Gordon Tucker

Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University, UK

On the notion of expectation in language learning

There is growing evidence, mostly derived from corpus linguistic research, of the centrality of expectation in language use. What I am suggesting through the use of the term ‘expectation’ is that speakers develop, as an important aspect of their linguistic competence, expectations that certain kinds of linguistic event will take place in given contexts. This idea has surfaced in a number of ways in recent decades. It is implicit as a criterion in Hymes’ notion of ‘communicative competence’, namely, whether (and to what degree) something [linguistic] is in fact done, actually performed. It is implicit in Firth’s notion of collocation, in Sinclair’s ‘principle of idiom’, in the notion of formulaic language and in the systemic functional linguistic view of grammar as probabilistic. It is also present in Hoey’s important recent work on ‘(lexical) priming’.

In this paper I claim that the development of expectations about language behaviour is a crucial part of language learning. In order to take account of this in language pedagogy, however, we need to produce descriptions based upon the above-mentioned phenomena. Using corpus linguistic findings, I shall offer some partial descriptions and explanations and set out a programme for their more comprehensive study with potential implications for language pedagogy.