Beyond the Sentence by Scott Thornbury

Subtitle: Introducing Discourse Analysis

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book

          This book is part of my ongoing project to read for professional development.  More specifically, this book was recommended reading for the distance DELTA (W) course I’m currently doing.

The Review

          As with all the other TESOL related books I review on this blog, this book is not pleasure reading, and it’s only going to be of interest to other English teachers.

            But although the general public may want to stay clear, fellow English teachers should find this book worth their time.

            The title of the book Beyond the Sentence indicates the theme.

            Too often, Scott Thornbury says, we English teachers focus on individual sentences in isolation when we teach grammar. 

            (Yours truly is certainly guilty of this in any number of the grammar sheets I designed).

            However, as Scott Thornbury points out, the sentence does not exist in isolation, and it is the type of text, or genre, that determines much of the grammar and word choices of the sentences within it.  Therefore teachers and students should be encouraged to think about the text as a whole before analyzing individual sentences.

           

            With a subtitle like Introducing Discourse Analysis, you know ahead of time the book is going to be mostly broccoli. And it is.

            And yet, once you get into it, the book actually isn’t half bad.  Unlike a lot of teacher-training books, which can often get very pedantic, Scott Thornbury never talks down to his readers.  He’s an intelligent author who guides the reader through the subject material very well—never assuming too much, but never over-explaining either.

            His insightful explanations caused me to realize any number of things about spoken and written language that I never knew before.  (Language is a funny thing—you can use it every day, but never stop to think about how a text is actually constructed.)

            Scott Thornbury relies entirely on authentic texts to illustrate the points he is making, and because all of his text analysis is grounded in actual texts from real life, it makes his points all the more interesting.

            And he has just the right amount of sly winking humor throughout the book as he subtly pokes fun at many of the texts he analyzes. 

            All in all, you feel like you’re in the hands of a capable author, and even if the subject isn’t your favorite, you still appreciate the clear straightforward explanations of discourse analysis.

Notes and Other Observations

Spoken Discourse Versus Written Discourse

          I found Scott Thornbury’s section on spoken discourse particularly interesting.

            As Thornbury says: “Another effect of the spontaneity of speech is its ‘one-clause-or-phrase-at-a-time’ construction. Rather than being built up in sentence-length units, speech tends to be produced in smaller ‘runs’, each run representing a unit of meaning.  These runs are tacked on to each other, rather than being embedded inside larger units (as is typically the case with formal writing) and are often linked by the highly frequent conjunctions and, but, and so…..The cumulative construction principle tolerates the addition of sentence ‘slots’ that in written language would be considered ungrammatical.” (p. 64-65)

           

          This was something I never really thought of before.  (Strange how we can speak everyday, but never really give much thought to how we speak—at least in my case.) 

            As Thornbury explains, because of the processing demands on the speaker, we tend to speak in shorter phrases and chunks that would not be considered grammatical if we wrote them down.

            He goes onto explain:

            “Of course, this segmentation into bite-sized chunks not only makes production easier, but it makes processing on the part of the listener easier too.  This is a fact that is sometimes forgotten when materials writers write texts for listening practice that are constructed out of sentence-length units, rather than clause—or phrase—length ones.  In a well intentioned attempt to ‘tidy up’ spoken language, they may, in fact, be making it harder to process. (p.65)

            Interesting.  I never thought about that before either.

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Lexical Repetition and Lexical Cohesion

          ESL students are often taught to avoid repeating the same words when writing an essay.  (I’ve seen this in a lot of textbooks and materials and occasionally I’ve even taught this myself, usually prompted by the textbooks I was teaching out of.)  The idea is that repeating the same word too many times bores the reader, and that students should instead be encouraged to vary their word choice by using pronouns, synonyms, paraphrases.

            This is all good in theory, but it can also lead to incomprehensible student writing.  When I’m teaching EAP (English for Academic Purposes) classes, I often come across sentences that make absolutely no sense.  However, when I ask the student to explain the sentence to me, they usually can give me a clear simple oral explanation of the incomprehensible written sentence.

            “Well why didn’t you just write that instead?” I ask.

            “Because I didn’t want to repeat the same words I had already used in the previous sentence,” the student responds.

            The search for synonyms and paraphrasing had lead to incomprehensible writing.

           

          I therefore took interest in Scott Thornbury’s explanation of how good writers will actually repeat the same words over and over again to build cohesion in a text. 

            As Thornbury writes on page 62: “Explain to writers that lexical repetition is not necessarily a bad thing. Show, using authentic texts, how effective writers use both direct and indirect repetition to convey their argument and to create cohesion.”

           

            Since reading Thornbury, I have been telling my students not to worry about lexical repetition, and even encouraging them do to more lexical repetition.       

            (Although… I do worry somewhat this may be in conflict with the training the students get on the IELTS (W) courses, where they are told that higher scores are awarded for displaying a broad range of vocabulary.)

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Spaghetti Writing

          I found this quote particularly descriptive of the kind of challenges I face in marking student writing:

            “Spaghetti writing is the kind of loose-jointed composition writing which second-language students can produce in paragraph after paragraph. It is characterized by long incoherent sentences and a surfeit of subordinate clauses in search of a main one. All language stimulates expectations, but so often these expectations are not fulfilled in spaghetti writing and a however or a so leads the reader to a wrong conclusion. It is difficult to correct, because tinkering with a relative or a conjunction will not solve the problem, and the usual correction shorthand (Sp, T, Art—spelling/tense/article) is inadequate: short of rewriting the passage, there is little the teacher can do.” (From page 61, although Thornbury is quoting another writer here, D. McDevitt)

            This paragraph very eloquently captures the frustration I feel in marking EAP essays. I have been given a correction code by my school which is similar to the short hand mentioned above (Sp, T, Art—spelling/tense/article), but which is inadequate to correct the types of incoherent sentences my students are writing.

            (Thornbury goes on to respond to the above quote by saying that spaghetti writing can not be solved after the fact, but it can be pre-empted before hand if the teacher tells the students to always keep their reader in mind.  Personally I’m somewhat pessimistic that the problem will be so easily solved, but I’ll give it a try.)

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Skimming Versus Reading

          In a previous book review, I mentioned my ambivalence to teaching skimming and scanning strategies.

            I was, therefore, glad to find out that Scott Thorbury shares my ambivalence.  From page 112: “it has been argued that encouraging learners to process text at this very superficial level—eg by skimming and scanning—may be counterproductive, since successful reading involves a much greater degree of engagement with the text than such an approach allows. Successful readers may, indeed, ‘read every word’, at least some of the time. By discouraging readers from processing texts at anything other than a very superficial level, teachers may be giving learners the wrong message.”

           

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Language Awareness Raising

          In the section on language awareness writing, Thornbury writes “Just as real texts and coursebook texts provide data for language study, so too can learners’ texts be exploited for the same ends.  In fact, there’s a good case for learners’ texts being the best resources for a focus on language.  After all, learner-produced texts are more likely to be closer to the developmental stage that other learners are going through. (p.155)

            One way of doing this, Thornbury says, is “The learner text is ‘tidied up’ before being made available to other learners. For example, errors are corrected and awkward wordings are reformulated. Yet the content—and ideally the flavour—of the original remains the same…What can be particularly revealing for learners is to see the two versions, the original and the edited, side-by-side and to make comparisons and notice differences. In other words, the awareness-raising process is self-initiated, rather than teacher directed” (p. 156)

            I’ve actually started doing this recently with some of my young learner classes by correcting their writings and putting the correcting versions on-line for the class to see.  So I was glad to see an idea I’ve already been using had been approved by the ESL experts.

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Parsnips Topics

          Information from this book came in useful the other day during a staffroom conversation.

            A fellow teacher was expressing frustration with the way heterosexuality was always assumed in all of the coursebooks.  “In all of the example sentences, textbooks just always assume that boys are going to love girls, and girls are going to love boys,” she said.  “The textbooks don’t even acknowledge that homosexuality exists.”

            “Funny you should mention that,” I said, “I was reading about that just the other day.”

            In Beyond the Sentence Scott Thornbury explains that because ESL textbooks are usually aiming for a global audience, topics that would be taboo in any country are avoided for all of them.  The textbook writers are told to avoid any PARSNIP topics (politics, alcohol, religion, sex, narcotics, isms and pork).  (This is one of the reasons why many ESL textbooks are so inherently boring as well not inclusive.) 

            However, Thornbury also mentions that this is slowly beginning to change under pressure, and in some textbooks marketed towards Southern Europe, homosexuality is beginning to be included.

And Others

          There’s much more in this book.  (I didn’t even talk about Thornbury’s discussion of genre analysis, for example.)  But the above are just a few brief things that caught my attention as I read the book.

Link(s) of the Day
Noam Chomsky: Trans-Pacific Partnership is a “neoliberal assault”  The political theorist and linguist slams the agreement that has little to do with free trade 
and from cracked.com: 5 Terrible Things I Learned as a Corporate Whistleblower

Update: June 7 2017  
Video Review HERE