Findings from corpus-based research are increasingly being exploited for the creation of teaching materials. Although such studies provide valuable insights into language use, they are mostly based on 'expert' corpora and therefore cannot tell us about what is not known by students. In order for materials to address students' deficiencies fully, insights gleaned from interlanguage corpora could usefully be used to complement those from 'expert' corpora for course design.
Several valuable studies on interpersonal strategies in scientific discourse have been undertaken and the area of pragmatic failure is also well documented in the literature on contrastive rhetoric. However, it would also be useful to examine these strategies from a learner corpus-based perspective. This paper outlines the findings from an error analysis of interpersonal strategies of a 200,000-word sub-section of the HKUST Learner Corpus. These findings not only provide useful insights into students' deficiencies in this area but have also been used to shape and refine classroom materials.
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