Learning English prepositions in the Chemnitz Internet Grammar
Josef J. Schmied · 2003
This article uses part of the Internet Grammar that was developed at Chemnitz University to illustrate a new way of presenting real language data and language rules in the same ‘grammar’ with an inductive component, called the discovery section, and a deductive component, called the explanations section. I have focused on prepositions here in order to demonstrate how grammar can be presented and to discuss how learners use both inductive and deductive learning strategies in their work to come to terms with these extremely polysemous forms of English. The new computer-based learning environment allows us not only to set up a new form of ‘grammar’ but also, for the first time, to look empirically at how such a learning resource is exploited by individual learners to develop their own internal grammar from an external grammar (an electronic grammar supported with corpus examples).