’Wish you were here’: ‘little’ texts and language awareness¹

Readers may be interested to know that the stereotypical phrase often intuitively associated with postcards and used in the title to this article, Wish you were here, never occurred in the corpus.

Abstract

Awareness of language is important for learners, trainees, teachers, and trainers. In particular an awareness of the relationship between language and the sociocultural context in which it occurs is important. Using an appropriate model of language to analyse relatively small and simple but authentic texts, this relationship can be demonstrated and awareness of language developed. It is suggested that everyday, ephemeral texts can be relatively easily collected and categorised according to genre for teaching and training purposes and for cross‐cultural comparison. An illustration of the advantages of creating a computer corpus of such texts for concordancing and hypothesis‐testing is presented. ‘Wish you were here’: ‘Little’ texts and language awareness

Notes

Readers may be interested to know that the stereotypical phrase often intuitively associated with postcards and used in the title to this article, Wish you were here, never occurred in the corpus.