María Martínez Lirola

Departamento De Filología Inglesa, Universidad De Alicante, Spain

The Importance of Teaching Text Linguistics to Increase Students’ Literacy

In this presentation we intend to demonstrate that the study of Text Linguistics helps students to increase their level of literacy. We will point out that Text Linguistics has a crucial role in literacy since it concentrates in the production and analysis of texts in a given language. We will highlight the relationship between, literacy, Text Linguistics and effective writing with an applied educational emphasis, using Systemic Functional Grammar. This framework of analysis will be used to evaluate students’ writing and reflect on the relationship between linguistic links across sentences and textual coherence.

We have analysed a corpus of different essays written in English by university students and have indicated the main errors in them, such as faulty reference. After having studied and classified the main errors in the essays we decided to give emphasis to Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) types of cohesive devices (reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion) so that students could improve their level of literacy.

We have studied students’ essays during the first and second semesters and have observed that as students advanced in the study of Text Linguistics, their level of literacy also improved. The improvement of literacy in the essays has been analysed by paying attention to two main levels: cohesive structure and theme/rheme patterns.

References:

Biber, et al. (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, Essex: Longman.