Background
Information: The Students and the Program | Benefits
of the Module for Teachers |
Informational
Discourse and Its Grammatical Features |
Cluster I: The
Noun Cluster | Cluster
II: The Verb Cluster |
The Teaching
of Informational Discourse: A Course Plan | 20
Teaching Activities |
References
This module is designed to meet the needs of intermediate-level English as a Second Language students in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) program. More specifically, this module would be part of the Georgia State University (GSU) intensive ESL program, the aim of which is to prepare immigrants to the Atlanta area for the academic tasks that they will encounter in mainstream university classes in the United States. The program is comprised of separate courses in grammar, writing, reading, and oral skills, for levels 1 to 5. Each quarter-long course meets for a total of ten-weeks, either two or three times a week. Classes are made up of a heterogeneous student body, with diverse cultural and language backgrounds and varying amounts of previous instruction in English, as well as varying levels of familiarity with American classrooms due to differences in their length of residence in the U.S.
This module will include an outline for ESL 063, the third level of grammar instruction, usually taken by students approximately two quarters before beginning regular university coursework. Although the focus is on grammar, the grammar is taken from the context of the reading and writing tasks that students will need to complete in an academic setting. This module therefore strives to present these features as grammar from context, that is, instruction based on the structures found in the texts that students will be required to read and write as university students. The activities which make up this module will be based on reading and writing tasks revolving around scientific topics. Some descriptions of places will also be included, which should involve vocabulary and content somewhat more familiar to the students.
This module is an example of how we as grammar teachers can organize our curriculum in a way that is more consistent with the needs of our students. The progression of instruction is more natural when it deals with features that occur together, in contrast with instruction divided into present time, past time, modals, and so forth, without clear connections drawn between them and the ways in which these structures are actually used. In this approach, instruction is based on authentic materials and this module seeks to demonstrate how these authentic materials can be employed in the classroom with students who have not yet mastered all of the grammatical structures contained within the texts. By clustering grammatical features according to what students are finding in texts and explaining to students why these grammar points tend to co-occur, confusion on the part of the students will hopefully decrease.
In addition, grammatical instruction should become more cohesive and less frustrating to teachers when organized according to these grammatical clusters that characterize specific discourse styles. By organizing instruction based on these clusters, we can avoid some of the problems that result when the grammar that students need to know is not a part of the current course curriculum. As many of us know from experience, basing curriculum decisions on the apparent easiness or difficulty of grammatical structures does not work when students need to be able to read or write texts that contain structures that they will not be taught until more advanced levels (Byrd, forthcoming).
Therefore, this module will demonstrate one possible way in which the grammatical features of informational writing may be grouped for more effective instruction, leading to greater understanding and an improved ability to communicate using academic prose. In addition to a discussion of the features identified as common to informational writing, the more specific grammar points that will need to be covered in order to understand or write this prose are included in the following module. For example, in order to deal with the lengthy noun phrases of academic writing, students must be familiar with articles, attributive adjectives, and relative clauses. The module shows how these items can be spiraled through a course, providing students ample opportunities to acquire the necessary grammatical knowledge and confidence to employ these structures. Activities that seek to appeal to a variety of learning styles are provided to demonstrate how instruction could be sequenced in order to facilitate this learning. Ways in which the sample activities could be adjusted for the content that I have chosen to focus on are also included. However, the content will obviously change depending on your chosen focus, just as you will want to add or take out activities based on your students' needs and your own ideas.
This module is largely based on the characteristics of informational discourse as defined by Douglas Biber (1988) and related work done by Patricia Byrd (forthcoming), which describes how Biber's findings can be useful to us as ESL grammar teachers. Biber's analysis identified several dimensions of discourse, two of which stand out as being especially relevant to ESL instruction, and therefore worthy of our attention. These two dimensions, the narrative/non-narrative and the involved/informational represent two continuums along which various discourse styles can be seen to exist. This approach to the classification of discourse has evolved from earlier research which tended to divide discourse into separate categories with less emphasis on the relationships between discourse style. For example, many researchers have focused on the distinctions between written and spoken language, with somewhat less attention paid to the variations that occur depending on the purpose for which a spoken or written text is produced (Chafe & Danielewicz, 1986). Biber's dimensions provide a more complete picture of the range of discourse types, with consideration given to whether a spoken text is a prepared speech or a face-to-face conversation, and whether a written text is a personal letter or academic prose, all of which he has placed on the dimension of involved/informational discourse.
As native speakers we have been schooled in the use of appropriate language for each of these genres, both in academic settings and through our exposure to different kinds of discourse on a daily basis. Using Biber and other text analyses we can see the frequency with which various features occur, which can then be used as a guide so that we teach our ESL students to speak, write, and read in the way that we do naturally as native speakers educated in these discourse styles. The benefit of organizing instruction in this manner is that we are able to avoid the artificiality of specially created texts that include only the features that we wish to explain during a given class or course. By using authentic materials and the grammatical features identified by Biber and other researchers contained in these texts, we can present accurate and coherent information concerning the usage of these grammar structures.
Biber lists the following features in the informational end of the involved/informational continuum (1988, p.102). They are ordered according to the frequency of their occurrence in the texts that he analyzed, with the appearance of nouns being most prevalent characteristic of informational discourse:
Byrd (forthcoming) has also included the present tense and the verbs be and have on her list of the Grammar of Informational Communication, since they too appear frequently in informational prose. Chafe's research (1982) found a much higher proportion (approximately a two to one ratio) of relative clause usage in written language as compared to his spoken data. Therefore, this module will cover both the present tense and relative clauses as they appear in academic prose.
For the purposes of this instructional module, these grammatical features have been organized further into two clusters, one which will be referred to as the noun cluster since it focuses on the grammatical features of noun phrases, and one which will be known as the verb cluster, which initially emphasizes the verbs used in informational writing, although its relationship to noun phrases will become apparent. The following sections will enumerate these features as well as the additional grammatical points that will be included in order to present these concepts in a logical order to students. In addition, examples and explanations of these grammatical features are provided to demonstrate how these are characteristic of academic writing.
Abstract informational prose has been found to be highly nominal, as opposed to the verbal style of narrative or interpersonal writing, such as that of personal letters (Biber, 1988). As compared to involved speaking or writing, informational academic writing is characterized by long noun phrases which contain large numbers of attributive adjectives, prepositional phrases, and relative clauses (Biber, 1988; Chafe, 1982). Longer words and a greater variety of them are also characteristic. These factors identified by Biber can all be viewed as the writer's means of communicating specific information to an unknown reader.
Before continuing with the discussion of the reasons for the presence of these features, please take a few moments to look over the first two paragraphs of the entry on snow, taken from the Raintree Illustrated Science Encyclopedia, found in the juvenile section of the library. Please look at the length of the words and noun phrases, the variety of words and the quantities of prepositional phrases, and attributive adjectives. All noun phrases consisting of more than one word have been underlined.
SNOW Snow is tiny crystals of frozen water that falls from the sky. Snow forms when water vapor in the air crystallizes. The crystals are usually hexagonal (six-sided). However, they may form an infinite variety of shapes. No two snowflakes are exactly alike.
The air temperature between the clouds and the ground must be at or below 32 F. [0 C], the freezing point of water, for snowflakes to form. If the temperature is near or at the freezing point, the snowflakes are large and wet. At colder temperatures, the snow is fine and dry. If the ground is cold enough, the snow may collect and get very deep. Freshly fallen snow reflects about 95 percent of the sun's heat back into space. This is one reason why the temperature often drops so low on winter nights. (adapted from The Raintree Illustrated Science Encyclopedia, vol.15, 1991, p.1645-6).
As will be discussed later in the module (see Activity 2), the writer of an introductory academic text, a dictionary definition, or an encyclopedia entry assumes that the reader has little prior knowledge of the subject matter, and therefore attempts to clearly and specifically communicate the necessary information as efficiently as possible. This contrasts greatly with the assumptions made by the author of a personal letter, who knows what knowledge is shared by both s/he and the reader and whose writing is likely to be a continuation of an ongoing dialogue. It also differs from a face-to-face conversation in which there is the opportunity for clarification at the listener's request. As simply stated by Chafe (1982), "Speakers interact with their audiences, writers do not."
Word length and diversity of word usage (as measured by the type/token ratio) are both thought to be related to lexical specificity. Biber has stated that longer words have more specific meanings than shorter ones (1986) and a high type/token ratio "reflects extensive use of words that have very specific meanings" (1988, p.104). When comparing spoken and written speech with regard to these features, time constraints appear to be the influential factor, as Biber writes, "...differences in lexical specificity seem to truly correlate with the production differences between speaking and writing: the high levels of lexical diversity and specificity that are found in formal academic writing are apparently not possible in spoken texts due to the restrictions of on-line production" (1988, p.238). The absence of time constraints in written expression also lead to a greater efficiency in expression, with "far less content wasted on the restatement or expansion of previously stated ideas or on irrelevant ideas" (Horowitz & Newman, 1964).
Long noun phrases are formed from a combination of prepositional phrases, attributive adjectives (adjectives occurring before the noun), and relative clauses, all of which serve to modify the main noun, defining it more specifically. Whereas the verbal style is characterized by shorter sentences and the use of conjunctions, nominal sentences are longer and often contain greater numbers of prepositions as opposed to conjunctions (Wells, 1960). Prepositional phrases are a means of including large amounts of information into the nominal academic discourse style by expanding the amount of information contained in each idea unit, i.e. each noun phrase, and are used to mark semantic relations among the numerous pieces of information found in abstract texts (Biber, 1988; Biber, 1986a). Relative clauses are another device used to insert large amounts of information into each idea unit (Chafe, 1982), and commonly occur in definitions to provide more information about nouns (Byrd, forthcoming; Cavusgil, forthcoming). In the juvenile encyclopedia I examined, the definitions that introduce each entry tend to include relative clauses.
Snow is tiny crystals of frozen water that falls from the sky. (Raintree Illustrated Science Encyclopedia, vol.15, 1991, p.1645).
Rain is liquid water that falls from the clouds to the ground. (Raintree Illustrated Science Encyclopedia, vol.13, 1991, p.1496).
Verb-related features included in Biber's factorial analysis of informational discourse include agentless passives (passive voice without a by-phrase) and past and present participial WHIZ deletions. However, Byrd (forthcoming) also includes the present tense and the frequently appearing verbs be and have on her list of the Grammar of Informational Communication (forthcoming, p.12), and based on an examination of texts such as the one that follows, these features have been included for study in this module.
Please re-read the first two paragraphs on snow and note the high frequency with which the present tense is used, as well as the frequent use of the verb be. All of the verbs have been underlined.
Snow is tiny crystals of frozen water that falls from the sky. Snow forms when water vapor in the air crystallizes. The crystals are usually hexagonal (six-sided). However, they may form an infinite variety of shapes. No two snowflakes are exactly alike.
The air temperature between the clouds and the ground must be at or below 32 F. [0 C], the freezing point of water, for snowflakes to form. If the temperature is near or at the freezing point, the snowflakes are large and wet. At colder temperatures, the snow is fine and dry. If the ground is cold enough, the snow may collect and get very deep. Freshly fallen snow reflects about 95 percent of the sun's heat back into space. This is one reason why the temperature often drops so low on winter nights. (adapted from The Raintree Illustrated Science Encyclopedia, vol.15, 1991, p.1645-6).
As this example shows, the informational style of academic writing may contain numerous instances of the present tense. Although not deemed a significant factor by his analysis, Biber does refer to the use of the present tense in academic styles "to focus on information being presented and remove focus from any temporal sequencing" (1988, p.224). Another indicator of a decontextualized writing style is the frequent use of passives, especially agentless passives, in order to describe events in a more abstract manner (Chafe & Danielewicz,1986). The agentless passive enables us to avoid naming the doer of the action and to avoid "expressions of personality," which is believed to be essential in scientific writing (Wells, 1960). This is demonstrated in the second two paragraphs from the snow passage. Please note the underlined examples of the agentless passive voice, and the recurring use of the present tense.
Snow has a number of benefits. Accumulated (collected) snow insulates plants and hibernating animals during the severe winter months. Mountain snow is an important water source for rivers when the snow melts in the spring. Snow also provides a natural method of fertilization. When snowflakes are formed, some nitrogen from the air is contained in each flake. Later, when the snow melts, some of this nitrogen enters the soil along with the water. This nitrogen is used by plants for growth.
Permanent snow exists at the north and south poles, in Greenland, and on some mountaintops. Snow falls during the winter in most regions with moderate climates. In the United States, heavy snowfalls are usually associated with blizzards and other winter storms. A blizzard is a storm with high winds and temperatures well below freezing, as well as large amounts of snow. The snow is blown about by the fierce winds, making it difficult to see anything at a distance. The snow may be blown into huge piles called drifts. Such a storm can bring people's normal activities to a standstill. (adapted from The Raintree Illustrated Science Encyclopedia, vol.15, 1991, p.1646).
In the actual module, the passive voice with agents will first be introduced, serving as an intermediate step before moving on to a discussion of the agentless passive, as was seen in the above example. After instruction regarding agentless passives, relative clauses will be reintroduced to examine the use of the passive in relative clauses. This will serve as a stepping stone to past participial WHIZ deletions, i.e. reduced relative clauses. For example, in the following passage the underlined postposed modifiers (Chafe, 1982), could be considered reduced forms of the respective clauses
- which is called water vapor
- which is known as the dew point, and
- which are called condensation nuclei.
How rain forms. The sun's heat is constantly causing evaporation of water from the oceans and other bodies of water and from the moist earth. This evaporated water, called water vapor, is always present in varying amounts in the air. As the air rises, it cools and cannot hold as much water vapor. At a temperature known as the dew point, the water vapor condenses on tiny particles in the air, forming water droplets. These particles, called condensation nuclei, include soot, dust, and salt.
Though mentioned by Biber, present participial WHIZ deletions will not be discussed in the module due to their relatively low appearance in the texts examined for this module and the time constraints inherent to a ten-week course. This decision is supported by Chafe (1982) who stressed the "overwhelmingly more frequent" use of past participles in written texts.
Place adverbials are used in informational texts to refer to figures, charts, or other parts of the text, as in the phrase "the figure shown below." While the teacher should confirm that these are understood by students, they generally do not create much difficulty for students and for this reason will not be emphasized.
As mentioned in the first section, this module comprises one section of a intermediate level grammar course, which would also include a brief review of involved discourse and a lengthier segment focusing on narrative style. Although narrative discourse is not described in this paper, possible subject matter that would complement the informational module is mentioned below in the table showing the course outline.
| Week | Discourse style and grammar features | Content |
| 1 | involved | -questions: getting to know each other
-personal letters |
| 2 and 3 | informational noun cluster: word length, word variety, noun phrases, articles, attributive adjectives, adjective order, prepositional phrases, relative clauses | -definitions
-description of a place -scientific definitions and descriptions |
| 4 and 5 | narrative | biographies, personal stories |
| 6 and 7 | informational verb cluster: present tense, passive with agent, passive w/o agent, passive in relative clauses, past and present participial WHIZ deletions, and recycling of noun cluster features | -scientific definitions and descriptions of processes |
| 8 and 9 | narrative | history of a place |
| 10 | narrative and informational combined | -scientific definition and description, including
historical overview of research
-description of a place and its history |