Lecture 18

Text Processing (Skills).

Main points:

1. Interconnection between text production and text reception.

2. Problem-solving and text-processing.

3. Synthesis: writing. Strategies and tactics.

4. Analysis: reading.

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It is difficult to keep knowledge and the use of knowledge separate and, indeed, they

are only so distinguished in analysis and certainly not action.

A convenient place to start is to recognize that text-processing operates in both directions - reception and production; listening and speaking (or, the focus of our particular interest, reading and writing) - and that the processes involved are essentially mirror images of each other, i.e. we can explain reading and writing in terms of the same model.

1. Interconnection between text production and text reception.

The interconnection between production and reception can be seen in fig. 1: writer, reader and text.

W RITER

C ontext 1 Production

process

TEXT 1

(original, writer’s intention)

subject-matter

C ontext 2 Interpretation

process

TEXT 2

(semantic representation of

text 1)

READER

Text production and text-reception constitute the major part of the process of human communication and, as such, we are dealing not with one text but with two: the writer’s text and the reader’s.

The context of writing and reading differs as between writer and reader (participants) who are different individuals with different experiences of life and intentions when engaged in the task of text-processing; they have differing goals (aims, general and particular) and for each the experience will have different outcomes (ends); results, intended or otherwise. Further, the way in which the writer planned for the text to be taken (key) - the tenor (зміст, значення) of the discourse - may differ from the way in which it is actually taken by the reader; what was entertaining may be felt to be flippant and annoying by the reader.

Text-processing is a problematic enterprise. There is a particular problem: in principle, processing could go on forever, there is no definitive reading of a text nor perfect rendering of ideals in written form (nor, therefore, a “perfect” translation).

Two principles: “analogy (things will tend to be as they were before) and local interpretation (if there is a change, assume it is minimal) form the basis of the assumption of coherence in our experience of life in general, hence in our experience of discourse as well” (Brown and Gule, 1983, 67 ).