Discourse and context in language teaching by celse murcia
- 1. DISCOURSE AND CONTEXT IN LANGUAGE TEACHING - by Celce Murcia COLLEGE: ISFD 41 PROFESORADO DE INGLÉS 4TH YEAR SUBJECT: PRÁCTICAS DISCURSIVAS DE LA COMUNICACIÓN ESCRITA 4 TEACHER: STELLA SAUBIDET STUDENTS: EDUARDO GARCÍA MALDONADO, MARTÍN GRAFF, ARIEL OÑATE DATE:14TH SEPTEMBER, 2021
- 2. Chapter 7: Reading The chapter focuses on the development of reading skills and the difficulties that students of second or foreign language encounter when they read in a new language.
- 3. Reading for communication In the process of reading the reader has to: ● Decode the message ● Interpret the message ● Understand what the author's intention was. There are three participants: ● The writer ● The text ● The reader
- 4. Two separate approaches ● Bottom up approaches: a series of stages that proceed in a fixed order from sensory input to comprehension. ● Top down approaches: view the interpretations process as a continuum of changing approaches hypotheses about the incoming information.
- 5. The effective reader -Good readers know how to select successful strategies to work in the process. -Good readers ask themselves some questions when they face a written text: ● Should I read this text? ● What do I expect to get out of it? ● What do I expect it to tell me? ● What do I know about the writer of the text and the purpose for which it was written?
- 6. The effective reader -Good readers also ask themselves some questions during the reading process itself: ● Do I understand the author’s point? ● How carefully do I need to read this? ● Do I understand the important words? ● Do I see where the arguments seems to be going? ● How can I read this faster and better?
- 7. Features of a well-written text ● Coherence : quality that makes a text comform to a consistent world view based on one´s experience and culture or convention. ● Cohesion: an overt feature of the text, providing surface evidence for the text’s unity and connectedness.
- 8. Reading difficulties ● Global difficulties: in a well written text the global coherence meshes with the more local coherence of paragraphs and sentences. ● Grammatical difficulties: every language has features at the sentence level that can be perceived as difficult. ● Discourse features: reference needs to be maintained through a written message of any sort in order to ensure both cohesion and coherence. ● Lexical accessibility: readers guess the meaning of unfamiliar words by using clues of the text, but this only happens when the context provides them with immediate clues for guessing.
- 9. Suggestions for developing a reading course Give learners ample time and opportunity to engage in independent reading (silent reading in guided situations, shared reading in groups, and individual reading inside and outside the classroom). Everything should be carefully planned so the learner can develop truly effective reading strategies. Metacognitive awareness helps readers to make decisions and choices before, during and after their reading of the text. Important goal of a discourse - oriented course: to expose the learner to a variety of texts, genres, content areas, and styles of writing. The learner can develop knowledge components and processing skills through the processing of different texts.
- 10. Reading strategies that lead to the development of strategic reading Three subcomponents that need to be tackled in developing a reading course: - Language knowledge - Discourse knowledge, sociocultural knowledge - General knowledge Students need strengthening and development in activating all three areas. (using special activities to provide learning experiences leading to improvement in their ability to function in all these areas).
- 11. Feuerstein and Schcolnik (1995) Reading activities that are useful for the development of discourse - oriented reading courses. - Dictionary skills, vocabulary work (to expand learners’ receptive vocabulary). - Text organization, of grammatical and logical connections within the text. - Strategies related to previewing a text and making predictions before and during the reading process. - Strategies related to focus on external and internal features of a text.
- 12. Chapter 8: Writing The interactive approach The relationship between speech and writing have two conflicting positions: - Writing is different from speech. - Writing is similar to speech. In the first approach, writing is viewed as a much more decontextualized production process in which the writer needs to continually consider and accommodate an absent reader-audience to his or her ideas. The second approach takes a more social view of the writing process and therefore perceives it as similar to speech. It compares writing to speech events.
- 13. Reader-based approach Emphasized to be developed by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) in order to ensure the communicative power of the text. The writer needs to use language, content and conventions of writing in a way that will enable the reader to extract the intended meaning effectively, even though the act of reading will be carried out at a time and place removed from and independent of the act of writing.
- 14. Writing for a reader - Matching the writer’s and reader’s schemata Research in writing has found that training in elaboration skills is important not only for young writers but also for college students in freshmen courses and basic writers of any age who lack the sense of an audience and fail to generate potential reader demands for elaboration. The four components of the model presented by Berlin are: - The writer (or “knower”) - The audience (or “reader”) - Reality (or “context”) - Language of the written text
- 15. Expressivist movement VS cognitivist movement The expressivist movement views writing as an act which leads to and encourages “self-discovery” and is crucial in the development of an educated person. Elbow has emphasized fluency and power over the writing act as major aims in the writing class. He contributed to instructional approaches by encouraging writing activities such as personal journals and dialog journals (Both in English as a mother tongue and in other languages that adhere to Western conventions of writing).
- 16. Cognitivist approach It places great importance on “writing as a problem-solving activity” that emphasizes thinking and process in writing. Writing requires the ability to work with higher-order thinking skills. The writer makes plans, considers the context, chooses and generates alternatives, presents arguments, giving them the proper support and arrives at a well-supported conclusion. All of this is part of the problem-solving process that is translated into writing.
- 17. Writing as process: - Create coherence in a text. - Contrastive rhetoric. - Strategies and steps in creating coherence.
- 18. Creating coherence in a text. - Organize your ideas into a sequence that makes sense. Start writing, then organize everything. Write an introduction that serves as a basis for the whole text. - Then revise your text for it to be coherent.
- 19. Contrastive rhetoric. Whorfian hypothesis: the language a given people speak accounts in large part for the way they think. - Use parallel texts when carrying out any comparative analysis so that the genre, topic, and register of the texts are controlled. They may develop and codify over time culturally based and linguistic rhetorical patterns. How to work with these differences?
- 20. Strategies and steps in creating coherence: - Is responsibility of the writer to produce a text that will be coherent to the potential reader. - These strategies involve considerations of extratextual features that relate to the background knowledge and intratextual features that the writer must build. Examples: - Give a list of sentences that are the main statements of a paragraph, students have to change the order of them and add additional sentences. - A "guided creative writing through cloze". (Fill in each blank with a word).
- 21. Give a list of sentences that are the main statements of a paragraph. - In order to create a “logical” paragraph students have to change the order of the sentences and add two or three additional sentences. 1. He like to experiment with gases 2. He could not see the atoms but he imagined them. 3. According to Dalton's theory the atoms of an element were all the same size and weight. 4. He had an interesting hobby. 5. He developed a new atomic theory. - This activity will require coherence considerations and some background knowledge.
- 22. A "guided creative writing through cloze". This task involves the provision of words that can be suited to the grammatical environment in the passage. Fill in each blank with one word. It is a great experience to go on a (1) ______. I went to the (2) _______ and sat down. For a while I looked at the (3) _______. Then, I listened to the (4) _______. It was very (5) ______. - Once the first blank is filled in, it will affect, all the other blanks, so a variety of different possibilities exist for each blank.
- 23. Genre and rhetorical format: An important consideration in the creation of coherence in a text is the choice of genre and rhetorical format which is closely related to the purpose of writing. Narrative genre: Factual genre: structured around a chronological development of events and is centered around a person or hero. has no chronological organization but rather a logical one is usually objective and factual in nature. The purpose and the intended audience become of crucial importance.
- 24. Local well-formedness. Topic: Comment: Topic is considered an entity of discourse that connects one part of the discourse to other parts through given information that runs through the whole discourse. Comment is what is said about the topic and that is new or added information. The writer will use the cohesive elements in the language in order to establish a clear sequence of anaphoric reference. The writer manages to maintain the reader's focus on the topic while distributing new information in consecutive portions that hold the reader's interest and create anticipation of what is to follow in the discourse.
- 25. Writing instruction. - Breaking the initial barrier. (Anxiety, I have nothing to write about, feel of failure). Preparatory work prior to writing is crucial here. Brainstorming activities, discussions, and oral interactions which students can discover they have a lot to say. - Tactics for planning the writing process: preparing an outline for the text, preparation of a flowchart, mapping out the main ideas. - Reading as a model for writing. Using well written passages from literature, or passages written by others, as models for one's own writing. - Writing and rewriting. Students should revise and feel comfortable about revising what they have written. Two major techniques, peer review/feedback (must learn to respect each others work, how to offer and accept constructive criticism, how to identify problematic features of the text). The other technique is self-questioning.
- 26. “Using well written paragraphs passages from literature” ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ (Pride and Prejudice, 1813) Activities: 1) -Do you agree with this passage? - How do you feel about it? 2) Add two or three sentences.
- 27. Bibliography: ● Celce Murcia, M. & Olshtain, E. (2000). Discourse and Context in Language Teaching:A Guide for Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press.