engleski

Can We Shroud a Syntactic Structure in an ESP Cloak? Case Study: Teaching Indirect Questions to Students of Political Science

Indirect questions, both reported and embedded, have proved to be syntactic structures that most students have not (fully) mastered at the secondary level of education. Therefore, the authors' aim is to draw attention to these structures, whose practical use is extremely frequent in formal oral discourse, typical of professional situations. In spite of the fact that an incorrectly formed indirect question hardly ever causes problems in communication and compromises the pragmatic value of the sentence, the authors believe that insisting on teaching these structures systematically in class is likely to help students reach a higher level of accuracy and thus improve their general level of proficiency in English. The elements in focus are the following: adequate affirmative word order in the subordinate clause, a perspective-based use of the time and place adverbials as well as of the pronouns and appropriate backshifting of tenses provided a verb in the subordinate clause is affected by the past tense in the main clause. The purpose of this paper is to show how an apparently complex grammatical structure, sometimes viewed as arduous and even hostile by learners, can be taught in an imaginative and creative way without ever crossing the borders of the ESP realm. In their everyday work, the authors use a whole array of activities designed for teaching indirect questions to political science students and all of them are based on authentic subject-specific texts. The source materials used for creating the activities vary in terms of style and register and are provided from various media. However, all activities hinge upon the principle of communicative appropriateness of indirect questions, independently of the activity's strategy and the nature of source materials. It is the authors' intention to present some relevant teaching materials and strategies in order to show that university students can acquire indirect questions in an amusing but still efficient and effective way in any ESP context.

activities ; grammar in context ; indirect questions ; politics ; subject-specific texts

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