Time: 9:00a.m.-12:00noon
Venue: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University AG712

Making talk work and making work talk: developing teaching materials from workplace discourse

Workshop leader:
Prof. Janet Holmes
Victoria University of Wellington

Over the past 12 years, the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project has accumulated an extensive corpus of workplace English. This material has been used for familiarising professional migrants to New Zealand with socio-pragmatic norms of communication in a range of New Zealand workplaces.

Drawing on this resource, the objectives of this workshop are (i) to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of using authentic materials to assist learners to understand and produce appropriate English in the workplace (ii) to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a range of exercises developed from such materials for raising awareness of socio-cultural issues in workplace communication.

To achieve objective (i) transcripts of authentic workplace interactions from the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project corpus will be provided for discussion and analysis.

To achieve objective (ii) exercises used in teaching the Communications Skills Course for Professional Migrants will be provided for discussion and analysis.

Participants will be expected to relate the materials to their own teaching and learning contexts.