FINAL_WORK_READING

Introduction

“Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings;

it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other,

and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective.”

Kenneth L. Pike

McCarthy (1993) states that written discourse analysis is not a new method for teaching languages. Rather, it is “. . . a fundamentally different way of looking at language compared with sentence-dominated models" (p. 170). Written text conforms to rules that most successful writers unconsciously follow and native readers unconsciously expect to find. By studying the textual and lexical elements of these texts, one can learn to regularly recognize the overall structure of a text.

Written Discourse includes some medium which keeps record of the conveyed message, it develops in space in that it needs a means to carry the information. The author of the text does not often know who is going to read the text; as a result he cannot adjust to readers' specific expectations. The writer is frequently able to consider the content of his work for almost unlimited period of time which makes it more coherent, having complex syntax. What is more, the reader might not instantly respond to the text, ask for clarification, hence neat message organization, division to paragraphs, layout are of vital importance to make comprehension easier.

In this paper the purpose is to analyze a student’s writing to come up with some strategies and activities which help him or her to improve his or her writing. First of all it is necessary to describe the student.

Profile

This is a 14 year-student of Secondary with a B1 level of English. She has been studying English since Kindergarten, which is for about nine years. She is a very committed student; hardworking, intelligent. She comes from a wealthy and good family.

In this report the purpose of the student is to give an opinion about her favorite character from a movie, a story, a TV program, etc. The intended audiences are her friends, the teacher, classmates or even family members.

Analysis

Every text is a net in which words and sentences get organized to form paragraphs which together produce a communicative unit with a meaning and global sense. In that sense, we need to take into account that in every text it is precise that its lexis and linguistic register concur with the communicative situation in which it takes place.

According to what was previously stated in this paper, I am going to analyze my student´s writing. She was asked to write about a character from a movie, a story, a novel or a TV program, that she like or dislike, and also she was supposed to support her comments.

She starts the text by giving it a title (something that wasn´t in the instructions). Then she starts writing about the character but then she makes a twist and starts narrating the movie. Even though she lost the main purpose of her writing, this is cohesive and coherent. It is cohesive because she uses some connectors like, because and but. She repeats words to connect the different parts of the paragraph, example: “When she returned to Acapulco she only wanted to do one thing.” Besides she substitutes words trying not to be repetitive, example: Julie become in the worst mother ever in USA and Mexico with the movie “Instructions not included”. But some people disagree with this, because after she left her daughter with her dad,” She uses punctuation marks correctly which is also a resource of cohesion since they set up relations between the ideas expressed in the sentences of a paragraph, allowing the reader to comprehend the text.

She also narrates the story in the order the events happened at the movie so, that makes the text coherent. On the other hand the lexis used in the text is adequate to the intended audience. It is possible to identify the main idea of each paragraph.

Conclusion

Even though there are several grammar and spelling mistakes, I think the text is cohesive and coherent. I think she did a good work but she need to improve her listening skills to follow the instructions. She did not do what she was asked to. I believe this happened because she did not listen to the instructions carefully. She needs to learn more connectors.

I need to help her to follow the steps on the writing process so, first I need to introduce these steps in the class. First it is necessary to plan what we want to write, the theme, the purpose and organize ideas so we can structure them later on. Then we are going to write, the third step is to check our writing and then rewrite. We need to know the theme, we want to write about. I need to remind my students that it is usually easier and more effective for them to write about a topic they are familiar with or that relates to their own personal interests.

I also need to help them practice identifying the target audience and purpose for writing in a variety

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