Practicas Discursivas de la Comunicación Escrita 4

1. “DISCOURSE AND CONTEXT
IN LANGUAGE TEACHING”
MARIANNE CELCE-MURCIA
ELITE OLSHTAIN

2. CHAPTER 7
READING SKILL
IN A
SECOND OR FOREIGN
LANGUAGE

3. THE INTERACTIVE NATURE OF THE READING PROCESS
It is an INTERACTIVE PROCESS because it implies three participants.
● The writer
● The text
● The reader
This process also implies three simultaneous tasks
● DECODING the message by recognizing the written signs
● INTERPRETING the message by assigning meaning to the words
● UNDERSTANDING what the author’s intention was

4. PSYCHOLINGUISTIC - COGNITIVE APPROACH TO READING
This process ...
● is LEARNER-CENTERED
● places cognitive development and text processing in the middle of its view on
reading
● SCHEMA or SCHEMATA is key and central in this approach
● Theorists in this approach were key in
changing teaching methodologies from a
traditional focus to an interactive and
collaborative view

5. APPROACHES TO READING: BOTTOM-UP
Bottom-up approaches view reading as a series of stages that
take place in fixed order from sensory input to
comprehension.
This process happens when someone tries to understand a
text by looking at individual words, sounds or grammatical
characteristics.

6. APPROACHES TO READING:
TOP-DOWN
Top-down approaches view the
interpretation process as a continuum
of changing hypothesis about the
incoming information.
It happens when someone uses
background or previous information
(SCHEMA) to predict what the text is
going to be about.

7. Although they are different processes,
they take place simultaneously.
It’s the integration of both
what leads to interpretation
and integration of the written
text and creates the
interactive reading process.

8. TOP-DOWN PROCESS BOTTOM-UP PROCESS
➔ Referred to as KNOWLEDGE or
CONCEPT-DRIVEN approach
➔ Reader bound approach
➔ Relies on the reader’s global
interpretation process
➔ Recruits the reader’s background
knowledge of both content and
genre and his or her expectations
and experiences
➔ Easier and more effective process
when the reader is familiar with the
topic
➔ Referred to as DATA-DRIVEN
approach
➔ Text bound approach
➔ Relies on the linguistic information,
both semantic and syntactic

9. “GOOD AND EFFECTIVE READING MUST COMBINE
BOTH RAPID AND ACCURATE RECOGNITION AND
DECODING OF LETTER, WORDS WITH SENSIBLE,
GLOBAL PREDICTIONS RELATED TO THE TEXT AS A
WHOLE”

10. THE EFFECTIVE READER
A good reader
● adjusts to the material at hand and fit his/her skills to the type of text
● knows when to abandon unsuccessful strategies of reading and select new
ones
● knows how to re-implement old strategies
● knows when and how to combine strategies that seem to work best
● makes constant adjustments to the text by recruiting background knowledge
for top-down processing and changes strategies to fit bottom-up decoding of
the text
● combines both processes in the most efficient way in order to understand the
text
● is capable of decoding and recognizing words, expressions and phrases
quickly
● continuously match old and new information and experience

11. METACOGNITION KNOWLEDGE
It’s important to encourage the development of METACOGNITION to be aware of the
strategies and processing techniques in order to be able to use them consciously.
This metacognitive knowledge connects top-down and bottom-up processes.

12. FEATURES OF A WELL-WRITTEN TEXT
COHERENCE
It is the quality of being logical and consistent and it’s achieved when ideas and
sentences are connected and flow together smoothly.
The coherence of a text is central and the cohesion is a linguistic consequence of it.
COHESION
It means tying up words, phrases, ideas, sentences and paragraphs together, to
create a text where the relationship between these elements is clear and logical to
the reader

13. DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED BY READERS WHEN READING
1. Sometimes it can be a mismatch between the reader’s view of the world and the
one presented in the text.
1. The interaction between new and old information
1. Too much reliance on text-based features via bottom-up resulting in text
boundaries

14. CHAPTER 8
WRITING SKILL
IN A
SECOND OR FOREIGN
LANGUAGE

15. WRITING AS COMMUNICATION
The writer COMMUNICATES her/his ideas in the form of a written text
and a reader EXTRACTS the ideas and their meanings.
Sometimes we write for ourselves: lists, notes for lectures, personal diaries
But the most of the time WE WRITE FOR OTHERS. We expect our message
to be comprehended

16. SPEECH AND WRITING
Two different points of view:
1) writing is different from speech:
-much more decontextualized production process
-the writer needs to continually consider and accommodate an absent
reader-audience to his/her ideas.
- writing competence develops a dependence on context for meaning.
1) writing is similar to speech:
-social view of the writing process
-writing as a monologic speech based on socialized dialogic speech

17. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN READING AND WRITING
● Both deal with the written text
● The language user begins with prior knowledge
● Language knowledge is important for bottom-up processing
● Metacognition plays a major role in both

18. A “reader-based” approach:
-use language, content, and conventions enable the reader to extract the
intended meaning effectively.
-the act of reading will be carried out at a time and place removed form and
independent act of writing.
-fully ‘committed’ both to the content and the form of the written text
-interaction is decontextualized.
A “writer-based”approach:
-most typical in some communities or specific writing context
-the purpose of the writing is to be understood by themselves (for instance
medical treatment or analysis)
DIFFERENT APPROACHES

19. A “good communicator” in writing: Being able to anticipate the readers’
needs when they read the text we are creating.
Novice writers difficulties:
-go through this process of reader-consideration
-decide how much has to be said on a particular topic or issue and how to
stay on the same topic without boring the reader.
Experienced writers are sensitive to the reader as well as to background
knowledge and potential content schemata and thus are able to use
elaboration skills to create a text that is comprehensible and
communicative in nature.

20. The expressivist versus the cognitive movements
Expressivist: writing as an act which leads to and encourages “self-
discovery”
The cognitivist: -“writing as a problem-solving activity” and therefore
emphasizes thinking and process in writing.
-writing requires the ability to work with higher-order thinking skills
-make a revision many times: require careful interaction between top-down
and bottom-up productions of the written text.
at the bottom-up level attention needs to be given to language features
and other conventions of the written text
and at the top-down the considerations require global planning.

21. The writer:
-is responsible for the communicative
potential of the text
-needs to imagine the audience
-take into consideration the reality in which
a text is written and the imaginated reality
in which the text will be read.
-thinks about “maxim of quantity”and
“maxim of relevance”

22. Writing as PROCESS
A writer who undertakes the task of
creating a written text for communication
purposes is faced with the need of organize
his/her thoughts into a sequence which
makes sense. There are different ways in
which individual writers approach writing
since the writing process is a personally
creative process

23. STRATEGIES AND STEPS IN CREATING COHERENCE
The writer is the responsible of creating a coherent text
The teacher is the responsible of giving STRATEGIES to do that.
EXTRATEXTUAL FEATURES
INTRATEXTUAL FEATURES
SOME ACTIVITIES TO MAKE STUDENTS AWARE OF THE IMPORTANCE OF
COHERENCE
- Sentences to be place in a logical order
IMPORTANT: THE CHOICE OF GENRE is RELATED TO THE PURPOSE OF
WRITING

24. CREATING a WELL-WRITTEN text
As a conclusion, It is possible to create a well-written text, however, we need work
on choosing proper lexical items and grammatical forms, appropriate use of
cohesive devices, and using proper punctuation and other details of form.