Urban myths and English grammar
This talk is for delegates who've had enough of uninformed descriptions such as 'present perfect tense', 'third conditional' and 'word grammar' (to name a few). If you want reliable information about English syntax - tense, aspect, modality, conditionals, determiners, modifiers, etc., and a useful handout too, come along and help to change things for the better.
Biodata
I began my teaching career 42 years ago, and have taught in schools in UK and Germany, in initial teacher training in UK, and in higher education in UK and Hong Kong. I retired from University of Durham in 2002 but continue to work on a part-time basis, currently at Durham and Newcastle universities. I've also worked on short language training and teacher training courses for British Council and several language schools. My interests are language teaching methodology, teaching writing, and pragmatics. I've written several resource books for teachers, some co-authored. 'Art in ELT', co-edited with Hania Bociek and Kevin Parker and including contributions from Chris Lima, Luke Meddings, Emma Riordan and Stella Smyth, is due to be published by Helbling later this year or early next year. This resource book grew out of the Writing Workshop at last year's Cardiff conference. I'm also author of 'Doing Pragmatics', now in its third edition, and am currently working with Dawn Archer on a Pragmatics Reader due to be published by Routledge early in 2011.
11 March 2009
2 years 5 weeks
Dear Colleague,
If you click on 'view documents', you'll find my PowerPoint presentation and my handout. As you'll see, the handout is far more elaborate than the presentation because I've only 45 minutes for the presentation and so can only hope to cover a single area. On the handout, I've tried to give, in condensed, accurate form, information about several areas of English grammar - verb phrase morphology, conditionals, articles, and reference and referent modification in particular. If you look at the end of the handout or the penultimate slide of the Powerpoint, you'll see that I invite you to contribute examples of inaccurate grammatical descriptions from published work in ELT. My idea is that we might together make a no-no list of things that ought not to be said about English in the hope that this will discourage inaccurate descriptions in published work and in presentations.
For technical reasons, I've had to upload my files in pdf format. This means that you can't manipulate them, but I'm very happy for you to alter, extract from or add to my handout or powerpoint, and so will send you Word and Powerpoint versions if you'd like to have them - just send a message to peteriatefl@btinternet.com. (It may take me a few days as I'm fully involved in the Conference, so please be patient.)
Thanks for your interest! Peter