Introduction
This website was originally designed to promote and share good practice in teaching (English) linguistics, as well as ideas and useful resources for doing so. Over the years, the focus has shifted somewhat towards Corpus Linguistics and promoting my tools and methods for linguistic analysis, especially in Corpus Pragmatics.
Please feel free to link to and make use of the course pages below in your courses if you like them. All I ask in return is that you acknowledge my efforts in some form, either by explicitly referring to my authorship, or possibly also by sending me a brief email to let me know where and how you use them.
Any constructive criticism and suggestions on how to improve the content are always appreciated ;-)
Course Materials
The following represents a brief selection of all the extensive course materials for linguistics & ESP courses that I’ve developed over a number of years. Although these materials have been designed – as far as possible – to also allow for self-study, they’re really supposed to be used for moderated teaching, as well as to allow students to revise the contents in their own time later. As part of this overall general teaching strategy, I usually don’t provide any solutions to the exercises on the pages directly, so it’s up to the teacher to do so. If you find the materials useful and want to use them in your teaching, but are struggling to find the right explanations, feel free to contact me for advice, though. In general, the exercises are designed to look very simple, but you may find that you can sometimes actually easily spend a full session on one or two of these seemingly very basic exercises ;-)
Linguistics
Introduction to English Linguistics: a general introduction to (English) linguistics, including many interactive exercises. I’ve recently updated the materials to make it possible to save the results of a majority of the exercises individually to HTML pages.
English Phonetics & Phonology: a general introduction to phonetics & phonology. Most of the pages include facilities for online transcription practice through a variety of different exercises, as well as for creating printable HTML pages from an online transcription editor. Whenever I’ll find the time, I’ll update the transcription facilites to make it possible to save all exercise results individually.
Practical Phonetics: a basic course in instrumental phonetics.
Lexicology: a basic course in English lexicology, covering aspects of the history of English, morphology & lexical semantics.
ESP
English for Engineering: an ESP course for engineers that covers various (actually too many) topics ranging from basic academic practice and research skills, via presentation design, and discussion skills, to written communication. For various reasons, although I hope that the basic corpus-oriented/-based design is relatively successful, I still consider this course highly experimental. This is because, during the development, I unfortunately had to focus too much on the interface design and therefore had to leave a large part of the content development to other people, rather than being able to apply stringent ‘quality control’. Thus, many of the materials are still a little too ‘bookish’ and not completely natural for my taste.
The following two sets of course materials are derived from the above course materials, but hopefully constitute major improvements over the original materials, as they’ve undergone major restructuring of the parts taken from the original course, as well as hopefully representing major improvements in terms of the naturalness of the language, etc.
Negotiation Skills: a basic course in negotiation skills, covering topics from presentation design, via conducting meetings & writing minutes, to negotiating.
Business Writing: a basic course in business writing, covering issues such as research skills for fact finding, different container formats for business communication, how to write business plans & proposals, as well as report writing.
Corpus Data
The SPAADIA Corpus (version 1): The SPAADIA (Speech Act Annotated Dialogues) Corpus consist of 35 transactional dialogue files that are fully annotated with speech-act information, as well as additional information regarding syntactic (C-unit) categories, topic information, surface polarity, and semantico-pragmatic markers (modes). These files represent a subset of the data annotated as part of the SPAAC project. For more information on the specific categories and the overall design of the annotation scheme, please see the SPAADIA Annotation Scheme document.
The SPAADIA Corpus (version 2): A revised version of the original SPAADIA corpus, using version 2 of the DART taxonomy.
Pragmatically annotated version of parts of the SRI Amex Travel Agent Data involving the speaker Agent A. Please note that this is derived data and the original copyright lies with SRI. Some more information on the data, including certain limitations of it, can be found in my chapter in Talking at Work: Corpus-based Explorations of Workplace Discourse (see publications page).