Modern Trends in Language Teaching: Discourse Approach to Text Interpretation

In this paper we develop discourse approach to text interpretation. Being concerned with the study of language in use (written texts of all kinds and spoken data, from conversation to highly institutionalized forms of talk), discourse analysis has built a significant foundation for applied linguistics, including ELT. Discourse approach to text interpretation implies three-dimensional semiotic analysis of the text involving its semantic, syntactic and pragmatic aspects. We pay particular attention to recognizing textual patterns. These patterns are manifested in regularly occurring functional relationships between textual segments that become deeply ingrained as part of our cultural knowledge. We consider the interpretation of relations between textual segments as a cognitive act on the part of the reader. On the one hand, textual segments are related to each other through such universal logical sequencing as phenomenon reason, cause consequence, instrument achievement, problem solution and suchlike; on the other hand, their relations can be viewed as matching relations, when segments of the text are compared or contrasted with one another. Together with cohesion and coherence of the text, logical sequencing and matching represent the basic categories of the so called “discourse” approach to text interpretation that is widely employed in ELT at present.