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Exploiting a corpus of business letters from a phraseological, functional perspective*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2012

Lynne Flowerdew
Lynne Flowerdew
Affiliation:
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong, SAR (email: lclynne@ust.hk)
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Abstract

This paper illustrates how a freely available online corpus has been exploited in a module on teaching business letters covering the following four speech acts (functions) commonly found in business letters: invitations, requests, complaints and refusals. It is proposed that different strategies are required for teaching potentially non-face-threatening (invitations, requests) and face-threatening (complaints, refusals) speech acts.

The hands-on pedagogic activities follow the ‘guided inductive approach’ advocated by Johansson (2009) and draw on practices and strategies covered in the literature on using corpora in language learning and teaching, viz. the need for ‘pedagogic mediation’, and the ‘noticing’ hypothesis from second language acquisition studies.

Keywords

inductivepedagogic mediationnoticingpattern-huntingspeech actsfunctionsphraseology
Type
Research Article
Information
ReCALL , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , 27 April 2012 , pp. 152 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning 2012

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