Mainly about text

The aim of grammar: to provide the learner with the capacity to form sentences in the new language and to express anything they wanted to say.

Recently the communicative approach focused more on the communicative use of the language as a means of familiarizing the learners with expressive resources of the language * The change has refocused attention beyond construction of sentences and sense relations between the words , on to patterns of language use exhibited in the communicative events brought into the classroom.

Consequently , language teaching has sought and stimulated investigations into the ways people actually use language in different kinds of situations . .

What is the difference between usage and use? Usage: the normal ways in which sentences are put together and words change to match their role in the sentence Use: the way in which utterances are employed to make something happen to influence a listener or to achieve a particular goal maintain a conversation

What is the reason for paying attention to language use as well as to the facts of usage? Language is very rarely used by anybody divorced from a context

Language as discourse

Q)How a “ discourse syllabus “ could be designed Q)How a “ discourse syllabus “ could be designed ? What kinds of knowledge and skills can be usefully incorporated ?

1/ one of the syllabus designer’s tasks is to distinguish between shared or universal linguistic processes and how the new language expounds them .

2/ A further problem for the discourse syllabus designer is how to find a principle of ordering . Solutions ranged from the essentially unordered ‘ topical ‘ syllabus to linking discourse features with the complexity of the language used to expound them , to a ‘ cyclic ‘ syllabus .

3/ A third problem concerns the involvement at discourse level with the culture (s) of the speakers of the new language, or at least the culture into which the learners desire potential access .

For the applied linguist , it is important to remember the term discourse refers to both the structure and purposes of one person’s continuous production in a speech or a piece of writing , and also to text co-produced by two or more people, in conversational , or in written exchange .

The appropriate way to view the operations and language which have to be considered if a discourse syllabus is used . * This Is the question of whether discourse elements are treated as part of language structure , or part of the operations performed by the producer or receiver of the language .

What it means to ‘ know’ a second language What it means to ‘ know’ a second language ? Having discourse competence and strategic competence , whether or not one considers them both to be a property of the language . There is every reason to suppose that knowing ‘ what’ can inform and support ‘ how’ .

Different aspects :

1- A distinction needs to be drawn which features in practical discussions of text : between relations which are present and signaled in the text itself, and those whose significance is derived from facts external to the language; from the situation or context in which the language occurs.

Cohesion is the general name for linguistic devices which signal the textual structure which represent the coherence of the message encoded. There are many cohesive devices – words and structures – which fix the links between ideas in the text. * conversational implicature .

Second language pedagogy can take for granted that the learners will, by virtue of being speakers of a language already, know the structural and situational meanings being communicated, but has to present in a learnable form the ways the new language expresses them and what is appropriate in the situation.

2- Another distinction to be drawn about the situational context of language use has been developed by discourse analysts such as Brown and Yule (1983) : some language use situation consist mainly of transactions and transactional language; others are better described as interactions.

Typical of transactional are service encounters in which the appropriate things to say may be quite strictly defined, and which may contribute a large part of a non-native speaker's language activity on entering a speech community for the first time. Example : buying in shops, obtaining papers and official documents, seeking information, making travel arrangements, opening and closing telephone calls.

Interaction, on the other hand, has more to do with information and reciprocal topic exchange, so the appropriate management language for interaction becomes very important for the learner. How native speakers handle these kinds of tasks has been investigated partially by conversational analysis

Discourse and the Sentence What are discourse features of language concerned with ? - Organizing large structures of text like … ( interactions , conversations , paragraphs , chapters , or speeches ) . In addition to features within sentences , such as individual words like “ well “ , “ actually “ , and “you know “.

Examples of structural features within sentences which , however , would occur in a discourse syllabus would be tails , cleft sentences , and per formatives Tails : Tails or final-position elements , may be used to focus or emphasize a theme in interpersonal conversation, picking up and expanding a topic signalled perhaps only by a pronoun in sentence initial position : e.g. : They are very good , those French ones. They are particularly common in advice -giving situations . They would rarely be appropriate in writing . Tails are suggested as an important syllabus element since in their corpus data , their use is so remarkably frequent .

Cleft sentences : Clefts are somewhat puzzling since their obvious discourse function is to focus the new information by putting a place-holder in initial position of the sentence but of course the main burden of the sentence is actually postponed . Their use in advice in warnings is very frequent : For example .. What I would do is ring the helpline.

Performatives : These are verbs which in special cases are sufficient for performing the action they describe rather than just reporting or describing it . They constitute the action itself . Contrast verb like drive , draw , eat , run All of which describe everyday actions in the real world , with promise , deny , refute , apologize These describes actions which are essentially linguistic in performance . Moreover , there is a difference between using the verb to report that the linguistic action occurs and actually doing it ; He promised to give you a thousand pounds . In which no promise is made , contrasted with ; I promise to give you a thousand pounds .

Moreover , there is a difference between using the verb to report that the linguistic action occurs and actually doing it ; He promised to give you a thousand pounds . In which no promise is made , contrasted with ; I promise to give you a thousand pounds . Second language learner has to learn the culturally acceptable ways of performing the discourse function required.

Apology in Hebrew involves : 1- an expression of apology 2- an explanation 3- an acknowledgement of responsibility 4- an offer of repair 5- a promis of forbearance e ( with intensifier; I am really sorry ) ( I did not see you in time ) ( It was my fault ) ( Let me get you some help ) ( promise not to do it again )

Pedagogically , this sets an example of language problem and strategic problem Students responded better to direct information about this kind of L2 use than indirect practice or discovery modes of teaching , which in turn implies that accomplishment of interpersonal functions through the structuring speech acts should be an explicit syllabus item .

Sumaiya AL-Ansari Samah AL-Hazmi Sumaiya AL-Gamdi Sahar AL-Dahiri Done by: Sumaiya AL-Ansari Samah AL-Hazmi Sumaiya AL-Gamdi Sahar AL-Dahiri