Friday 27 January 2012
Words that replace speech marks
by Ken Paterson
A few years ago, I noticed that one of the students in my class would often add little remarks that her friends or family had made into her conversation. She would never turn them into indirect speech by making grammatical changes, but would instead prefix the quotations with the word ‘look’. In other words, she [...]
Read more »Friday 6 January 2012
Exaggerated language
by Ken Paterson
Part of the research for ‘A Handbook of Spoken Grammar’ (follow the links ‘Titles’ and ‘Language Practice’ on the DELTA website for details) involved going through pages of the language that we had reformulated for our students on speakings skills courses, highlighting recurring features. One thing that would come up now and again were examples [...]
Read more »Wednesday 21 December 2011
The vague use of ‘thing’
by Ken Paterson
In writing ‘A Handbook of Spoken Grammar’ (follow the links ‘Titles’ and ‘Language Practice’ on the DELTA website for details), we wanted to include some key aspects of ‘vague language’ (e.g. ‘sort of’, ‘a couple of’, ‘a bit of’ etc.). The word ‘thing’ (and ‘thingy’, ‘thingamajig’, and ‘thingummy’) has a number of uses: - There [...]
Read more »Friday 9 December 2011
Lexical bundles
by Ken Paterson
When we were deciding on the contents for ‘A Handbook of Spoken Grammar’ (follow the links ‘Titles’ and ‘Language Practice’ on the DELTA website for details) we were fairly sure we wanted to include some spoken English ‘lexical bundles’. These are strings of words that corpus research has shown are particularly frequent in conversation. See the [...]
Read more »Thursday 1 December 2011
Teaching spoken grammar
by Ken Paterson
Hello, my name is Ken Paterson and I’m a co-author (with Caroline Caygill and Rebecca Sewell) on Delta’s forthcoming title ‘A Handbook of Spoken Grammar’ (follow the links ‘Titles’ and ‘Language Practice’ on the DELTA website for details). In the book we take 20 items of non-traditional grammar, explain how they work, and offer practice [...]
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