[Ling] The influence of linguistics on teaching

[Richard]

Is there anything you have learnt on the Linguistics course that might change how you teach English?

[Jatopon P.]

In fact, I really don’t have strong experience in teaching. As ‘Public Speaking in English’ was my most memorable course that I taught, this course should be taken as the example for the discussion here. What is coming up in my mind (from learning Linguistics course) is using Genre Analysis to develop a teaching resource for ‘Public Speaking in English’ course. Besides, traditionally, having students focus on (such as) speak coherently, smoothly, clearly, grammatically, students would also be required to perform well-formed moves in a public speaking task. Understanding move organization might help the students compose more systematic and persuasive speeches.

To educate the students how moves is organized in a speech, move-pattern model as the teaching resource would be created. To create a move-pattern model, research on move analysis might be conducted. To research the move structure, a communicative event in a specific context (e.g. speech in a funeral, speech in a wedding, speech in an academic conference) in which a public speech might take place would be approached. I might collect a number of speeches from a communicative event in a specific context as the research data. Moves and steps of the collected speeches would be coded into themes, maybe based their functional purposes of communication (e.g. to greet the audience, to identify the purpose of the speech). Swales’ CARS model might be used as the guideline for the thematic coding.

I think this would work. Any suggestion?