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
The researcher in this study makes various recommendations for instruc-
tion.
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The recommendations include the following:
■
That ESL textbooks not simply offer learners lists of decontextualized
grammatical structures as in drills and unnatural dialogs, but rather
include background information on appropriateness when presenting
these grammatical structures, paying attention, as much as possible, 
to register differences and speaker–listener relationships (e.g.,
boss–employee, teacher–student, between classmates or friends).
■
That teachers provide classroom tasks based as much as possible on
naturally occurring conversations.
■
That teachers raise learners’ awareness of the possible impact of a
certain pragmalinguistic choice in delivering a given speech act. For
example, in making a suggestion, the use of the form “Why don’t you
. . . ?” (as opposed to “How about . . . ?” or “You might want to . . .”)
leaves the listener with few options and so may threaten the listener’s
face.
Effective use of authentic language material by teachers therefore calls
for getting learners to notice how speech acts are actually realized across
multiple turns in interactive negotiations, involving overlaps and frequent
turn-taking. Some corpus linguists prefer an exploratory student-guided
approach to instruction, for example, the instructional sequence of 
“illustration–interaction–induction,” where learners first examine language
data (illustration), discuss the data (discussion), and generate rules that 
will be further refined. Advocates of this approach state that a traditional
teacher-fronted approach (“presentation–practice–production”) may be a
less appropriate option.
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The discovery-based approach recommended 
here is compatible with the awareness-raising approach often used for the
teaching of L2 pragmatics. Learners who struggle to negotiate their meaning
may then realize just how authentic that process actually is in interactive
discourse, even among fluent speakers of the target language.
Discussion
This chapter has described what CA is and has illustrated how it can be
applied both to learning about discursive pragmatics and to teaching L2
pragmatics. Descriptions of sample instructional activities have also been
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Jiang (2006: 49–51).
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Carter and McCarthy (1995: 155, 2004); McEnery et al. (2006).

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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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offered for how to apply these insights to discourse-focused instruction. We
then considered ways that language corpora could be used in pragmatics
instruction as well. We noted benefits and challenges facing teachers and
curriculum writers who would like to use corpus data in the teaching of
pragmatics. It is our intention that this chapter will encourage teachers 
to explore ways to utilize authentic language data through conversation
analysis and language corpora in their teaching.
Activity 9.1, below, provides hands-on opportunity to examine the 
features of spoken and written discourse and to develop instructional tasks
or activities based on authentic language data.
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Reported in Jiang (2006).
Activity 9.1 Designing instructional material using a
language corpus
Objectives
1
You will be able to compare characteristics of spoken and written discourse and
identify relevant features to teach for a speaking class.
2
You will be able to develop a pragmatics/discourse-focused task or activity by
obtaining authentic language samples from an electronic corpus, and by using the
research-based information (“Structures used in spoken and written suggestions”)
provided below.
Suggested time:
1 hour.
Materials:
■
Information: “Suggestions in American English”;
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■
internet access to the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) for
each group.
Directions
1 As a whole group, study the research-based information below, “Suggestions in
American English”. It has been found that the frequency of these structures is
often not reflected in commercially available textbooks.
2 Form into groups of about three participants.
3 On a computer, access MICASE at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/. As
indicated in this chapter, this is an online corpus of spoken academic discourse

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