The applied aim of this ARC project is to reinforce the link between theory and practice in FLL research both by taking classroom practice into account in research and by actually integrating research findings in teaching practice. The focus will be on phraseology in English for General Purposes (EGP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP)

The pedagogical project will be developed along four core research lines:

1. Making the haphazardness of language explicit in language courses, textbooks and writing books
2. Providing relevant material for learners
3. Validating the pedagogical significance of research findings
4. Popularising new teaching methods

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LINE 1: MAKING THE HAPHAZARDNESS OF LANGUAGE EXPLICIT IN LANGUAGE COURSES, TEXTBOOKS AND WRITING BOOKS

Howarth’s comparative analysis of native and non-native academic writing (1998) draws conclusions about the necessity of prefabs in language learning (especially writing), and the difficulties of teaching something that is so poorly understood. Schmitt (2000) also discusses what is known (and not known) about how the brain recognizes and retains lexemes and adds that it is only very late in our learning that we develop intuitions about the word's frequency, register constraints, and collocational behavior, simply because these features require a large number of examples to determine the appropriate values. The results of corpus linguistics studies will provide these large numbers of examples and will be exploited to present, illustrate and somehow formalize the prefabricated aspects and highly conventional forms of language use. Insights into frequency patterns will be exploited to present useful and recurrent word combinations to the learners. The collection and innovative annotation of an entirely new type of corpus (corpus of textbook material) will enable us to assess the exact place given to phraseology in textbooks. By applying corpus analysis methods to the corpus, we will provide evidence-based state-of-art treatment of phraseology, mainly in EGP.

A review of existing EGP and EAP resources (including phraseological aspects), will be carried out. We will take stock of current practice and, when necessary, provide innovative ways of presenting phraseological aspects of FLL.

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LINE 2 : PROVIDING RELEVANT MATERIAL FOR LEARNERS

Teaching (and learning) material should not exclusively be made of textbooks. We are planning to integrate the preliminary research results produced by our colleagues in various types of teaching and learning aids. We will implement the results obtained from research carried out on high frequency verbs, recurrent word combinations, phraseological errors by :

• promoting and facilitating online access to L1 corpus data

• suggesting guidelines for adapting existing textbooks and writing books (model units will be provided)

• suggesting guidelines for adapting existing dictionaries or potential add-ons to dictionaries (model dictionary entries will be provided)

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LINE 3 : VALIDATING THE PEDAGOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH FINDINGS

Here again, various aspects of corpus research will enable us to address and assess the pedagogical relevance of research findings. The CIA methodology, combined with interlanguage error analysis, will provide new avenues for the selection and organisation of teaching material in the curriculum. The results of experimental studies will provide further refinement of the issue.

The conclusion of Rowe Krapels’s excellent overview of second language writing process research (1990) will also be taken into account. We will focus on :

• promoting actual L2 rather than using awareness of L1 writing process research as a guiding force (Krapels’s findings are confirmed by Johns (1990) who also states that most of ESL composition research and teaching, which developed and matured in the 1980s, was drawn from research in L1 composition)

• promoting the value of large empirical and descriptive studies: all too often studies rely on case study as a research methodology, resulting in a small number of subjects (often 4 to 6)

• promoting a joint product and process approach to LAP teaching: a lack of competence in writing results from a lack of both composing competence and linguistic competence. Cross-linguistic influence is indeed not limited to the lexical, grammatical or syntactic levels. One’s first language writing process has also been shown to transfer to or be reflected in one’s L2 language writing process.

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LINE 4 : POPULARISING NEW TEACHING METHODS

Promotion of new corpus-based resources and methods will be achieved through:

• extensive publications

• the organisation of multi-disciplinary conferences

• the organisation of workshops for teachers (as suggested by Mukherjee, 2002) devoted to:

  - ‘teaching about corpora’ (providing basic notions on corpus design, major corpora, authenticity, representativeness, etc.)
  - ‘exploiting corpora to teach language’ (dealing with idiomaticity, native-like selection, spoken vs written language, genre differences, etc.)
  - ‘teaching to exploit corpora’ (focusing on learner autonomy, data-driven learning, etc.)

• the organisation of joint pre- and in-service teacher training sessions and hopefully the creation of a permanent and UCL-based centre for foreign language research and teaching.
  

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