Recurrent problems in EFL students' texts: Pedagogy and functional grammar.

Mendoza

Congreso; Primera Conferencia Latino-americana de Lingüística Sistémico Funcional y la Enseñanza de la Gramática: Systemic functional linguistics in language education; 2004

Departamento de Inglés. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo

The Grammar II class taught at the School of Languages, U.N.C., follows the tenets of functional grammar, as proposed by Halliday (1994). Authors such as Downing and Locke (1992) and Lock (1996) also constitute useful bibliographic resources, since they provide clear examples and an accessible theoretical framework that can be used in the classroom. In an attempt to make students aware of the bases of text organization, we focus on topics such reference markers, lexical cohesion, syntactic and logico-semantic relations between clauses, information management, and mood and modality. After presenting, discussing and doing exercises on these various aspects of texts, we also work on text-building exercises in the hope that students will be able to produce cohesive and coherent texts that integrate all the information handled throughout the school year. According to students? comments and final exam results, however, we have to conclude that this integration is very difficult for the students and rarely transpires in their written production. In order to discern the major and most frequent problems, I plan to study the short texts written by the students in the 2003 November-December exams. The methodology to be used is based on the careful examination of data proposed by Glaser and Strauss (1967). The purpose behind this analysis is to find the main problems in text organization evidenced by the students' written samples so that we can target these difficulties head on with next year's students.