Langugae Teaching Methodology
A Text for Teacher
Chapter Four (Published with Permission).
Reading: A Discourse Perspective
Introduction
This chapter takes up some
of the central themes which have been developing in the two preceding chapters
and applies them to the development of reading in a second or foreign language.
Some of the key theoretical and empirical
perspectives on the nature of reading and learning to read are examined
in the first section of the chapter. We then look at ways in which this
theoretical and empirical work has found its way into the classroom through
teaching materials and techniques. The key questions addressed in this chapter
are:
- What is meant by bottom-up
and top-down approaches to reading?
- What is meant by schema
theory, and what is it s influence on reading theory and
practice?
- How does background
knowledge influence the reading process?
- In what way can reading be
said to be a social process?
- What are the
characteristics of an effective reading lesson?
Bottom-up and top-down views
on reading
In Chapter 21 outlined two
different views on the nature of listening: the bottom-up view, which suggests
that successful listening is a matter of decoding the individual sounds we hear
to derive the meaning of words and thence utterances; and the top-down view,
which suggests that we use discoursal and real-world knowledge to construct and
interpret aural messages. These two competing models of language processing have
also had a central place in the debate on the nature of reading
comprehension.
Until comparatively recently, the bottom-up approach dominated both first
and second language research and theory. According to Cambourne (1979), it was
the basis of the vast majority of reading schemes. Many people will recall with
distaste the basic primers with their highly improbable stories which were used
to develop early literacy skills. Although there is now a great deal of evidence
which points to the inadequacy of the approach, it still has many adherents
within the teaching profession. In addition, the ‘back-to-basics’ movement and
introduction of ‘basic’ skills testing in schools indicates that the approach
has a good deal of support beyond the profession itself.
The central notion behind the bottom-up approach is that reading is
basically a matter of decoding a series of written symbols into their aural
equivalents. Cambourne, who uses the term ‘outside-in’ rather than bottom-up,
provides the following illustration of how the process is supposed to
work:
According to this model, the reader processes each letter as it is
encountered. These letters, or graphemes are matched with the phonemes of the
language, which it is assumed the reader already knows. These phonemes, the
minimal units of meaning in the sound system of the language, are blended
together to form words (Phonemes are the individual units of sound in a
language.) The derivation of meaning is thus the end process in which the
language is translated from one form of symbolic representation to another.
One reason for the survival of this approach in the face or criticism is
that it seems a reasonable and logical explanation of what happens when we read.
Letters do represent sounds, and despite the fact that in English twenty-six
written symbols have to represent over forty aural symbols, there is a degree of
consistency. On the surface, then, it seems more logical to teach initial
readers to utilize the systematic correspondences between written and spoken
symbols than to teach them to recognize every letter and word they encounter by
memorizing its unique configuration and shape (a practice favoured by proponents
of the ‘whole-word’ approach.)
One of the assumptions underlying this phonics approach is that once a
reader has blended the sounds together to form a word, that word will then be
recognized. In other words, it is assumed that the reader possesses an oral
vocabulary which is extensive enough to allow decoding to proceed. This
assumption is not one that can be made with second language learners for whom
any form of reading instruction ought to be linked with intensive aural
vocabulary development. In fact, the assumption that phonic analysis skills are
all that is needed to become a successful independent reader is questionable
with first as well as second language readers. Most teachers of reading have
encountered children who are able to decode print after a fashion and thereby
‘read’ without actually extracting meaning from the text.
A number of other major criticisms have been made of the phonics
approach. Much of this criticism is based on research into human memory. In the
first place, with only twenty-six letters to represent over forty sounds in
English, spelling-to-sound correspondences are both complex and unpredictable.
It was this realization which led to the development of primers, in which
stories were composed of words which did have regular sound/symbol
correspondences. Unfortunately, as many of the most common English words have
irregular spellings and were therefore excluded, the stories in primers tended
to be unnatural and tedious.
Research into human memory also provides counterfactual evidence. It has
been shown that the serial processing of every letter in a text would slow
reading up to the shown that the serial processing of every letter in a text
would slow reading up to the point where it would be very difficult for meaning
to be retained. An early study by Kolers and Katzmann (1966), for example,
demonstrated that it takes from a quarter to a third of a second to recognize
and assign the appropriate phonemic sound to a given grapheme. At this rate,
given the average length of English words, readers would only be able to process
around 60 words per minute. In fact, it has been demonstrated that the average
reader can read and comprehend around 250-350 words per minute. Given the fact
that we can only hold in working memory about seven items at a time, readers
would, under the bottom-up model, very often forget the beginning of a sentence
(and perhaps even a word) before they have reached the
end.
Smith (1978) has pointed out that the serial processing operations
underlying the phonics approach are also contradicted by the fact that it is
often impossible to make decisions about how upcoming letters and words ought to
sound until the context provided by the rank above the one containing the item
has been understood. Thus, in order to assign a phonemic value to a grapheme it
is often necessary to know the meaning of the word containing the grapheme. If,
for example, in reading a text one came across the graphemic sequence ‘ho--’, it
would be impossible to assign a value to ‘o’ until one knew whether the whole
word were ‘house’, ‘horse’, ‘hot’, ‘hoot’, etc. In the same way, it is
impossible to assign a phonemic value to the vowel sequence in the word ‘read’
until it is known whether the
sentence containing the word is referring to the present or the past. Additional
evidence against the notion that reading proceeds through the serial processing
of ever larger units of language has come from a line of research initiated by
Goodman and Burke (1972). This research involved the analysis of errors made by
the reader when reading aloud. Errors, termed ‘miscues’ by Goodman and Burke,
provide evidence that something more than mechanical decoding is going on when
readers process texts. The found that in many instances deviations from what was
actually written on the page made sense semantically – for example, a child
might read the sentence ‘My father speaks Spanish’ as ‘My Dad speaks Spanish’. (
If the child read ‘My feather speaks Spanish’, this would be evidence that
he/she is not reading for meaning, but is decoding
mechanically.)
Insights from sources such as the Reading Miscue Inventory led to the
postulation of an alternative to the bottom-up, phonics approach. This has
become known as the top-down or psycholinguistic approach to reading. As with
the bottom-up models, there are a number of variations in this approach, but
basically all agree that the reader rather than the text is at the heart of the
reading process. Cambourne (1979) provides the following schematization of the
approach.
From the diagram, it can be seen that this approach emphasizes the
reconstruction of meaning rather than the decoding of form. The interaction of
the reader and the text is central to the process, and readers bring to this
interaction their knowledge of the subject at hand, knowledge of and
expectations about how language works, motivation, interest and attitudes
towards the content of the text. Rather than decoding each symbol, or even every
word, the reader forms hypotheses about text elements and then ‘samples’ the
text to determine whether or not the hypotheses are
correct.
Oller (1979) also stresses the importance of taking into consideration
psychological as well as linguistic factors in accounting how people read. He
points out that the link between our knowledge of linguistic forms and our
knowledge of the world is very close, and hat this has a number of implications
for discourse processing. Firstly, it suggests that the more predictable a
sequence of linguistic elements, the more readily a text will be processes. It
has been suggested that texts for initial first language readers should come
close to the oral language of the reader. (The fact that phonics primers written
in phonically regularized language present relatively unpredictable language at
the levels of clause and text probably helps explain the difficulty many readers
have with them.) Even second language learners, despite their limited knowledge
of linguistic forms, should be assisted by texts which consist of more natural
sequences of elements at the levels of word, clause and text. A second way of
exploiting the relationship between linguistic and extra linguistic worlds is to
ensure not only that linguistic elements are more predictable but also that the
experiential content is more familiar and therefore more predictable. (See also
Alderson and Urquhart’s (1984) ‘text-reader-task’ structure for characterizing
foreign language reading.)
The significance of content familiarity for compensating limited
linguistic knowledge is explored more fully in the next section. Here we should
note that just as linguistic sequencing above the level of the grapheme/phoneme
was unfamiliar in phonics-based primers, so also was the content, the subject
matter often being remote from the experiences and interests of the readers (For
an extended discussion on linguistic and extra linguistic relationships, see
Smith 1978, and Oller 1979.)
One of the shortcomings of the top-down model is that is sometimes fails
to distinguish adequately between beginning readers and fluent readers. Smith,
for example, advances the view that fluent readers operate by recognizing words
on sight. In other words, fluent reading in non-ideographic languages such as
English proceeds in the same way as fluent reading in ideographic languages such
as Chinese, where readers must learn to identify characters by their shape. (in
ideographic languages, the characters do not represent sounds. Rather they are
derived from the objects and entities they are supposed to represent.) Of
course, it does not necessarily follow that, as fluent readers proceed through
sight recognition (assuming that this is how they read – something upon which
there is by no means universal
agreement), this is the way initial readers should be
taught.
Stanovich (1980), in his exhaustive review of reading models, criticizes
the top-down notion that reading proceeds through the generation of hypotheses
about up-coming text elements. He points out, for example, that the generation
of hypotheses in the manner suggested by Smith would actually be more time
consuming than decoding would be. In the light of the perceived deficiencies of
both bottom-up and top-down models, he proposes a third which he calls an
interactive-compensatory model. As the name indicates, this model suggests, that
readers process texts by utilizing information provided simultaneously from
several different sources, and that they can compensate for deficiencies at one
level by drawing on knowledge at other (either higher or lower) levels. These
sources include all those looked at separately in bottom-up and top-down
processes, that is, phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic and discoursal
knowledge.
Stanovich claims that his alternative model is superior because it deals
with the shortcomings inherent in other models. The major deficiency of the
bottom-up model is that it assumes that initiation of higher level processes,
such as use of background knowledge, must await lower level decoding processes.
The top-down model, on the other hand, does not allow lower level processes to
direct higher level ones. The interactive-compensatory model allows for
deficiencies at one level to be compensated for at another. In particular,
higher level processes can compensate fro deficiencies at lower levels, and this
allows for the possibility that readers with poor reading skills at the levels,
and this allows for the possibility that readers with poor reading skills at the
levels of grapheme and word can compensate for these by using other sources of
knowledge such as the syntactic class of a given word or semantic knowledge.
Given deficiencies of lower level skills, poor readers may actually be more
dependent on higher level processes than good readers.
Schema theory and
reading
With the insight that there
is more to comprehension that the words on the page has come an attempt to
provide a theoretical model which will explain the way that our background
knowledge guides comprehension processes. We have looked at aspects of this
theory in Chapter 2 and 3, and here we take the ideas a little further. Much of
the model-building has been carried out by researchers in the field of
artificial intelligence whose ultimate aim has been to enable computers to
process and produce discourse. Terms chosen by cognitive psychologists and
computer specialist include ‘frames’, ‘scripts’, ‘scenarios’ and ‘schemata’. A
useful introduction and overview of this work is provided by Brown and Yule
(1983a).
One of the most widely reported theories in the cognitive psychology
literature is Minsky’s ‘frame’ theory. Minsky suggests that human memory
consists of sets of stereotypical situations (frames) which guide comprehension
by providing a frame-work for making sense of new experiences. (Pearson and
Johnson’s 1978 view of reading comprehension as a process of relating the new to
the known is based on a similar notion.)
While this theory appeals to our commonsense notions about how
comprehension might work, it does have a number of problems. For example, it
provides no explanation of why one script rather than another might be selected
to guide comprehension. Brown and Yule see this as a major shortcoming of the
theory, and they detail their major objection by inviting the reader to decide
which ‘frame’ should guide comprehension for a reader processing a newspaper
article:
Consider the following new
situation which presented itself at the beginning of a newspaper
article.
The Cathedral
congregation had watched on television monitors as Pope and Archbishop met in
front of a British Caledonian helicopter, on the dewy grass of a Canterbury
recreation ground. (The Sunday Time, 30 May 1982)
The problem should be
immediately obvious. Is a ‘Cathedral’ frame selected? How about a
‘television-watching’ frame, a ‘meeting’ frame, a ‘helicopter’ frame, a
‘recreation-ground’ frame? These questions are not trivial. After all, it
probably is necessary to activate something like a ‘recreation-ground’ frame in
order to account for the definite description ‘the grass’ mentioned in the text.
(Brown and Yule 1983a: 241)
The term which has gained
greater currency in the literature than any other is ‘schema’, a term first used
by Bartlett (1932). Like frame theory, schema theory suggests that the knowledge
we carry around in our head is organized into interrelated patters. These are
constructed from our previous experience of the experiential world and guide us
as we make sense of new experiences. They also enable us to make predictions
about what we might expect to experience in a give context. Given the fact that
discourse comprehension is a process of utilizing linguistic cues and background
knowledge to reconstruct meaning, these schemata are extremely important,
particularly to second and foreign language learners.
Widdowson (1983) has reinterpreted schema theory from an applied
linguistic perspective. He postulates two levels of language: a systemic level
and a schematic level. The systemic level includes the phonological,
morphological and syntactic elements of the language, while the schematic level
relates to our background knowledge. In Widdowson’s scheme of things, this
background knowledge exercises an executive function over the systemic level of
language. In comprehending a given piece of language, we use what sociologist
call interpretive procedures for achieving a match between our schematic
knowledge and the language which is encoded systemically. Cicourel, who was one
of the first to utilize the notion of interpretation in the behavioural
sciences, suggested that:
Through the use of
interpretative procedures the participants supply meaning and impute underlying
patterns even though the surface content will not reveal the meanings to an
observer unless his model is directed to such elaborations. (Cicourel
1973:40)
Widdowson has related this notion to the work on schema theory. He argues
that there are two types of schema operating through language. The first of
these is concerned with propositional meaning, while the second relates to the
functional level of language, either of which can provide textual connectivity.
Thus, in Chapter 2, we saw that the connectivity of text cannot always be
explained exclusively in terms of the language in the text. It also depends on
our interpretive ability to make connections which do not exists in the text,
but which are provided by use from our schematic knowledge of the subject in
hand, or the functional purposed which the different text elements are
fulfilling.
An important collection of articles on schema theory and reading is
Carrell et al. (1988). The collection contains conceptual, position
papers which provide a theoretical framework, and also a number of empirical
studies showing how schema are implicated in reading
comprehension.
Research into reading in a
second language
A number of studies have
been conducted into the influence of schematic knowledge on the comprehension
processes of second language readers. Aslanian (1985) set out to discover what
interpretive processes went on in her learners’ heads as they completed a
multiple choice/gap test of a reading passage. After the subjects had completed
the gap test, Aslanian took them individually through the test and asked them to
tell her why they had chosen one item rather than another. Transcripts of these
interviews indicate that correct responses were often provided for the wrong
reasons, and that incorrect responses were sometimes provided by readers who, in
fact, had an adequate grasp of the passage as a whole. Aslanian’s study shows
that schematic knowledge structures can either facilitates or inhibit
comprehension according to whether they are over- or
underutilized.
If readers rely too heavily
on their knowledge and ignore the limitation imposed by the text, or vice versa,
then they will not be able to comprehend the intended meaning of the writer.
Whether one has understood the text or not depends very much on text variables
such as sentence structure and length, vocabulary intensity, number of new
concepts introduced, the difficulty and novelty of the subject matter, etc… To
understand the reader and the nature of the act of reading more clearly and
comprehensively, one needs also to find out and describe the reader’s strategies
and reactions with regard to the reading tasks, and to see how the reader copes
with the reading tasks and solves the problems. (Aslanian 1985:
20)
In a rather different study Nunan (1985) set out to test whether the
perception of textual relationships is affected by readers’ background
knowledge. Subjects for the study were 100 second language, high school students
who were divided into two groups. Group A consisted of longer-term learners who
were orally fluent but had reading problems. Group B consisted of recently
arrived immigrants. Test materials consisted of passages on familiar and
unfamiliar topics from high school texts. Readability analyses showed the
unfamiliar passage to be easier than the familiar passage. Both passages were
analyzed for the cohesively marked logical, referential and lexical
relationships they contained (Halliday and Hasan 1976). Ninety-six
relation-ships were identified which were matched across both passages, and
these were used as the basis for constructing the test items. To construct the
test, a modified cloze procedure was used in which the second end of the
cohesive tie was deleted. The task for the reader was to identify the
relationship and reinstate the deleted item.
Examples of the cohesive
relationships and the way they were used to construct test items are set out
below:
Logical
relationship
Test item: Usually there
would be no difficulty in deciding whether a living thing is a plant or an
animal and it can be classified immediately. There are __________ some very tiny
creatures which scientists know to be living, but cannot be sure whether they
are plants or animals. (Deleted item: ‘however’. Cohesive type: adversative
conjunction).
Referential
relationship
There is no difficulty in
deciding that a bird is living and a stone is non-living, but not all things are
as easy to distinguish _______. (Deleted item: ‘these’. Cohesive type:
referential demonstrative).
Lexical
relationship
Test ITEM: Green plants grow
towards the light. This is because plants need ______ for energy. (Deleted item:
‘light’. Cohesive type: lexical reiteration).
For both groups of subjects,
the perception of textual relationships was significantly easier in the
familiar, though syntactically more difficult, passage. Group A was also
superior to group B, indicating that length of formal and informal exposure to
the target language is also a significant factor in
success.
As already indicated, this study was designed to test the effect of
schematic knowledge on the comprehension of various types of textual
relationship. Schema theory suggests that reading involves more than utilizing
linguistic and decoding skills; that interest, motivation and background
knowledge will determine, at least in part, the success that a reader will have
with a given text. This study showed that background knowledge was a more
significant factor than grammatical complexity in determining the subjects’
comprehension of the textual relationships in question.
This study has a number of pedagogical implications. The first of these
stems from the fact that reading skills are not invariant: that is, they do not
depend solely on a knowledge of the linguistic elements that make up a text.
Reading is a dynamic process in which the text elements interact with other
factors outside the text; in this case most particularly with the reader’s
knowledge of the experiential content of the text. This suggests that there is a
need to relate the language being taught to the context which carries it. In
instructional systems where the target language is the medium of instruction,
the teaching of language ought not to be divorced from other school subjects.
‘Language across the curriculum’ is as important, if not more important, for
second language learners as for first language readers (for suggestions on
teaching language and content see Mohan 1986; Brinton et al. 1989).
Widdowson goes so far as to suggest that foreign as well as second languages
might be taught through the other subjects on the
curriculum:
A foreign language can be
associated with those areas of use which are represented by the other subjects
on the school curriculum and … this not only helps to ensure the link with
reality and the pupils’ own experience but also provides us with the most
certain means we have of teaching language as communication, as use rather
than usage. (Widdowson 1978:
16)
Another study into the
perception of textual relationships in a cross-cultural context is reported by
Steffensen (1981). Steffensen identified relationships signaled by conjunctions
in culturally significant sentences in two texts. One of these described an
American wedding and the other an Indian wedding. A sentence was considered to
have cultural significance if the relationship it contained could not be
predicted from everyday knowledge, but which required familiarity with the
culture from which it was drawn. Sample sentences from Steffensen’s test
passages are as follows:
American passage
(i)
Actually it was surprising
that the men were in such good shape because they had a stag party on
Thursday and didn’t get in until 3 am
(ii)
The ushers seated some of
the bride’s friends on his side of the church so things wouldn’t look off
balance.
Indian passage
(iii)
They did not create any
problem in the wedding, even though Preema’s husband is their only
son.
(iv)
Her husband and in-laws
picked ‘Uma’ for her new name since her husband’s family calls him
‘Shiva’.
Steffensen had American and Indian subjects read the passages and then
recall as much of the content as they could. The recall protocols were then
analyzed to determine whether the relationships being investigated were recalled
by the subjects. This analysis revealed that Americans did better on the text
containing American cultural content and Indians did better on the text
containing Indian cultural content.
Steffensen concluded from her study that when readers are exposed to
texts which describe aspects of a culture foreign to the reader, there will be a
breakdown in the perception of textual relationships. A breakdown in
relationships at the linguistic level reflects a breakdown in comprehension at
the experiential level, that is, at the level of content. Her findings therefore
support the contention that the process of reconstructing meaning is one of
mapping the linguistic content onto extra linguistic context (see also Oller
1979). In setting out the pedagogical implications of her study, Steffensen
suggests that what, at first sight, is a linguistic problem, may in fact be a
problem of background knowledge. In such a case, teaching learners the facts
about the customs in question would probably be more effective than drilling
them in aspects of the language.
Considerable research has also been conducted into the strategies
employed by good readers. This research has been selectively used to justify
various proposal for pedagogical action . Walter (1982), in her book on learning
to read in a second or foreign language, says that good readers utilize the
following strategy when encountering a difficult text. First of all, they read
the text slowly, pausing to consider what they have read. They then reread the
text, looking from one part of the text to other parts in order to make
connections between these different parts, and to make a mental summary of what
they have read. She claims that most of the people who read in this way remember
both the general points and the details of what they have read better than those
who use other strategies. Her book provides numerous exercises deigned for
learners to search through a text and mentally organize the information it
contains.
Reading and social
context
Reading is usually conceived
of as a solitary activity in which the reader interacts with the text in
isolation. While not wishing to pre-empt the discussion in the section which
follows, it is worth pointing out that the two language lessons we look at
(classroom extracts 4.1 and 4.2) show that reading lessons are generally
anything but solitary.
The social context of the second language reader is taken up by Wallace
(1988), who explores in depth the circumstances in which such readers acquire
and maintain literacy. She points out that learning to read is different from
learning to speak, in that there is often a much stronger motivation to
communicate orally than there is to communicate through reading and writing. If
the use of literacy skills is a normal and accepted part of the behaviour of
those with whom learners come into contact, then there is a much greater
likelihood that the learners are going to want to read. In other words, learners
are socialized into reading, and the motivation for learning to read is not only
(or even primarily) for enjoyment or information, but because the aspiring
reader wants to gain access to a ‘community’ or readers.
In cultural terms, reading and learning to read will mean different
things to different learners. A young Polish doctor who is literate in her first
language will have different expectations and views on the nature of literacy
from an elderly Hmong woman with no formal schooling. This observation has
obvious implications for the classroom; we must take these differences into
account, not only in the texts we select, but also in the ways in which we go
about teaching literacy.
The cultural, social and political implications of literacy are
highlighted by Wallace in the following manner:
Achieving literacy is seen
not only as concomitant with certain social and occupational roles but in some
countries goes together with political rights, such as the right to vote.
Literacy is valued as part of adulthood, of full citizenship. It is clearly
partly for this reason that we do not talk of children – or at least younger
children – as being illiterate. Illiteracy is a stigma reserved for adulthood.
Nonetheless, as teachers of reading we need from the beginning to see functional
literacy as the goal; we need, that is, to show our learners that being
literate, for children as well as adults, is part of day-to-day life in a
personal and social sense. Children need from the beginning to see that reading
is purposeful, that it helps us to achieve things. (Wallace 1988:
3)
Types of reading
text
In Chapter 3 we looked at
genre theory and its implications for language use. In this section we apply
some of the insights from both genre theory and schema theory to reading. You
will recall that one of the claims of genre theory is that language exists to
fulfill certain functions and that these functions will largely determine the
structure of the text and the language it contains. Schema theory suggests that
we need to utilize information not explicitly contained in the text (i.e.
‘inside the head’ knowledge) to comprehend more texts adequately. As you read
the following texts, consider the interpretive procedures required to understand
them. What additional information does the reader have to bring to the texts in
order to understand them?
Text 1
System 816 feature
incredible storage capacity, the flexibility to handle a large variety of
applications, and the speed to get the job done fast. And you can choose from
more the 3,000 CP/M 8 or 16 bit programs as your needs grow. With the ability to
expand from single to multi-user, network up to 255 systems, and upgrade as the
technology advances, this equipment stands the test of
time.
Text 2
Lemon Cream
Sponge
Serves
6
500 ml cream
1 sachet gelatine
500 ml milk
3 tbs sugar
juice of two lemons
1 punnet strawberries
Melt gelatine in small
quantity of hot water. Blend milk, cream and lemon juice together. Add gelatine
mixture, stirring constantly. Chill several hours until set. Decorate with
strawberries.
Text 3
If you want to do the job
right, the saying goes, make sure you use the right tool. Don’t try to stop a
tank with a Roach Motel. So more than in other fields, scientists are debating
this questions of appropriate technology as microcomputers begin to move into
research facilities and R and D departments around the
country.
Text 4
New apple-fresh Cuddly
Fabric Softener. A fresh new experience! New Cuddly leaves your clothes so soft
and easy to iron; and now new Cuddly adds the crisp fragrance of freshly picked
apples to your wash. Only new Cuddly Fabric Softener has two softening agents
working together to soften your whole wash; and new Cuddly also helps eliminate
static cling. Use apple-fresh Cuddly in your final rinse. Do not pour undiluted
onto fabrics.
For anyone with a passing
knowledge of the field, text 1 is fairly obviously about computers. However, in
order to get from the text all that the author intended, one would need to
utilize a certain amount of background knowledge. It is unlikely that someone
with only a passing knowledge of computers will be able to say with any
certainty whether the text is about micro, mini or maxi
computers.
Text 2 is quite evidently a recipe, and it displays the generic structure
and language of recipes. In structural terms, it consists of a title,
specifications, ingredients and procedure. Linguistically, it contains language
which is typical of the ‘recipe genre’. Predicable function words such as
articles and prepositions tends to be omitted, and the procedure usually
consists of a set of imperative statements listed in chronological
order.
Our knowledge of text genres can, in fact, sometimes mislead us. Text 3
is a case in point. This text is extracted from an article on the use of
appropriate technology which was published in a popular journal. However, some
people have said that it is about advertising, having been misled by the second
sentence, which is couched in the language of advertisements but which is, in
fact, a metaphor. (A ‘Roach Motel’, by the way, is an American insect trap. The
insects check in, but never check out!)