Writing in foreign language degree courses: the case of English in college entrance
Keywords:
writing, foreign language, functional systemic linguistics, textual genresAbstract
In this article a characterization of the descriptive texts written by students entering the English Teaching, Translation and Investigation degree courses of a public university will be made. This characterization is part of an investigation that aims to diagnose the situation of incoming students regarding the expression of ideas and the organization of their texts in the foreign language (English) and, on this basis, improve prevailing pedagogical practices in both the middle school and the university. In this work we will focus on the preliminary analysis or diagnosis, which will serve as the basis for achieving the second objective. The study proposes the analysis of two main variables taken from functional systemic linguistics: Field and Mode. These variables will be studied from the observable dimensions in the texts produced by the students. In relation to the variable Field, the processes, circumstances, logical semantic relationships will be examined, and in relation to the variable Mode, the sequence of phases in the description, cohesion, theme-rheme and information flow will be studied. The corpus is made up of descriptions produced by two representative groups of the incoming population.
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