The Survey of English Usage
Quarterly Newsletter
June 2010

This newsletter is part of a series of quarterly newsletters from the Survey of English Usage, intended to keep the academic community and other interested parties informed about research in the Survey. The newsletter will be sent out in March, June, September and December. The March issue is the Survey’s Annual report.

The Glamour of Grammar

Announcing a one day workshop on Thursday July 8th 2010.

Grammar is seen by some as a set of dreary rules, by others as hoops to jump through on the way to assessing pupils' progress in English and by many others as something that is joyless and difficult. We hope to show you that while describing it as "glamorous" might be pushing it a bit, grammar can open up different ways of thinking about language, give you new approaches to teaching and equip your students with analytical and problem-solving tools that can help in all sorts of ways.

The day is designed to offer teachers of key stages 3-5:

  • sessions which will consolidate your own knowledge of grammar
  • resources that can be used with classes from year 9 to A level
  • ideas and practical approaches to teaching spoken language
  • examples of investigative approaches to language study
  • illustrations of actual language usage, drawn from the ICE-GB corpus

For more information, see here.

Seminars

The following seminars were held during the spring and summer terms:

Wednesday 10 February

 

 

 Dr Billy Clark (Middlesex University)
Concepts and procedures: combining and composing meanings in utterance interpretation.
Wednesday 17 March Dr Louise Sylvester (University of Westminster)
The lexis of medieval cloth and clothing: projects and research questions.
Wednesday 16 June Dr Gunther Kaltenböck (University of Vienna)
Is that a filler? On the discourse function of the that-complementizer in spoken English.

Bas Aarts
Director

June 2010

This page last modified 28 January, 2021 by Survey Web Administrator.