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English for Specific Purposes: The English Verb - Tense/Aspect/Voice is a moodle-based course designed to develop your understanding of the English tense and aspect system. The approach taken in this course is - in all likelihood - very different from anything you have encountered before. English tense and aspect is traditionally taught in one of two ways: a) form to function; or b) function to form. In a form to function approach, learners are given the list of forms (e.g. tenses or modal verbs) along with a list of functions for which they can be used. Conversely, a function to form approach starts from the point of language functions (i.e. talking about something that happened to us when we were young) and learners are given a list of forms that they need in order to talk about these functions.
English for Specific Purposes: The English Verb - Tense/Aspect/Voice is different. The approach we take in this course could be called "form to meaning" approach. While we also start with a grammatical form (e.g. a tense), what we do next differs dramatically from approaches a and b above. Rather than asking you to memorise a list of functions that a particular form can be used for, we examine as many examples of the form in action (i.e. examples of (authentic) text in which a form occurs) as possible with the aim of identifying the core semantics of that form. In other words, for each form we will try to answer the following question: What is its basic meaning? In doing so, you will, I hope, develop a much deeper understanding of the English tense/aspect system and therefore become a more confident and proficient user of English. |
