Beyond the Sentence by Scott Thornbury

1. Summary: Chapter 2 to 6

2. What makes a text?
 Types of text we can engage with in everyday life:
 Radio news (spoken receptive)
 Pages of a novel (written, receptive)
 Sporadic conversation with a partner (spoken
interactive)
 Reading and responding an e-mail (written, receptive)
 Making shopping lists (written, productive)
 Writing a paragraph (written productive)

3. >texts are
 Self-contained
 Well-formed
 Hang together
 Make sense
 Have a clear communicative purpose
 Recognizable text types
 Appropriate to their context

4. >cohesion
Cohesive devices
levels
Lexical
cohesion
Direct repetition,
word families,
synonyms, antonyms
Words from the same
semantic field, lexical
chains and lists.
Substitution
Grammatical
cohesion
Reference
Substitution of clause
element
Ellipsis of clause
elements
Conjuncts (linkers)
Comparatives
tenses
Rhetorical
cohesion
Question-answer
Parallelism

5. >reference
 Types of reference
It is commonly achieved through the
use of articles and pronouns
Anaphoric
reference:
Back reference
Cataphoric
reference:
The referring
word anticipate
the referent

6. >nominalizationIt is a process to make reference less focused, more
general way, using certain nouns.
>conjunctsContribute to the unity
and relation between
parts of the texts.
categories
>additive
>adversative
>causal
>temporal

7. >what makes a text
make sense?
>coherence
Capacity of the text to
make sense, it is
divided into two
perspective:
Micro-level coherence
topic and comment

8. >micro-level: topic and comment
Topic:
Given information
Comment:
New information
End-weight: it’s the
placement of new
infomation in the
latter part of the clause
Passive construction:
to place the object in
the topic slot and
placing new
information in the
comment slot
Cleft Sentences: these
sentences are used to
alter the normal order of
sentences elements to
place special enphasis on
the new information.

9. >macro-level coherence: topic
 at the macro-level texts achieve coherence because they
are obviously about something. That is, there is an
identifiable topic or topics.
Key words
Script
Schema
ArethAre words that occur with frequency of
these same words
Is the knowledge represented mentally
Are the wsys in which we expect things to
happen

10. >spoken texts
>text in context
Pragmatics
Study of language in its
contexts in use, and how
these contexts impact on
the way we produce and
interpret text.
Text type
Audience
Topic
Purpose
Mode
To take into
considerationa at the
time of creating texts

11. >context, text type and text
 There is a direct relation between text, text type and
context in which the text operates.
Context
Text type
text

12. >text functions
 Michael Halliday defined text as “language that is
functional”
>macro-functions: :
Refering Expressing Regulating Interacting Playing
using language to
convey or solicit
information
feelings: saying
what you like or
dislike
Using
language to
influence
people and
get things
done, such as
requesting,
ordering,
promising,
warning
Usinf
language to
mantain
social
relations
Using
language
imaginatively
and playfully.

13. >context and register
Possible components of the contexts that might impact the
language choices in texts production:
FIELD
The what of the situation:
what kind of social activity
is going on, and about what
kind of topic
TENOR
The who of the situation:
the participants, the
relationship and so on.
MODE
The how of the situation:
the means by which the text
is being created .
These
contextual
dimensions
determine the
REGISTER of
the resulting
text

14. >classroom texts
>text Needs
To be
Intelligible
Degree of
simplification
(in terms of
syntax and
vocabulary)
The writer
should keep the
audience in
mind, he should
respect the
“tenor”

15. >authentic texts
Types of
authentic
texts Authentic
Authentic texts adapted
for classroom use
Completely contrived
Grading the
tasks
Grade the task
not the text.

16. >authentic tasks
Purpose of the
classroom texts
linguistic For skill
development
or strategies
Level of
difficulty of
text will
depend on:
•Vocabulary
•Specialized or
unspecialized
•Idiomatic or
not idiomatic
•The grammar
of syntax
complexity
•The register
(formal/inform
al)
•Discourse
structure
•Top-
down/bottom-
up factors

17. >classroom applications
TASK-ADAPTATION
STRATEGIES
TASK-DESIGN
STRATEGIES
Shortening
Segmenting
Simplifying
Glossing
Co-textualizing
Pre-teaching
Brainstorming
Predicting
Initial
skimming
While-reading /
while-listening

18. >designing tasks
TAVI TALO
TEXT AS A VEHICLE OF
INFORMATION
TEXT AS LINGUISTIC
OBJECT
The information
within the text is
seen as more
important than
language.
Text is used for
language work,
specially
vocabulary or
grammar.
A good strategy is to combine both purposes in the one
text

19. >text-based syllabuses
This approach focuses on texts rather
than on language structures.
These criterions should be follow for
selecting material
frequency usefulness Difficulty

20. >literary text
Literary
texts
They are a type of
text that are neither
intended, neither to
display, not to
inform.
•Have easthetic function
•Seduce through
expressivity
•Provoke feelings
•Are subjective
•Produce effects
•Are metaphoric
•Are iconical
•Are playful
•Are highly valued by
cultures

21. >bibliography
Thornbury, Scott (2005) Beyond the Sentence.
Introducing Discourse Analysis. UK,
Macmillan. Chapters 2-3-5-6-7