The corpus-informed pedagogical intervention described in this article was developed for an advanced English as a Second Language (ESL) course designed for prospective International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) and implemented over the course of two class periods. Its primary goal was to offer students opportunities to gain language awareness of "smallwords" (Hasselgren, 2002b), with the broader goal of developing their ability to make pragmatically-appropriate lexicogrammatical choices and to enhance their communication as ITAs. The article situates this pedagogical unit vis-à-vis the goals of the class in which this unit was implemented, describes the progression of activities, and provides an appraisal of the unit.