Developing writing as a discourse skill

Fluency in writing

To be a fluent writer, it is necessary to write often and at length. It is also important to take into account sime advices:

• Think in English as you write: many students find difficult to think in English while they write. However, if you can do it while you speak and listen, you can do it while you write.
• Use the words you know: in writing, using the words you know means you should write your ideas using the words you are already comfortable with. So that, you can focus on ideas while you're writing.
• Keep riles in their place: too much emphasis on rules and grammar exrcises can hold back your development of fluency.

Children can be encouraged to choose and copy texts that they find interesting:items form the internet on their favorite pop star or player, or the rhymes learnt in class, or sections of their reading books that they enjoyed. The element of choice is to ensure that copying is meaningful and motivating. Another way to encourage extended writing is to ask children to write a jurnal, giving them a regular five or ten minutes in class to write whatever they want, or about a topic from the news that they are given, perhaps without worrying about correct spelling or grammar.

Complexity of written language.

In general, the level of the language that pupils write will lag slightly behind the level that they are comfortable with in speaking and listening.

The complexity of the written language depends on:

• the length and the purpose of writing
• the style and structure of the writing
• the content of the writing

And all these aspects depend on the level of language of the students.

*This was taken from  "teaching languages to young learners" by Lynne Cameron  pages 154 - 155.Cambridge Language Teaching Lybrary.

Learning to write for audience

The ability to write for an audinece requires selecting and adapting language so that other people can make sence of the writer's ideas and arguments. When  we are writing for an audience we have totake into acount the level, agem background knowledge of our audience and if we are going to use formal or informal language.

Writing for an audience should have a clear Audience, Purpose and Topic (APT). When we are writing in a Foreign Language (FL) we have to think beyond writing, we have to think about grammar and vocabulary. Activities in which we can practice this vocabulary and grammar are: letters and e-mail messages, articles about class events, essays on new films, simple stories, etc.

If we focus on how to teach children to write we have to take into account all the aspects mentioned previously and also teach them the following aspects:

• Editing drafts; these helo strudents to make some changes in their writing, if it is necessary
• Checking work with others; after they edited their first drafts they can check their writing with their classmates by reading it aloud in front of the group and after read it s/he can ask if her/his writing is understandable and if the topic is interesting
• Pairs-checking; after they edited and read aloud their writing they can chack with a partner if they have to make some changes on their final writing.

Written and spoken discourse

Written Discourse is:

• More grammatical
• More formal
• Has richer vocabulary
• Is stylistically more elegant
• Is planned

Spoken discourse is:

• The primary form of language
• There are not fully convey
• Is unplanned

Differences:

1. Time pressure: in spoken discourse we have little opportunity to come back and correct anything. In written we can re-read and re-write what we do not like.
2. The presence or absence of the audience: in spoken discourse we have a feedback immediatly. In written discourse we have to be sure that we write clear and express exaclty the meaning we intended to convey.

Main Features:

• Spoken discourse: hesitations, body language, strees and intonation, the main unit of grammar is the clause, noun and phrases ar short and post modification is less frequently, vague language is common, lexical density is low, vocabulary consist mainly of high frequency items, deixix (context), nominalization is rare, interactive expressions are frequently used, repetition and paraphrase are common.
• Written discourse: deletions, additions and correction are found in drafts, mod and attitude are conveyed mainly thourgh lexical choices, the main unit of grammar is the sentence often with complex subordinate clauses, noun and phrases are often long with pre- and porst modification, vocabulary is more specific and precise, lexical density is high, vocabulary often includes items that are rare of low frequency, reference outside the text is usually to background knowledge, nominalization is frequently, interactive expressions are uncommon, repetition and paraphrase are common.

Functional Grammar

Functional grammar is the general theory of the organization of natural language. FG wishes to be a theory whis is "functional" in at least three different, though interreleted senses:

• it takes a functional view on the nature of language
• it attaches primary importance to functional relations at different levels in the organization of grammar
• it wishes to be practically applicable to the analysis of different aspects of language and language use.

Lexical functional grammar is a theory of grammar that is, in general terms, a theory of:

• Syntax (roughly, how words can be combined together to make larger phrases, such as sentences) define different prespectives though which states of affairs are presented in linguistic expressions.
• Morphology (how morphemes - parts of words, such as the  parts of writers, namely the verb write, the "agentive affixes" -er and the plural markes -s -can be combined to make up words)
• Semantics (how and why various words and combinations of words mean what they mean) define roles that participants play in states of affairs, as designated by predications.

In addition, grammar is often taken to include phonology (the study of the sound systems of human languages), but LFG has relatively little to say about this.
In LFG, there are 2 parallel levels of syntactic representation: constituent structure (c-structure) and functional structure (f-structure)

• C-structures have the form of context-free phrase structure trees.
• F-structure are seen of pairs of attributes and values: attributes may be features, such as tense and gender, or functions, such as subject and object.

the names of theory emphasizes an important difference between LFG and the Chomsky tradition from which it developed: many phenomena are though to be more naturally analysed in terms of grammatical functions as represented in the lexicon or in F-structure, rather than on the level of phrase structure. An example is the alternation between active and passive, which rather than beign treated as transformation, is handled in the lexicon. Grammatical functions are not derived from the phrase structure configurations, but are represented at the parallel level of functional structure.