Part of
Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts: In honor of Merja KytöEdited by Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97] 2020
► pp. 283–300
The aim of this chapter is to critically examine the accuracy of the advice on formal, written grammar offered in EFL teaching materials and other normative works. We use corpus data to investigate the use of four grammatical features often labelled as “informal” or “spoken” and find that the guidelines presented in university textbooks and other normative sources do not always match actual usage. Our findings call for a re-examination of the role of prescriptivism in teaching materials and in the language classroom, especially regarding the use of the split infinitive, like meaning ‘such as,’ and the conjunct though.