Tense-aspect choices in three discourse types: Some pedagogical suggestions for EFL situations

Florianópolis

Congreso; 4th ALSFAL Conference of the Latin American Systemic Linguistics Association; 2008

Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC)

The purpose of this essay is to show how a systemic-functional approach can contribute to the teaching of writing in EFL situations. The discussion centers on pedagogical strategies meant to raise EFL students? awareness about the relationship between various types of texts and the range of verb tenses and aspectual choices usually featured in those texts. Following register and genre studies, I highlight common threads and functions within three genres: descriptive, narrative and argumentative. The texts that make up the set of teaching materials discussed in this essay have been drawn from various on-line publications. Similarities between sample texts belonging to a same genre will be pointed out so that the logic behind the selection of tense and aspect can be identified and later exploited in the language class. Working with these materials should help intermediate-level EFL students visualize relationships between particular lexico-grammatical choices and text types.