Reflection

A Summary of Chapter Two: Text and Discourse
in Teaching Reading Skills

Chapter Two in Teaching Reading Skills delves more into the writer’s role in the reading process. Discourse analysis is the linguistic study of how discourse is produced and organized, and a closely associated discipline to this analysis is call pragmatics. Pragmatics focuses on the interaction between writer and reader and studies how the reader interprets the writer’s messages.

There are four kinds of meaning in a text: conceptual, prepositional, contextual and pragmatic. Conceptual meaning means that the word in a text can have its own meaning; every lexical item have a concept. Prepositional meaning argues that a sentence have its own signification (or we may say, its plain sense); we have to have a prepositional meaning of a sentence its own to approve or deny a concept. Contextual meaning is also known as force, or functional value. A sentence has a force (functional value) of explanation or justification for other sentences/prepositions. Pragmatic meaning involves interaction between the message giver and the message taker. The intonation and the attitude of a message giver could have pragmatic meaning to a message taker.

The plain sense (signification) of a sentence could be the same in many situations while the value of a sentence may be quite different under different circumstances. The plain sense deals more about what writer says while the value of a sentence deals more about why writer says.

In order to make a story coherent, various cohesive devices are used to tighten the relationship among sentences. Coherence of a text depends on the value of sentences. Therefore, we can find a coherent discourse without cohesion (cohesive devices), because readers assume there is a relationship among sentences and seek it. Discourse markers such as 'but' and 'or' help readers to know the intended value of the sentence.

The following three aspects could influence the rhetorical acts (ex: explaining, or defining): the topic, the writer’s purpose, and the audience that he bears in mind. The way the underlying ideas are organized is called rhetorical structure. This is why a children’s story don’t have the same structure as a textbook.

Generally, a sentence begins by stating its theme (topic) and go on to rheme (further information, or comment). When a writer tries to organize sequences of sentences, some tricks are used. For example, using a topic sentence to sum up the main idea of a paragraph is a good way to organize sentences in a text. The organization beyond the paragraph level (i.e. the whole text) is usually hierarchical. Different types of text (genres) tend to be differently organized.

註：
signification我譯為「外在字面語義」
value譯為「內涵核心語義」
coherence譯為「上下文連貫性」
cohesion譯為「連貫字句」
cohesive devices譯為「連貫技巧」
discourse marker譯為「連貫字眼」