"I was wondering": What Does It Mean and How to Use it?

One idiomatic expression my students always had trouble with is the phrase "I was wondering". This is especially a puzzling point for my advanced ESL learners, who often hear this phrase in their daily life but keep "wondering" the exact meaning behind it.

To solve this puzzle, I looked up "I was wondering" in COCA, and the frequency counts showed 1729 total occurrences, with the majority (i.e., 1032 occurrences) in spoken situations.

The following is a snapshot of the concordances containing this phrase from some TV programs in the year 2012:

In a data-driven learning activity, it is important for learners to figure out the language use rules by examining the examples themselves. The following are some questions to help them get started:

1. What are the most common words/structures that follow "I was wondering"?
2. What's the tense requirement for the utterance containing "I was wondering"? Does it always need to be past tense?
3. When "I was wondering" is used together with present tense, what does it mean? Can you think of another phrase/word to express the same meaning?

After the initial discussion, the students will be shown the following clip from the TV show "Sex and City". They will be asked to interpret the meaning of "I was wondering" from the actor:

Upon the completion of the discussion, all students should be clear that "I was wondering if" is a polite way to make a request. Students are then encouraged to log in to the MICASE website and identify 5 specific examples of "I was wondering if" in making requests:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/c/corpus/corpus?c=micase;page=simple

Students can also be encouraged to rewrite/change the examples they have located from MICASE and design dialogues or skits to practice this useful expression with a partner.