The chapter focuses on reading skills development and difficulties for second language learners. There are bottom-up and top-down approaches to reading. Good readers use strategies like predicting, monitoring comprehension, and asking questions. Well-written texts have coherence and cohesion. Difficulties include global issues, grammar, discourse features, and unfamiliar vocabulary. Developing reading requires guided independent practice, metacognition, and exposure to varied texts and genres. Strategies include activating background knowledge, understanding text structure, and making predictions.

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.