Learning a Genre as opposed to learning French. What can Corpus Linguistics tell us? In W. Geertz, & L. Calvi (eds.), CALL, Culture and the Language Curriculum, 124-137. Berlin : Springer Verlag. ISBN 3-5407-6192-6. (PDF) CALL and Cultural Sudies in the Language Curriculum

Christopher Gledhill (1)

1 CLILLAC-ARP (EA_3967) - Centre de Linguistique Inter-langues, de Lexicologie, de Linguistique Anglaise et de Corpus

The starting point for this paper is the realization that even the most basic grammatical items cause stylistic problems for advanced learners of French. At undergraduate level in the UK, learners of French are expected to produce a wider variety of genres and registers than they are prepared for by their entry qualifications. This causes particular difficulties which on the surface have little to do with formal knowledge of grammar and tend to be put down to ‘style’. We argue here that corpus analysis and an empirical perspective to language development can bridge this gap and also unlock much wider issues, in particular the ideological perspective that underpins the language of a particular discourse community. While regular patterns that are not commonly included in expository writing syllabuses may prove to be useful ‘set phrases’ for the student in a particular assessment, we emphasise the more general role of variation in phraseology and possible exploitation of genre-specific idioms in the language syllabus. Secondly, the grammatical features of expository writing in French are different to those of the general language, and reveal broader issues of the extent to which French education and the media engender and reproduce their own discourse structures.

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Linguistics

Christopher Gledhill. Learning a Genre as opposed to learning French. What can Corpus Linguistics tell us? In W. Geertz, & L. Calvi (eds.), CALL, Culture and the Language Curriculum, 124-137. Berlin : Springer Verlag. ISBN 3-5407-6192-6. (PDF) CALL and Cultural Sudies in the Language Curriculum. W. Geertz, & L. Calvi CALL, Culture and the Language Curriculum, Springer Verlag, pp.124-137, 1998, 3-5407-6192-6. ⟨hal-03239949⟩