Glenda

This is the first message I have received from ATEG. I was not sure it was an active list.

I have a couple of brief observations:

1. You could interpret the structure either way, but you also need to explain to students the pragmatic meaning of the grammar in addition to labeling it with a pedagogical grammar structure.

2. One pragmatic meaning of "gonna" is to have an intention and subsequently a plan to do something. Intentions entail plans.

3. You might also mention the informal spoken linguistic register of the poem. 

4. I was just reading yesterday about the progressive tense in the British National Corpus which found that overwhelming percentage of its use (65%) was what the author described as "repeatedness" or in other words, "an ongoing single event." An example of repeatedness from the corpus in the article was "You are once again doing it completely and utterly wrong." The source for this is a book chapter:

Romer, U. (2010). Using general and specialized corpora in English language teaching: Past, present, and future. In M. Compoy-Cubillo, B. Belles-Fortuno, and M. Gea-Valor. (Eds.), Corpus-based approaches to English language teaching (pp. 18-35). London: Continuum.

Romer conducted a large study of progressive in a 2005 book, Progressives, patterns, pedagogy: A corpus-driven approach to progressive forms, functions, contexts, and dialectics.

I do not think repeatedness is the pragmatic function of the line, but teaching students about using corpus studies, and pragmatics to inform our knowledge of grammar is certainly worth the time.

Mike Busch