Rolf Kreyer 
The Linguistic Toolkit for Teachers of English 
Discovering the Value of Linguistics for Foreign Language Teaching

In contrast to literary or cultural studies linguistics is not taught in the EFL classroom, yet, it plays a major role in any English language teaching degree. Given this discrepancy it does not come as a surprise that students sometimes ask: ‘I want to be a teacher! Why do I need all this?’ The main goal of this textbook is to demonstrate the relevance of linguistic expertise for the EFL classroom. It explores a wide range of topics (phonetics/phonology, lexis, corpus linguistics, text linguistics and the power of language) with a clear focus on providing a convincing answer to the question above. With its highly accessible style and layout, a wealth of examples and exercises as well as a large range of additional innovative online materials this textbook sets out to convince its readers that they will be better teachers if they are good linguists.

Table of Content

INTRODUCTION
1 ‘I just want to be a teacher’
2 A toolkit and what’s in it
2.1 What tools are good for
2.2 The art of repairing
2.2.1 Errors and why they are a good thing
2.2.2 Interlanguage
2.2.3 What is an error
SOUNDS
3 ‘What are you sinking about?’ – sounds in isolation
3.1 The description of sounds
3.2 A comparison of English and German consonants
3.3 A comparison of English and German vowels
4 ‘France is bacon’ – Sounds in speech
4.1 Phonemes, phones and allophones
4.2 When Alastor Moody has a mat eye – allophonic contrasts
4.3 ‘France is bacon’ – sounds in speech
4.3.1 Assimilation
4.3.2 Weak forms
4.3.3 Linking
WORDS AND BEYOND
5 Nodes and links – the mental lexicon
5.1 Webs of words, not lists
5.2 The mental lexicon – some basics
5.3 Stay connected – links in the mental lexicon
5.3.1 Defining features
5.3.2 Encyclopaedic relations
5.3.3 (Mostly) sense relations
5.3.4 Collocation and other relations in language use
5.4 What Taboo can teach us about teaching words
6 Think big! More than words
6.1 Why tea can be powerful … and why it shouldn’t
6.2 Lexical phrases
6.3 Patterns and their relevance for the classroom
6.4 Teaching patterns
THE CORPUS IN THE CLASSROOM
7 The theory of practical corpus analysis
7.1 The corpus as a collection of authentic language
7.2 Words and their contexts
7.3 More than words – annotation provided in corpora
8 A more practical introduction to corpus analysis
8.1 Wild cards, regular expressions and corpus queries
8.2 Corpus queries – exploiting lemmatization and tagging
8.3 Corpus queries – collocations
8.4 Corpora in the classroom
8.4.1 Benefits and opportunities
8.4.2 Poblems and pitfalls
TEXTS
9 What makes a text a (good) text
9.1 What makes a text a text – Standards of textuality
9.2 The relevance of text structure
9.2.1 Themes and rhemes
9.2.2 Rhetorical Structure Theory
10 Texts and the relevance of sentence structure
10.1 Principles of text processing
10.1.1 The Given-before-new Principle
10.1.2 The Principle of End-focus
10.1.3 The Principle of End-Weight
10.2 Helpful sentence structures
10.2.1 Non-canonical clause patterns
10.2.2 Secondary clause patterns
10.3 From text to good text – an example
11 Texts and the relevance of the situation
11.1 Spoken and written English
11.2 The interpersonal dimension – politeness
THE POWER OF LANGUAGE
12 The recipient
12.1 Humans – the not so rational animals
12.2 Communication and the unpacking of information
12.2.1 Exploiting the Co-operative Principle
12.2.2 Background knowledge
12.2.3 Don’t think of an elephant!
13 The producer
13.1 Packaging information
13.1.1 The right word at the right time
13.1.2 Beyond the word level
13.1.3 Of swarms and floods – the power of metaphor
13.1.4 Framing
13.1.5 (Faulty) logic and argumentation
13.2 Walking uphill

About the author

Prof. Dr. Rolf Kreyer ist Professor für Sprachwissenschaft des modernen Englisch und zweifacher Lehrpreisträger der Universität Marburg.