Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Book reviews - Endre Abkarovits: Collins COBUILD Grammar Patterns. Volumes 1 and 2.

It is difficult to imagine building a lesson around a pattern and using the traditional Presentation-Practice-Production model. Instead patterns should contribute to grammatical consciousness-raising, vocabulary building or checking accuracy. The authors give examples of these in the 'Advice for teachers' section of their pattern books. These volumes do not state explicitely what can or cannot be said (which is often impossible to state), they rather concentrate on what is typically, often, or sometimes said. 'The primary use of the Grammar Patterns volumes is to give examples of words that behave in the same way and share an aspect of meaning.' (Hunston and Francis, forthcoming) And while the compilers of such volumes have to try to give as complete lists as possible, the learner or teacher of English can select the most frequent and useful words from the lists. In some papers the authors have defended their views concerning the importance of patterns against those who think non-native speakers can do without phraseologies native speakers use, and speak some simplified 'International English' instead. They believe patterns are a necessary feature of language. Most words have no meaning in isolation (or only an ambigous one), but have meaning when they occur in a specific phraseology. Pattern is therefore central to the meaning and is essential both to fluency and accuracy. I think we can agree with the conclusions of the authors that while we must still wait for a definitive theory of language based on corpora, the new findings and methods offered in these books can be recommended with greater confidence to teachers of English. References Francis G., Hunston S. and Manning E.: Collins Cobuild Grammar Patterns 1: Verbs. HarperCollins, London, 1996. (CCGP 1) Francis G., Manning E and Hunston S.: Verbs: Patterns and Practice. HarperCollins, London, 1997. Francis G., Hunston S. and Manning E.: Collins Cobuild Grammar Patterns 2: Nouns and Adjectives. HarperCollins, London, 1998. (CCGP 2) Hunston S. and Francis G.: Verbs Observed: A corpus-driven pedagogic grammar. In: Applied Linguistics, volume 19, pp 45-72, 1998. Hunston S. and Francis G.: Pattern Grammar: a corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of English. Benjamins, Amsterdam, (forthcoming) 188