Implications for the Teaching of English

Abstract

Amongst learners of English, prepositions are an important element of the language as, more often than not, the constructions found in the target language are different to what is known in the learner’s L1 (cf. Swan and Smith, 1987). Sinclair (1991: 81–82) has highlighted that pre-corpus dictionaries were fairly useless, were a learner to consult them to find out how to use of. Similarly, grammar books have “of pop up all over the place, attracting dozens of special statements … in one recent grammar, there are over 50 entries of of spanning the entire book with substantial entries in over half the chapters”. I can only fully concur with Sinclair that such an approach might be deemed fully comprehensive — yet it does little to assist a learner. I hope it has become clear from the research presented here that of is not only, nor mostly, used as a preposition. When we look at the nesting of of and to, and focus on the most frequent occurrences, clear patterns of usage have emerged. These are relevant for the understanding and teaching of a language:

Focusing on patterns can, we believe, provide a more comprehensive and useful description of English than has been available to teachers up to now. What is so new about this work is that it does not rely on a distinction between grammar and vocabulary, but provides connections between the two. (Hunston, Francis and Manning, 1997: 208)