Teacher Discussion Forums

I keep thinking that I know my native language pretty well, but I'm repeatedly stomped, and here's my current question:

How do you help a student who uses gonna (going to ) across the board to express the future. I explained that simple future is generally used to express voluntary actions (I'll get you a drink, I'll take out the trash this week since you took it out last week) and to express promises. I also explained that "going to" is generally used to express a plan (I'm going to France next year , I'm going to go to bed early tonight, etc.) I feel that this is oversimplified, and I'm trying to find a good online corpus of spoken English where I can type in "I'll" or "going to". Are any of you familiar with these online databases? I'm having trouble finding one.

I just don't want to utterly confuse my students. For example, if I use the expression, "Someday I'll learn my lesson" - is this a promise, and hence the simple future tense? What about, "I'll be happy to give him a hand?" If I'm confused, my poor students will be truly confused!

Thank you to all for the help you've been to me. I'm very grateful for this site.

Jenny

You might find this useful:
http://view.byu.edu/

I can't remember who first mentioned it/posted the link, maybe it was JTT. Anyway, this sort of question might get more of a response over on the Applied Linguistics forum (it's kind of the default grammar one).

I know the feeling and it's one of those, the more you know, the more you feel you need to learn. A good corpus is the British National Corpus at:
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

James

P.S. I'm writing a paper right now on Search Engines, so feel free to make suggestions as to what I should cover.