Straker Cook, R.H.

English

This study began by describing a particular set of problems
encountered in teaching English to overseas postgraduates in a
particular institution. But what attracted us to the Newcastle
situation in 1971 was a feeling that it was representative of the
difficulties faced by many other institutions proposing to offer EFL
tuition to students specialising in a variety of disciplines and.
studying them or researching in them through the medium of English.
It is hoped that some of the solutions which have been suggested here
will prove to be applicable to the development of a range of ESP
teaching materials.

Aural comprehension has been used to illustrate possible
applications of the descriptive system because it is one the
student's most urgent requirements when he arrives at the receiving
institution, and priority must be given to the development of suitable
practice materials. But the approach could well be applied to
training in productive skills, particularly to the verbal presentation
of reports and research proposals; for there are various speaking
situations in which overseas students may be called upon to produce
sustained monologue. Although the differences between written
discourse and monologue were stressed in Section 2.4.2, the similarities
are nonetheless sufficient to suggest that the descriptive apparatus
might be helpful in developing a functional approach to written
discourse, and eventually in the production of reading and writing
practice materials.

The system has certain shortcomings, of course, and would
no doubt benefit from application to a larger body of data. It was
suggested in Section 3.3.4 that the distribution of rhetorical
functions may well vary from discipline to discipline and even from
one topic to another: the system would be considerably refined if it
were called upon to handle samples of discourse from a carefully
selected range of disciplines. The system is clumsy in handling
discontinuous relationships at the rank of move: it is quite possible
that in the sequence c₁ + res + q, the qualification relates to the
causative rather than the resultative, and one could envisage
circumstances where several acts might intervene between the two.

What is more, it also fails to reveal complex discontinuous
relationships at higher levels of organisation, where a sequence of
episodes, say at D in the structure of an exposition, may not be
contiguously related. In the sequence .... m n o p..., it is quite
possible that n and o both depend directly from m, rather than o being
related linearly through n to o, and it is also quite possible that
they do not relate at all to p, that the line of argument runs from
m to p, leaving n and o as digressions. Of course, we have been
concerned with coherence rather than cohesion, and many of these
discontinuous relationships may well be indicated by devices of
cohesion. But it must also be said that just as the level of discourse
impinges upon the grammatical level at one end of the scale, so also
does it impinge at the other end on the level of content. Though
content analysis is clearly not a linguistic enterprise, there may be
pedagogical benefits to be derived from investigating the organisation
of the information itself. As we noted at the beginning of this
Section, in 4.1.1, the paramount question in comprehension is 'What
is the information the speaker is conveying? ', and at least in the case
of aural comprehension there is some justification for examining the
logical relationships inherent in the information conveyed.

Despite these shortcomings, it is felt that the descriptive
system has provided a coherent account of the structure of extended
monologue, and that this in turn can form the basis of comprehension
practice materials aimed specifically at an increased awareness of
the patterning of lecture discourse. One hopes that it will equip
the foreign student to extend and sustain his understanding of the
hours of lectures and talks to which he will be subjected, and that
he will less easily succumb to a seemingly endless flow of words

Straker Cook, R. H.

Edinburgh Research Archive

A communicative approach to the analysis of extended monlogue discourse and its relevance to the development of teaching materials for English special purposes

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A communicative approach to the analysis of extended monlogue discourse and its relevance to the development of teaching materials for English special purposes

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