A TYPOLOGICAL MODEL FOR TEXT-STRUCTURE PROCESSING: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PEDAGOGY OF TEACHING WITH REFERENCE TO TRANSLATION (ARABIC-ENGLISH)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF.; This thesis starts with the postulate that advanced Arab students are generally "good" at the level of sentence formation and context free semantics of English, but who are "poor" when it comes to appropriately structuring information as texts.; In an attempt to help such a student population, in the first instance, achieve a textual competence and find some pedagogical implications, the present thesis adopts--with some modifications--a typologically oriented model for text-structure processing.; To achieve such objectives, six chapters make up the thesis:; Chapter 1 sets both the motivations and the assumptions which underly the thesis.; Chapter 2 selectively reviews some episodes in the development of text-linguistics.; Chapter 3 is devoted to the explanations of the various components of the model adopted for text-structure processing.; Chapter 4 has two purposes: (1) A descriptive analysis of three exemplary texts to demonstrate the pure analytic potential of the model. (2) The design of an experiment to test the pedagogical implications of the model with particular reference to the teaching of translation (Arabic - English) to advanced Arab students.; The experiment involves two groups of advanced Arab students from the Polytechnic of Central London (PCL) and the University of Salford (US).; Chapter 5 is devoted to the analysis and discussion of the experimental data.; Chapter 6, the final one, concludes the thesis and covers some possible applications and plausible implications of the model. Some suggestions for further research are also proposed.