Learning vocabulary effectively in clt through language games at high school

Table of content Part A: Introduction 1. Rationale of the study 2. Aims of the study 3. Scope of the study 4. Methods of the study 5. Design of the study Part B: Development Chapter 1: Theoretical background 1.1. Theory of Discourse 1.1.1. Concept of discourse 1.1.2. Spoken discourse and written discourse 1.1.3. Text and discourse 1.1.4. Discourse context 1.1.5. Discourse structure and information structure 1.1.6. Sense relation 1.2. Cohesion 1.2.1. Concept of cohesion 1.2.2. Cohesion and coherence 1.2.3. Types of cohesion 1.3. Lexical cohesion 1.3.1. Concept of lexical cohesion 1 1.3.2. Types of lexical cohesion 1.4. Reiteration 1.5. Types of Reiteration 1.5.1. Reiteration in Text and in Reiteration in Discourse Chapter 2: Reiteration as a cohesive device news-in- brief on Iraq war in English press 2.1. General structure of news stories 2.2. General information of materials selected 2.3. Reiteration occurrences in separated parts of news-in-brief texts 2.3.1. Headline 2.3.2. Lead 2.3.3. Body 2.4. Classification of Reiteration based on types 2.4.1. Repetition 2.4.2. Synonyms and near synonyms 2.4.3. Superordinates and General words 2.4.3.1. Superordinates 2.4.3.2. General words 2.5. Reiteration with and without identical reference Chapter 3: Application Part C: Conclusion 2 Part A: Introduction 1. Rationale 1.1. During both processes of producing and perceiving in learning English, learners are usually guided to pay their attention on the logicality of the text. In other words, they are taught how to recognize (in listening and reading) or create (in speaking and writing) coherence of the text. Textual coherence can be obtained by various linguistic devices including grammatical and lexical ones. However, it is traditionally the case that almost learners’ attention has been drawn onto grammatical devices (such as reference, ellipsis, substitution ) and very little on lexical ones despite the fact that the latter can… contribute a significant part in creating coherence, as David Nunan (1995: 31) puts it: ‘lexical cohesion is the single most important form of cohesion, accounting for something like forty percent of cohesion ties in text’. Among lexical cohesive devices, reiteration is considered the most common one and to contribute the most to textual coherence. Obtaining a sufficient awareness of the extensive and vivid existence of reiteration as a type of lexical cohesive device, of its significant role in generating textual coherence as well as proper ways in which it is used by native speakers (or writers) can make a helpful contribution to English learners in more correctly, properly and lively producing and perceiving in their English learning. 1.2. Press, in the civilized society, has become one of the most popular and powerful means of communication and nowadays plays a displaceable part in man’s life. It is not only where people get themselves expressed, knowledge- enriched, information-updated and entertained, but also one of places where a language can interestingly manifest its own existence with its certain features. Unexceptionally, we can amusingly trace many of characteristics of English language in press published in English, possibly in any forms of writing there. 3 Being interested in Reiteration in English, we find it very interesting, and proper also, to apply related theories into the brief news daily updated on Iraq war in English press, the source of material that has never been used for any discussions involving Reiteration in Discourse so far. For all reasons above, we decided to choose “Reiteration as a cohesive device in news-in-brief on Iraq war in English press” to be the theme of the thesis. 2. Aims of the study The aims of the thesis are: - To emphasize the important role of Reiteration in creating textual coherence. - To give a statistic and description of types of Reiteration used in a specific form of writing in English press: News-in-brief. - To study the reasons leading to the different degrees of fondness in using each types of reiteration there. - To suggest some practical implications of Reiteration in teaching and learning English. 3. Scope of the study Our research deals with types of Reiteration in discourse provided by Halliday and Hasan (1976) including Repetition, Synonymy, Subordinates and General words. Other types of lexical and grammatical cohesion are out of the scope of the thesis. The statistic synthesized in the thesis is taken from news-in-brief texts available on CNN, which is – in our opinion – among the most well known online newspapers. It has nowadays become an internationalized newspaper on which English is the major language to be chosen for the information display. The news-in-brief texts are about Iraq war, an international security event initiated in March 2003 by the United States, and then followed by her allies, 4 against Iraq. The war is still believed by public to be unfinished up to the day the material for this thesis is selected (April 8 th , 2006). The event has been drawing the attention of all nations and people all over the world. And it comes as no surprise that online newspapers are where the hottest news about the war has been most frequently and fastest updated to the public. As the title of the thesis implies, most of the examples given in chapter 2 are taken from this source and reference is made for each. Examples taken from other sources are clearly marked with specific references as well. 4. Methods of the study - Revision of published related theories. - Quantitative methods. - Analysis and systematic of selected data. 5. Design of the study There are three main parts in this research paper: Part A: Introduction In this part, the rationale, aims, scope, methods and design of the thesis are introduced. Part B: Development This part consists of three chapters: Chapter 1 Theoretical background Chapter 2 Reiteration as Cohesive device in brief news of Iraq war in English press Chapter 3 Applications Part C: Conclusion In this part, principal findings are summarized and some suggestions for further researches are provided. 5 Part B: Development Chapter 1: Theoretical background 1.1. Theory of Discourse 1.1.1. The concept of discourse Until the first half of 20 th century, traditional linguists had been working under the orientational point of view that sentences are the largest complete units to be studied. It has, however, gradually been realized to be a mistaken one. Many problems concerning with both linguistic theories and practices appeared to be unthoroughly solved with this viewpoint. This fact eventually led to the appearance of a new subject in the 1960s and early 1970s, studying languages through units above sentence level. Discourse Analysis (as the new subject was termed), as Michael McCarthy (1991:5) puts it, ‘is concerned with the study of the relationship between language and the contexts in which it is used’, under the assistance of traditional linguistics, semiotics, psychology, anthropology and sociology. Since the time Discourse Analysis came into being as a branch of linguistics, the term “discourse” has been defined in different ways. A discourse, according to David Nunan in the introduction of his Introducing Discourse Analysis (1995), “is a stretch of language that may be longer than one sentence.” Barbara Johnstone (2002:2) claims that: “discourse usually means actual instances of communication in the medium of language”. In this thesis, the notion by Guy Cook (1995:198) seeing discourse as stretches of“ language perceived to be meaningful, unified and purposive” seems to be the best to adopt. 1.1.2. Text and Discourse 6 The viewpoints of the distinction between the two terms text and discourse are rather controversial. To some linguists, the two can be interchangeably used, as they state: (1) A text, or a discourse, is a stretch of language that may be longer than a sentence. [17:1] (2) A text may be spoken or written, prose or verse, dialogue or monologue. It may be anything from a single proverb to a whole play, from a momentary cry for help to all day discussion in a committee. [6: 1] On the other hand, some linguists suppose that it is worth seeing the two terms in different ways. Widdowson (1979), for instance, suggests that: One way sees it (the language beyond the limit of sentence) as a text, a collection of formal objects held by the pattern of equivalences, or frequencies, or by cohesive devices. The other way sees language as discourse, a use of sentences to perform act of communication which cohere into larger communicative units, ultimately establishing a rhetorical pattern which characterizes the pieces of language as a whole as a kind of communication. (quoted in Nguyen Thi Phuong Ngoc, 1999 – MA Thesis) Widdowson’s differentiation is more or less similar with that of Brown and Yule (1983:6) who ‘use text as a technical term to refer to the verbal record of a communicative act’; and that of Crystal (1992:25) defining discourse as ‘a continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit, such as a sermon, argument, joke or narrative’ and text as ‘a piece of naturally occurring spoken, written or signed discourse identified for purposes of analysis. It is often a language unit with a definable function, such as a conversation, a poster.’ 7 This thesis supports the short discrimination of Raphael Salkie (1993) suggesting that the term text is best used to refer to any written record of a communicative event and discourse, on the other hand, to the interpretation of the communicative event in context. That means any complete piece of news taken for analyzing in this study is best seen as a text, or a discourse unit. 1.1.3. Spoken discourse and written discourse Spoken and written discourse simply means speech and writing. It has been widely agreed by linguists that there are common features as well as different ones between these two forms of language. According to Halliday (1985), writing emerged in society as a result of cultural changes which created new communicative needs that could not be readily met by the spoken language. Approvingly, Raphael Salkie (1993) contributes that the contexts for using written language are very different from those in which spoken language is used. For example, in the case of information, written language is used to communicate with others who are removed in time and space, or for those occasions of which a permanent or semi-permanent is required. One, as a result, cannot deny that spoken discourse is often considered to be less planned and orderly, more open to intervention by the receivers while written discourse is much better structured and the possibilities for subordinate participants are limited. Brown and Yule (1983) claim that spoken and written discourse serve the various functions, the former is used for the establishment and maintenance of human relationships (interactional use) and the latter for the working out of and transference of information (transactional use) (cited in To Viet Thu 2001 – MA Thesis) On the other hand, some linguists see common points between these two forms of language. David Nunan (1995) believes that they both perform an 8 equivalent range of broad functions, i.e. they both are employed to get things done, to provide information and to entertain. Michael McCarthy (1991:150) additionally proposes, ‘both spoken and written discourses are dependent on their immediate contexts to a greater or lesser degree’, and ‘implicitness and explicitness (of the language being used) will depend on what is being communicated to whom, rather than merely on whether the discourse is spoken or written.’ In short, despite the fact that written and spoken discourses are two different forms of language, they both carry out many functions of communication and the differences are not absolute, and the characteristics that we tend to associate with written language can sometime occur in spoken language and vice versa. This means that some spoken texts will be more like written text than others and vice versa. 1.1.4. Discourse context 1.1.4.1. The context of situation David Nunan (1995:7) suggests a concept and a classification of context of situation (or context in short) as follows: Context refers to the situation giving rise to the discourse, and within which the discourse is embedded. There are two different types of context. The first of these is the linguistic context – the language that surrounds or accompanies the piece of discourse under analysis. The second is non- linguistic or experiential context within which the discourse takes place. Non-linguistic contexts include: the type of communicative event (for example, joke, story, lecture, greeting, conversation); the topic; the purpose of the event, the setting including location, time of day, season of year and physical aspects of the situation (for example, size of room, arrangement of furniture); the participants and the relationships between them; and the background knowledge and assumptions underlying the communicative event. 9 This viewpoint of Nunan is much similar to that of Halliday and Hasan (1976) who claim that when responding to a spoken or a written passage (discourse or text), the receiver employs not only linguistic clues, but also situational ones: linguistically, he responds to specific features which bind the passage together, the pattern of connection, independence of structure, that we are referring to as cohesion. Situationally, he takes into account all he knows of the environment: what is going on, what part of language is playing, and who are involved. And the importance of context toward discourse interpretation is apparently undeniable, as Cook (1989:10) asserts: ‘There are good arguments for limiting the field of study to make it manageable, but it is also true to say that the answer to the question of what gives discourse its unity may be impossible to give without considering the world at large: the context.’ For all the facts above, both linguistic and non-linguistic contexts will be taken into account in this study. It is because Reiteration, as a cohesive device and as an actual use of lexis, is obviously concerned with linguistic factors but how that use is carried out also greatly depends on non-linguistic features of discourse. 1.1.4.2. Context versus co-text It is necessary to tell these two terms from one another. David Nunan (1995) holds that co-text is considered the linguistic element and context the non-linguistic one. More specifically, Brown and Yule (1983) claim that ‘any sentence other than the first in a fragment of discourse will have the whole of its interpretation forcibly constrained by the proceeding text’ and ‘the words occur in discourse are constrained by their co-text.’ In his Pragmatics (1996), Yule gave another concept that considers co- text as linguistic material, accompanying the referring expression. The role of co-text is illustrated with the example as follows: 10