engleski

Can there be a positive synergy between learning syntax and domain-specific learning?

The main aim of this paper is to test the apparently unquestionable assumption that there is a strong correlation between learners’ exposure to a wide diversity of source materials exemplifying the use of the syntactic structure in question and the likelihood of learners’ successful learning and understanding the structure’s formal, semantic and pragmatic aspects. The authors put under scrutiny the absolute adequacy of this hypothesis by an attempt to teach all types of English conditionals (zero, first, second, third, mixed) without ever crossing the boundaries of the following, comparatively restricted, conceptual domain: ‘Martin Luther King and his legacy’. Authentic if clauses, mainly extracted from MLK’s speeches are supposed to provide thematically coherent contextualisation. The clarity and exactness of the chronological framework of the African American Civil Rights Movement and MLK’s biography are expected to enhance the students’ understanding of time relations between the conditions (expressed within various protases) and consequences (expressed by the corresponding apodoses). Apart from the teaching materials specifically designed for this purpose, this paper presents the results of a student perception survey that was carried out with the first-year undergraduate students of Political Science and Journalism at the University of Zagreb subsequently to the teaching process.

synergy ; conditionals ; MLK ; protasis ; apodosis

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