POSITIVE SYNERGY BETWEEN LEARNING SYNTAX AND LEARNING DOMAIN-SPECIFIC LSP CONTENT

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to test the widely held assumption that there is a strong correlation between learners’ exposure to a wide diversity of source materials exemplifying the use of a syntactic structure and the likelihood of learners’ successful learning and understanding of the structure’s formal, semantic and pragmatic aspects. The authors scrutinise the adequacy of this hypothesis through an attempt to teach all types of English conditionals (zero, first, second, third, mixed) within the boundaries of the comparatively restricted conceptual domain: Martin Luther King and his legacy. Authentic if-clauses, mainly extracted from MLK’s speeches, were used to provide thematically coherent contextualisation. The clarity and exactness of the chronological framework of the African American Civil Rights Movement and MLK’s biography were expected to enhance the students’ understanding of time relations between the conditions (expressed within various protases) and consequences (expressed by the corresponding apodoses). In order to validate this presumption, the authors conducted a student perception survey with a hundred first-year undergraduate students of Political Science and Journalism at the University of Zagreb upon the completion of the teaching process. The survey findings largely corroborated the authors’ initial presumption about a positive synergy effect of simultaneous teaching of conditional sentences and restricted domain content.