Entry #10: summary of chapters 1, 2, 3 from Beyond the sentence

SUMMARY FROM BEYOND THE SENTENCE BY SCOTT THORNBURY

CHAPTER 1: UNLOCKING TEXT

Making sense of text implies a variety of 'text attack' strategies for learners of English. Students tend to access to their "insider knowledge" about the language and the culture to fully understand the text. It can be done by using BOTTOM UP or TOP DOWN strategies. Bottom up is based on linguistic information, whereas top down approach recruits contextual clues (signs, patterns of signs and context itself) and reader's background knowledge. At the same time, we must take into account that when readers are going to read, they approach to texts from different directions and with different expectations. Therefore, we can say that the ability to write connected and intelligible text is like the ability to interpret texts. It is a complex interaction of a variety of skills but it is not simply a matter of stringing sentences together. For that reason, the idea of this summary is to give tools to deconstruct and reconstruct texts to write connected and intelligible texts. 

WHY TEXTS?

Texts could have: 

Parts of speech

Phrases

Clauses

Common verb patterns

Conjunctions

Repetition

All texts are formed by these words and group of words, they have grammar and the grammar that is embedded in them is bound to be fairly representative of English grammar as a whole. However, learning a language is more than the learning of its grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation. Texts can deliver a great deal of information about a language. In fact, the components of a text are miniature representations of the system as a whole. Therefore, we, as teachers, must help students to unlock those component's features to fully interpret a text.

Chapter 2: What makes a text?

·         Characteristics of a text

·         *Are self-contained

·         *Hang together

·         *Make sense

·         *Have a clear communicative purpose

·         *Are recognizable text types

·         *Are appropriate to their context of use 

        Lexical and grammatical devices

A text is cohesive by a combination of LEXICAL and GRAMMATICAL devices:

·         THE LEXICAL CONNECTORS include repetition and the lexical chains of words that share similar meaning

·         THE GRAMMATICAL CONNECTORS: Grammatical cohesion is realized by pronouns, which refer the reader back to their REFERENTS (concepts previously introduced in the text)

·         SUBSTITUTION: The use of DO/DOES substitute a preceding verb phrase. Words like SO and NOT substitute for whole clauses.

·         SUBSTITUTION BY ZERO = ELLIPSIS (technical name): It is the leaving out of elements that can be retrieved from elsewhere. Ellipsis retrievable from the previous sentence fills the empty slot.

·         COHESION: It suggests the presence of explicit linking words and conjunctions in a text

·         SENTENCE-INTERNAL FUNCTION: Conjunctions connect clauses inside sentences. Connector that link sentences are called CONJUNCTS (or linkers)

COHESIVE DEVICES

Cohesive devices are classified according to three types of levels:

REFERENCE

Elements in a text can refer to other elements both inside and outside the text. It is achieved through the use of pronouns and articles. They can be:

NOMINALIZATION

It refers to references in a less focused and more general way than pronouns and articles. Nouns that are typically used to nominalize actions and events are: situation, process and way, ideas, explanations, criticism, proposal, and suggestion. They are used to refer to what has been said or written.

CONJUNCTS

CHAPTER 3: WHAT MAKES A TEXT MAKE SENSE?

COHERENCE: The capacity of a text to make sense. Coherence is a quality that the reader derives from the text. It is not simply a function of its cohesion.

WHAT HELPS MAKE A TEXT COHERENT?

There are two perspectives:

·         MICROLEVEL: It is related to the analysis of sentence by sentence and its logical relationships. These relations can be:

ADDITIVE: The second sentence gives details about, or specifies the statement in the first sentence.

ADVERSATIVE: The second sentence makes a contrast

CAUSAL: The second sentence provides a reason for the situation mentioned in the first one

TEMPORAL: The chronological order of events is implied

·         MACROLEVEL: what the text is about, how the text is organized and the organization is familiar to the reader.

Theme and rheme/Topic and comment

TOPIC (THEME): What the text is about. It is related to the new information.

COMMENT (RHEME): What the writer or speaker wants to tell you about the topic. It is related to the new information.

GIVEN INFORMATION: Related to what is already known or given (old information)

The tendency to place the new information in the latter part of a clause or sentence is called END-WEIGHT. This new information, in turn, often becomes the given information of the next sentence. Or the same topic is carried over and a new comment is made about it. So, the writer tends to alter patterns of topic and comments to help us make sense of his/her arguments:

PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS: It places the object in the topic slot and places the new information in the comment slot

CLEFT SENTENCES: They place special emphasis on the new information. EX: ROBIN PAID/ IT WAS ROBIN WHO PAID

TEXTUALIZING PROCESS

This process has involved the following kind of operations:

·         *Transforming active constructions into passive ones, in order to achieve end-weight

·         *Re-arranging the order of elements in the sentence in the interests of end-weight

·         *Combining sentences using relative pronouns or linkers

·         *Using referring pronouns, such as ‘it’, to connect sentences and avoid repetition

·         *Changing verb forms in order to re-position events relative to other events