A01 cohe4573 01 se fm. Qxd

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T H E N U T S A N D B O L T S O F P R A G M A T I C S I N S T R U C T I O N
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The TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus (T2K-SWAL
Corpus); Biber et al. (2002).
recorded and transcribed at the University of Michigan. Familiarize yourselves with
the format of the corpus.
4 If any group members are teaching a speaking class, you could use one of their
classroom contexts. If no one teaches speaking, think of an imaginary speaking
class and determine the audience.
5 Drawing from MICASE, you are to search for words and phrases that may be used
in “suggestions” (i.e., advice, proposals, and recommendations). Note that there 
is a grey area where suggestions border on requests or commands.
6 Since a corpus is not usually designed so as to provide instances of a given speech
act, you will need to search by words and phrases that might be found in that
speech act. See the information, “Suggestions in American English” below for
specific words and phrases reported in a research study based on a spoken and
written academic corpus.
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7 Start by searching MICASE for “have to,” “let’s,” “need,” and “should.” You could
also search for “why don’t you” and “ought to.” Finally, consider other words to
include in a search, such as the word “suggestion” itself. If you include all the
possible MICASE attributes in your search, you may find yourself with more than
2,000 hits. On the other hand, if you limit your search to certain attributes (e.g.,
the status and role of the speaker, the native language of the speaker, the type of
session that the sample was drawn from, etc.), you may find you get limited or no
hits, depending on the attributes you choose.
8 While you are going through the language samples looking for instances of actual
suggestions, also keep in mind that MICASE is a corpus exclusively of spoken
English. Discuss ways in which this might make the data different from those in
the study based on a corpus of both spoken and written language.
9 Compile a set of expressions based on the spoken corpus of American English 
that you could use for a lesson on making suggestions in a speaking class. You
may wish to consider register differences between status-equal talks (as in study
groups) and status-differential talks (as in office hours). You could, for example,
compile language samples that your students could use in talking to their
professors during office hours on the one hand, and in talking to friends in study
groups on the other.
10 Report back to the whole class about the task or short activity that you
developed.

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D I S C O U R S E , I N T E R A C T I O N , A N D L A N G U A G E C O R P O R A
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Jiang (2006).
Discussion/wrap-up
Discuss what might have been challenging in constructing the classroom task/activity
and the strategies that you would recommend for dealing with the challenges that
arise. For example, how would you provide contextual information about the original
data? Would you modify the authentic data transcribed using a CA convention? If so,
how would it be done?
Information: Suggestions in American English
The information below is from the findings of a corpus-based study on spoken and
written suggestions in American English.
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1
The most frequently used structure for making suggestions in this corpus 
was Let’s. . . . This structure can suggest a joint action or in fact be a polite
command.
2
The most commonly used modals were have to and need in either spoken or
written discourse. Should is a popular modal in textbooks but was much less
frequently used in authentic data. The formality of these modals differs and
they imply different degrees of speaker authority and urgency of the
message.
3
The (phrasal) modals, ought to and must were hardly used for suggestions.
4
Hedging expressions (e.g., just, probably, really, and only) were fairly
frequently used along with modals.
5
The formulaic Wh- questions (e.g., How about/What about . . . ? and Why
not / Why don’t you . . . ?) were not as frequently used as their treatment 
in textbooks would make it seem.
6
Why don’t you . . . ? was much more frequently used by non-native speakers
than native speakers. This structure may appear less polite, as it implies the
speaker’s knowledge or judgment is superior to the listener’s.

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