English Grammar in Context

Course Coordinator: Dr Winfred XUAN, BA (HZU); MA (SYSU); PhD (PolyU)

Course Developer: The Open University, UK, Course Team

As this is a higher level grammar course, students are strongly advised to have already taken ENGL A202 The Structure of Modern English or the equivalent before attempting this course.

Aims
This course aims to help learners acquire:

• An understanding of the major characteristics of English grammar;
• Skills in grammatical analysis and interpretation in order to gain an insight into how English 'works' in real-life contexts;
• Skills in applying grammatical understanding in order to evaluate and, where appropriate, improve the quality of spoken and written texts.

Contents
The course is designed for students needing an up-to-date framework for describing and analysing the English language as used in the world today. The course includes the following:

• Corpus and grammatical description
• The units of grammar — function and form in spoken and written English
• The noun phrase and the verb phrase
• Understanding complexity in and around clauses
• Intonation, ways of speaking — exploring linguistic variability
• Packaging and staging information
• Positioning and persuading
• The grammar of social roles and relationships
• Construing human experience — grammar, representation and point of view
• Organizing messages; making a text hang together — the role of lexical cohesion and grammatical devices.

Learning support
This course involves 300 study hours. There will be ten face-to-face tutorials.

Assessment
There will be five assignments and an examination at the end of the course. Except for some designated assignments, students are required to submit assignments via the Online Learning Environment (OLE).

Equipment
Students will need access to multimedia components on the Online Learning Environment (OLE). This can be accessed via computers/mobile devices.

Set book(s)
Biber, D, Conrad, S and Leech, G (2002) Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Harlow, UK: Pearson Educational Limited.