Abstract (eng)
This thesis aims at proving that Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) providing information about the verb uses in CLIL classroom discourse. Various aspects of the English verb, as verb classes, verb forms, the usage of tense and grammatical functions, which occur in history and marketing lessons are compared to each other. Additionally, these results are compared to the findings on spoken English of corpus linguistics in order to evaluate if verb usage in classroom discourse is comparable to the findings of the LSWE and BNC.
As students are exposed to the English language in addition to language class their proficiency should improve. Their verb use and the one of the teacher should be fairly similar to native speakers. In order to confirm this thesis the results of the data analysis and the corpus findings are compared to each other. Furthermore, it is analyzed if there are differences in the use of the English verb in history and marketing lessons. Another hypothesis is that the past tense is a dominant tense in history lessons while the present tense and potentially the future are predominant. Both the teachers’ and the students’ verb use is analyzed. On the one hand, to show that the teacher is able to confront the students with a high level of language proficiency and on the other hand, to confirm that the students’ show a considerably high level of proficiency. Even though it is presupposed that the students’ language skills are improved by CLIL it still has to be considered that student and teacher verb usage differs very much. A further hypothesis claims that the teachers use a higher number and variety of grammatical functions, like aspect and passive voice. Finally, modal verbs are supposed to be used equally often by teachers and students respectively.
The diploma thesis at hand can be subdivided into four parts. Firstly, a theoretical description of the English verb and all its aspects is given. Secondly, corpus linguistics is introduced and the findings of both the LSWE and BNC are illustrated. Thirdly, it is described why quantitative methods were used for the data analysis and how research is conducted. Lastly, the results of the data analysis is presented and compared to the findings of the LSWE and BNC.
The results of the data analysis have verified that past tense is dominant in history lessons and present tense and the future are the main tenses in marketing lessons. The analysis has also resulted in proving that teachers use both a higher number and variety of grammatical structures. The use of tense, grammatical forms and verb forms is highly dependent on the subject. This can not be confirmed for the share in semantic domains but not for the most common verb forms which also depend on the subject.