Teaching Logical Relationships in Written Discourse

Abstract

When the main emphasis in teaching English as a foreign language was on reading (in the heyday of the Michael West readers), attention focused on vocabulary control. The selection and rate of introduction of vocabulary were main concerns; that is, the approach was strongly word-centered. With the development of audio-lingual methods, the emphasis shifted to the teaching of phonology and structure, and the approach became sentence-centered. Now reading is getting more attention than it has in recent years, and there seems to be a trend toward an approach that might be called discoursecentered. Far too little is known, however, about ways to deal with the reading problems of non-native speakers of English. The comprehension of written language involves a large number of factors: lexical, grammatical, and cultural meanings, connections between sentences, paragraph structure, the organization of longer selections, and many other elements. Connected discourse calls for reading skills in addition to those required for the reading of individual sentences. Just as a student who reads word-for-word may end up by failing to comprehend the meaning of the sentence in which the words occur, a student may read sentence-by-sentence and fail to grasp the meaning of a paragraph because he does not sense the relationships between sentences. The necessary skills, particularly in the reading of expository discourse, involve the recognition of logical as well as lexical and structural relationships, for the three are inextricable. In trying to help non-native speakers with reading, it seems likely that more attention should be paid to logical relationships than is usually the case, for foreign students may be accustomed to different conventions of reasoning and rhetoric. The differences may be sufficiently great, in fact, that logical relationships encounter as much interference from the foreign student's own language habits as do the phonology and syntax of English. Nevertheless it is common for English textbooks for foreign students to mention logical relationships only in an exercise or two on the use of connectives such as however, moreover, therefore, etc. Our ways of expressing ideas in expository writing are a heritage of the oral rhetoric of our Greek and Roman cultural forebears. But because these are our conventions, we can by no means assume that these habits are normal for all people, that this is the way human beings in general think and reason and order their ideas in written form. These cultural aspects of