Theory Of Textual Patterns And Discourse Coherence In Students'Writing

Many linguists and language teachers abroad have concentrated the attention on discourse analysis or textual linguistics, which takes either oral discourse or written text as the object of study with the concern in the process which the producer experiences in discourse production and the receiver experiences in discourse interpretation. To be specific, discourse analysis studies the language unit that is larger than sentence. From the perspective of exploration, linguists have opened up a wide range of functional paths to discourse study.As the substance of discourse study lies in discourse coherence, the present study is carried out, along the same line of inquiry, by taking advantage of Textual Patterns Theory raised by Hoey and McCarthy. According to Hoey, Textual Patterns are macro structures for discourse organization and the relational composition for discourse formation. McCarthy sees Textual Patterns for the sake of discourse receivers and he believes that certain patterns in text reoccur time and time again and become deeply ingrained as part of the cultural knowledge. Some patterns are already manifested to bear regularly occurring functional relationships between bits of the text like"problem-solution","general-particular","claim-counterclaim"and"question-answer". The advantage of the Textual Patterns rests on their clarification of relations between concerned sentences, macro-structures, and the function of their exclusive organizing words for weaving texture. That is, Textual Patterns can be used to interpret discourse organization from various respects. It is true that the two linguists look at Textual Patterns from the perspective of discourse interpretation for discourse coherence.