| Besides
learning to tackle syntax and vocabulary, L2 readers need to appreciate
that the unit of meaning is not the sentence or the paragraph, but the whole
text. They need to recognize that there are features belonging to the organization
of texts that, inevitably, occur in sentences but whose function can only
be understood by seeing the patterns of logical connection crossing sentence
boundaries. These features are conventions that a reader can expect an author
writing in a shared native language to use, and similarly that an author
can expect a reader to be familiar with. They can be broadly divided into
organization at the level of the text and at the level of the sentence.
Once again, English will be used here for illustrative purposes, but the
points in this section are almost certainly applicable, with suitable adaptation,
to most European languages. |
