Texts you engage in… (receptively or productively)

(Scott Thornbury, 2008)

0 radio news
0 novels
0 sporadic conversations
0 reading and responding e-mails
0 making shopping lists
0 consulting references
0 writing a paragraph
 Text or non Text
1.

For the perfect cup. Use one tea bag per

person and add freshly drawn boiling water.
Leave standing for three to five minutes
before stirring gently. Can be served with or
without milk and sugar.
2.

Scott,
Thanks for sending me the disk.
Sandy Mackay
3.
1. The university has got a part.
2. It has got a modern tram system.
3. He has got a swimming pool.
4. I have got tickets for the theatre
5. Rio has got some beautiful beaches.
6. She has got a good view from the window
4.
Suzy Stressed gets up late and has a shower. She
doesn’t have breakfast. She goes to work by car. She
gets to work at five to nine. She uses the lift. At
eleven o’clock she has a cigarette and a black coffee.
Suzy has lunch at half past one. She finishes work at
six o’clock. Then she goes to an Italian class. She
gets home late. After that she watches TV. She has
dinner at eleven o’clock. She goes to bed very late.
Suzy is very stressed. Do you like Suzy?
0 5. 0 6.

I like a so go
pumpkin. go so
I like a celery. sl ow
Go toward the go oh
21st century. low oh
oh
07

YOU ARE NOW

ENTERING
THE HUMAN HEART
The 7 Texts – language events
0 Recognizable text type?
0 Clear communicative purpose?
0 Display unity?
0 Logical organization (beginning, middle, end)?
0 Well-formedness?
0 Appropriacy?
 Texts …
0 are self contained;
0 are well-formed
0 hang together (cohesive)
0 make sense (coherent)
0 have clear communicative purpose
0 are recognizable text types
0 were appropriate to their contexts of use
 Text (Widdowson 2007:4)
0 “A text can be defined as an actual use of language, as
distinct from a sentence which is an abstract unit of
linguistic analysis. … it has been produced for a
communicative purpose.”
0 For people, a text is not something to analyse; it is
something to act upon.
0 “… we relate the text not only to the actual situational
context in which we find it, but to the abstract context
of what we know to be conventional.” (p.5)
 KEEP OFF THE GRASS

HANDLE WITH CARE

KEEP AWAY FROM CHILDREN

THIS SIDE UP
 Text in context
0 Which grass?
0 What to handle?
0 What should be kept away?
0 Which side?
These texts designed to be directly acted upon - to get
things done.
 CULTURE
Genre (Purpose)

Situation

Who is involved?
(Tenor)

Subject matter Channel

(Field) (Mode)

Register

TEXT
 Text
0 It is a semantic unit.
0 Something is called a text when it is meaningful.
0 It is spoken and written.
0 It is not a phonological or a graphological unit.
0 It occurs in a context of situation.
 Context of situation
There are three elements
0 Subject matter (field)
0 Participants involved (tenor)
0 Channel (mode)
 More on Context (Widdowson, 2007)

0 “We only produce language when we have to occasion

to use it, and the occasions for use occur in the
continuous and changing contexts of our daily life.”
(p19)
0 Here and now - deixis
The chalk is over there.
Pass me the tape measure.
There’s a page missing.
I like the look of that.
Is that the time?
 (Widdowson. p 20)
0 People make sense of what is said by making a
connection between the language and the physical
context of the utterance – over there, this one etc.
0 But being present in the physical situation is not a
guarantee that listeners will make the required
connection: they may still fail to identify just what is
being indicated.
0 …, context is not an external set of circumstances but a
selection of them internally represented in mind.
0 Coontext, then, is an abstract representation of a state
of affairs
 Context of culture
0 Every culture produces text types.
0 A text type is a genre
0 Two general purposes: Transactional and
Interpersonal genres
0 Transactional: to get something done
0 Interpersonal: for different purposes of
communication
 Basic English genres
0 Procedure 0 News item
0 Descriptive 0 Discussion
0 Narrative 0 Explanation
0 Recount 0 Exposition
0 report 0 Review
 Text analysis
0 Needs linguistic analysis
0 Interpretation is based on linguistic evidence
0 Text analysts need the right ‘knife’ to cut the right
‘bread’
0 Different ‘knives’ for different ‘bread’
 Discourse analysis
0 How texts relate to contexts of situation and context of
culture
0 How texts are produced as a social practice
0 What texts tell us about happenings, what people think,
believe etc.
0 How texts represent ideology (power struggle etc.)
 Text & Discourse Analyses
(Nunan, 1993)

0 Text analysis is the study of formal linguistic

devices that distinguish a text from random
sentences.
0 Discourse analysts study these text-forming
devices with reference to the purposes and
functions for which the discourse was produced,
and the context within which the discourse was
created. The ultimate goal is to show how the
linguistic elements enable language users to
communicate.
Text and
0 Text are uses Discourse
of language Analysis (Widdowson,
2007:6)
0 Texts have different communicative purposes: to get
the message across, to explain, to persuade etc.
0 We refer to these complex communicative purposes as
the discourse that underlies the text and motivates
its production in the first place.
0 People interpret the text as discourse that makes
sense for them.
 (Widdowson, 2007:6)

“But at the receiving end readers and listeners… have to

make meaning out of the text to make it a
communicative reality. In other words, they have to
interpret the text as a discourse that makes sense to
them. Text, in this view do not contain meaning, but are
used to mediate it across discourses.”
“ Sometimes … the mediation is straightforward: what
the text means to the reader will generally match up
with what the producer of the text means by it.”
 (Widdowson, 2007:7)

“Obviously we must generally assume that texts will

serve to mediate some convergence between dicourses,
or otherwise no communication would take place at
all… but no matter how explicitly we think we have
textualized what we want to say, there is always the
possibility that it will be interpreted otherwise.”
“So the term discourse is taken here to refer to both to
what a text producer meant by a text and what a text
means to the receiver.”
 (Widdowson, 2007:9)

“When people communicate each other, they draw on

the semantic resources encoded in the language to key
into a context they assume to be shared so as to enact a
discourse… to get their intended messages across to
some second person party. The linguistic trace of this
process is a text.”