© 1999 by Oxford University Press
Articles |
Responding to grammar questions on the Internet: providing correction through the corpus
Works on the TELEC project at the University of Hong Kong. His interests include pedagogical grammar, computermediated education, and critical discourse analysis. E-mail: tyrwhitt{at}hkucc.hku.hk
This article considers an interactive messaging system that was set up on the Internet to enable Hong Kong teachers of English to discuss language related issues as part of the TeleNex teacher support network. The Language Corner is restricted to serving English language teachers and trainee English teachers in Hong Kong, who send in questions and contribute to discussions. TELEC (Teachers of English Language Education Centre) staff members also contribute to the Language Corner, generally by responding to questions. This article describes how grammatical explanations based on the analysis of corpus data are routinely used to answer teachers' queries. It also shows how the provision of accurate answers sometimes entails a need for explicit correction. It is argued that correction has an important role not only linguistically and pedagogically, but also in maintaining the quality of the interaction, and thus ensuring the long-term future of the site.