultural studies linguistics is not taught in the EFL classroom, yet, it plays a major role in any English language teaching degree. Given this discrepancy it does not come as a surprise that students sometimes ask: "I want to be a teacher! Why do I need all this?" The main goal of this textbook is to demonstrate the relevance of linguistic expertise for the EFL classroom. It explores a wide range of topics (phonetics/phonology, lexis, corpus linguistics, text linguistics and the power of language) with a clear focus on providing a convincing answer to the question above. With its highly accessible style and layout, a wealth of examples and exercises as well as a large range of additional innovative online materials this textbook sets out to convince its readers that they will be better teachers if they are good linguists.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

INTRODUCTION 1 "I just want to be a teacher" 2 A toolkit and what's in it 2.1 What tools are good for 2.2 The art of repairing 2.2.1 Errors and why they are a good thing 2.2.2 Interlanguage 2.2.3 What is an error SOUNDS 3 "What are you sinking about?" - sounds in isolation 3.1 The description of sounds 3.2 A comparison of English and German consonants 3.3 A comparison of English and German vowels 4 "France is bacon" - Sounds in speech 4.1 Phonemes, phones and allophones 4.2 When Alastor Moody has a mat eye - allophonic contrasts 4.3 "France is bacon" - sounds in speech 4.3.1 Assimilation 4.3.2 Weak forms 4.3.3 Linking WORDS AND BEYOND 5 Nodes and links - the mental lexicon 5.1 Webs of words, not lists 5.2 The mental lexicon - some basics 5.3 Stay connected - links in the mental lexicon 5.3.1 Defining features 5.3.2 Encyclopaedic relations 5.3.3 (Mostly) sense relations 5.3.4 Collocation and other relations in language use 5.4 What Taboo can teach us about teaching words 6 Think bi g! More than words 6.1 Why tea can be powerful ... and why it shouldn't 6.2 Lexical phrases 6.3 Patterns and their relevance for the classroom 6.4 Teaching patterns THE CORPUS IN THE CLASSROOM 7 The theory of practical corpus analysis 7.1 The corpus as a collection of authentic language 7.2 Words and their contexts 7.3 More than words - annotation provided in corpora 8 A more practical introduction to corpus analysis 8.1 Wild cards, regular expressions and corpus queries 8.2 Corpus queries - exploiting lemmatization and tagging 8.3 Corpus queries - collocations 8.4 Corpora in the classroom 8.4.1 Benefits and opportunities 8.4.2 Poblems and pitfalls TEXTS 9 What makes a text a (good) text 9.1 What makes a text a text - Standards of textuality 9.2 The relevance of text structure 9.2.1 Themes and rhemes 9.2.2 Rhetorical Structure Theory 10 Texts and the relevance of sentence structure 10.1 Principles of text processing 10.1.1 The Given-before-new Principle 10.1.2 The Principle of End -focus 10.1.3 The Principle of End-Weight 10.2 Helpful sentence structures 10.2.1 Non-canonical clause patterns 10.2.2 Secondary clause patterns 10.3 From text to good text - an example 11 Texts and the relevance of the situation 11.1 Spoken and written English 11.2 The interpersonal dimension - politeness THE POWER OF LANGUAGE 12 The recipient 12.1 Humans - the not so rational animals 12.2 Communication and the unpacking of information 12.2.1 Exploiting the Co-operative Principle 12.2.2 Background knowledge 12.2.3 Don't think of an elephant! 13 The producer 13.1 Packaging information 13.1.1 The right word at the right time 13.1.2 Beyond the word level 13.1.3 Of swarms and floods - the power of metaphor 13.1.4 Framing 13.1.5 (Faulty) logic and argumentation 13.2 Walking uphill