Blurb:

The chapter by Thorne, Reinhardt and Golombek, ‘Mediation as Objectification in the Development of Professional Academic Discourse: A Corpus-informed Curricular Innovation’ implements Concept-Based Instruction in an ESL International Teaching Assistant (ITA) Program at a large research university. The concern of the project is instruction in the pragmatic function of hedging in English, which according to the authors is an important function for ITAs when advising students during one-on-one office-hour sessions. The course of instruction designed by Thorne and his colleagues is situated within a perspective known as data-driven learning. To this end, the authors draw up the large corpus of academic English, MICASE, developed at the University of Michigan. They use this data to benchmark the performance of ITAs as well as to develop instructional materials. They then developed a series of systematic diagrams to present the concept of pragmatic hedging to the ITAs and to assist them in guiding their appropriate use of English when interacting with their American undergraduate students.