FINAL EXAM – SUMMARY

Cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction (cohesive devices)

 Comparative reference

- Adjectives and adverbs

 Substitution

- Nominal, verbal and clausal

Nominal: one/ones
Verbal: do
Clausal: so

 Ellipsis

- The omitted information can be recovered from the preceding text.

Sylvia: I like the blue hat

Mary: I prefer the green

- Nominal: My kids play a lot of sports. Both (0) are incredibly energetic.
- Verbal: Have you been working? Yes, I have (0)
- Clausal: Paul’s staying for dinner, isn’t he? Is he? He didn’t tell me (0)

 Conjunction

- Temporality, causality, addition and adversity

Adversative: however, on the other hand

Additive: and, besides, furthermore
Temporal: first, then, secondly
Causal: because, for this reason, due to

Lexical cohesion: reiteration and collocation

 Reiteration: repetition, synonym, superordinate and general words.

- Superordinate: pneumonia/illness (type of)

- General word: steamed buns/things

 Collocation: words that belong to the same field (school: classroom, students, teacher,
etc)
 Background information: they help us to identify collocational relationships (our
familiarity with the content of a text)

Context: tenor, field, mode and purpose

 Tenor: (relationships) the relationship between the speaker/writer and the audience
 Field: what the text is about
 Purpose: the WHY
 Mode: the how of the context, written or spoken?

- aspects of experience: people and things processes (actions, states) consequences

EXPERIENTIAL FUNCTION
- kinds of interaction: statements, questions, commands INTERPERSONAL
FUNCTION (what’s the relationship between the participants?)
- links with context and within text: language as part of the action or as a reflection
of it TEXTUAL FUNCTION

 Context of situation --- it is the environment of the text (if we read or listen to the
expression “What would you like to order?” we assume it is in a café or restaurant)

FUNCTIONS

Poetic function: one way to detect it is rhyme and rhythm, alliteration (repetition of the
initial sounds) – “the same ... another” (contradiction), “the same” (comparison). Most of
the times advertisements/jingles use it
Referential/informative
Metalinguistic: we use it, or it is used, every time we explain language itself (the origin of a
word, the roots, etc)
Directive: persuasion (generally expressed with imperative verbs), parallelism (repetition
of the SAME word)
*as ... as /like: simile
*malapropisms: the wrong use of words
  The headline attracts people’s attention (standfirst – it adds information to the
headline)

Parallelism: two or more phrases or clauses that have the same grammatical structure.

“Five dollar off? – Two dollar off?”

Hypernym: Special occasions – Hyponyms: Christmas, Easter - Meronym: sink – kitchen; choir
– hymn (when they are part of something)

- Text type
- Genre
- Layout: organization of the text
- Main idea
- Contextual features:
1. Culture refers to the traditions, beliefs, customs, and way of life specific to a
particular group of people. Culture can be associated with a specific
nationality, race, geographic area, or religion
2. Historical context refers to what was going on in the world during the
timeframe in which a work is set or was written. It involves factors like
economic conditions, societal norms of the day, major events, technological
advancements, etc.
3. Physical context refers to the setting in which a work of writing takes place. A
book about surviving on your own in a huge, densely populated city will be
very different from a book on the same topic that is set in a remote rural
location.
4. The rhetorical context of a work created for a class assignment that will likely
only be read by the writer’s teacher is very different from an editorial opinion
 piece on an issue the author is passionate about that will be published to a
broad audience via a news outlet.

Opinion paragraph

- Opinions based on facts and give several examples

- Topic sentence: states the main idea (to understand what the paragraph is about)*
- All the information in the paragraph MUST BE related to the topic sentence
- First line of a paragraph is indented (space)
- A concluding sentence that summarizes the main idea of the paragraph +
- Supporting sentences: they support and help the topic sentence. They answer “who,
what, where, when, why and how”

Extending the school day would threaten teaching profession. Due to the pandemic we
are still going through, it has been exposed the negligence in education that exists in
Argentina.
To begin with, it is a fact that teachers’ salaries are located in a low position, in
comparison to other jobs. According to the EPH (Encuesta Permanente de Hogares)
made by Indec (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos) in 2020, teaching
remuneration is in the 15th position.
If the government does not invest enough money in teachers’ salaries, how is it
supposed to fund these extra hours?
Secondly, the lack of investment in education is not only related to the point
previously mentioned, but also to the context in which teachers work. It is very
normal, especially in public schools, that buildings are not in proper conditions to stay
for a long period of time. For instance, lack of light/water is very normal within these
spaces. The absence of these basic needs eventually interrupts the school day and
sometimes students can not even go to class.
Another point to consider, in terms of poor investment in education, is students do not
have access to Internet at school, complicating the teaching/learning process, as it is a
good tool to work with.
All things considered, I believe there must be an important investment in
infrastructure to create good conditions of work, as well as paying a good salary. This
would consequently motivate teachers to do a better job. But most importantly, the
government would eliminate the problem from the root, avoiding short term
solutions.

 It mustn’t be too general that everyone accepts as true (libraries have books, tea is
delicious)
 It has controlling ideas
+ Restatement, suggestion, opinion, prediction

Narratives:

- Abstract: short statements of what the story is going to be about (‘I must tell you
about an embarrasing moment yesterday’)
- Orientation: time, place and characters
- Complicating events: main events that make the story happen
- Resolutions
 - Coda: bridge between the story world and the moment of telling (‘and ever since, I’ve
never been able to look at a mango without feeling sick’)
- Evaluation: it makes the story worth listening to/reading

Texts in context

- Co-text: the words that accompany a particular word or passage that provide context
and help to determine meaning (a key to a door)
- Context of situation: the immediate physical, temporal, special, social environment in
which verbal exchanges take place.