Corpus-based Teaching of Pragmatics

• Francisco Alonso Almeida ^[1] ; Elena Quintana Toledo ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

     Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

     Gran Canaria, España

     
• Localización: II Jornadas Iberoamericanas de Innovación Educativa en ámbito de las TIC: Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 12 y 13 de noviembre de 2015 / Jesús Bernardino Alonso Hernández (ed. lit.), David Sánchez Rodríguez (ed. lit.), Carlos Manuel Travieso González (ed. lit.), 2015, ISBN 978-84-608-3145-7, págs. 89-93
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper is a proposal for teaching pragmatics following a corpus-based approach. Corpora have had a high impact on how linguistics is looked at these days. However, teaching linguistics is still traditional in its scope and stays away from a growing tendency of incorporating authentic samples in the theoretical classroom, and so lecturers perpetuate the presentation of the same canonical examples students may find in their textbooks or in other introductory monographs. Our view is that using corpus linguistics, especially corpora freely available in the World Wide Web, will result in a more engaging and fresh look at the course of Pragmatics, while promoting early research in students. This way, they learn the concepts but most importantly how to later identify pragmatic phenomena in real text. Here, we raise our concern with the methodology, presenting clear examples of corpus-based pragmatic activities, and one clear result is the fact that students learn also how to be autonomous in their analysis of data. In our proposal, we move from more controlled tasks to autonomy. This proposal focuses on students enrolled in the course Pragmática de la Lengua inglesa, currently part of the curriculum in Lenguas Modernas, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.