Introducing Flaw & Order

This online course was originally informed by the realisation that non-native speakers and writers of English - even advanced ones - often have difficulties in putting sentence constituents and the information therein into the right place. The resulting 'errors' are often not immediately recognised as such but leave an impression of 'clumsiness' or 'imbalance'.

German learners, in particular, have a tendency to succumb to the pitfalls of word order and information structure. The aim of this course is to help remedy this tendency by teaching them 'where to place things' in English, more specifically:

• Re-activate the unmarked rules of English word and constituent order
• Raise students' awareness of the stylistic aspects of information structure
• Help students to develop a critical awareness of info structure in text
• Guide students towards improving their own style of writing.

Flaw & Order starts with a crash course in the 'constituent analysis' of English sentences; in order to know where constituents may be placed, one needs to know what these constituents are. It continues with the basic rules of word order, from SVO to beyond. The position of adverbials, seemingly rather free, then leads us to the principles of information structure. The informational concepts of (a) 'proximity vs remoteness' and (b) 'thematic progression' provide two interesting stylistic details which may help to avoid one of the most frequent mistakes (a) or build up a lucid flow of text (b). The final section is devoted to a few grammatical operations which can be used to restructure the information structure of a clause.

The methodology of this course is largely inductive: as it is geared towards what is probably a heterogeneous group of learners, some of whom will be familiar with most of the structures and operations, its tasks are designed to teach the contents by-the-by - 'learning by tasksolving', as it were. In some cases, it is the tasks' feedbacks which provide the most important information; in others, the most useful elements are the summary exercises. These latter summaries will become available as printable HTML files once the respective section has been completed.

The progression of the course is rather steep, ranging from basics of English word order to fairly advanced stylistic concepts. Ideally, our online component could be accompanied by a taught grammar or writing course, or a tutorial in which the lessons learnt from Flaw & Order are put into practice and applied to open grammar or writing tasks. For such a taught course, Flaw & Order may well be used selectively, as a mine for useful tasks or insights.

In the case of grammar courses, parts of it might be discarded as too basic or too stylistic, and in the case of writing classes, some of it could seem a little heavy on the meta-linguistic side.

Have fun exploring Flaw & Order!