INDEX

Introduction ................................................................................................................... 2

Methodological Criteria .................................................................................................. 5

The Textual Discourse Approach .................................................................................... 16

The Process of Language Learning .................................................................................. 22

Teaching Techniques, Tasks and Complementary Strategies for each Stage and Level .... 31

Teachers and Teaching Materials: Bibliography, and non-written Resources ................... 35

Project on English for Specific Purposes: Professional English.......................................... 39

Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 54

INTRODUCTION

The teaching of modern languages is the specified academical objective for the Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas explicitly referred in the law Ley 29/1981 (June, 24th) and in the L.O.G.S.E. 1/1990 (October, 3rd). This latter recent law for the organization of the current Spanish educational system states clearly, though not extensively, the central function of these educational institutions as the ones which will provide the specialized teaching of languages.

It was in the former law (Ley 29/1981) where the bases for the reorganization of these studies, whose origins date from 1915, were established. The teaching of languages was to be staged in two levels. The first level would be divided in two cycles or grades: the Elementary Grade and the Superior Grade. The Elementary Grade would have three courses of 120 learning hours each to achieve an intermediate knowledge of the language and the Superior Grade would consist of two courses (120 hrs/each) to progress to an advanced level of language knowledge.

The second level was planned to provide those students having an advanced knowledge of a language with more advanced practical skills and the professional qualification required to become Translators. The qualification referred in the Law was 'University Graduate', but the Spanish University stopped the development and application of this article since the Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas do not belong to the Spanish University and there are no established contacts for co-operation in education (though a great amount of university students, even the most specialized ones in Modern Philology, attend to the full five courses in the Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas to get a real advanced knowledge of the language and in Scientific Careers the qualification of Certificado de Aptitud, or even a certificate of the first three courses, is traditionally admitted for the convalidation of the subject of Modern Language, usually English). As a reaction, the Spanish universities undertook the creation of postgraduate schools in Translation, which seem not to be so successful as expected.

On the other hand, the constraint to teach the First Level syllabus, which is theoretically similar to the ones in Secondary Education, and the analogous degree required to be teachers at Language Schools and at Secondary Education Institutes have led the educational public administration to consider and organize the EOI as Secondary Education centers. This is still a real handicap in the future development of the EOI.

In the years 1989 and 1992 a new set of laws (Reales Decretos 1523/89, December 1st, and 47/92, January 24th) develops the organization of the First Level of these studies, establishing the minimal compulsory contents and levels of language skills to acquire for the Elementary and Superior Cycles and the way to evaluate the acquisition of those learning objectives. These objectives were stated by law after seventy-five years of continuous application in the Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas and as a result of their lately practical success which caused their expansion, promoted by the people from medium size towns and their Town Halls. It is this level that focuses the core of our everyday effort to continue achieving the high standards of success so much appreciated and demanded by our students and their social, family and professional environment.

The first part of this dissertation deals with the principles which govern the teaching of a modern language, English in our particular case, with the newest methodological criteria, based on the most recent theories of language research, studying the process of language learning, the elements which take part in language acquisition, considering the participants, the teachers and mainly the students, their circumstances, including the techniques, strategies and materials necessary to achieve a systematic progress in the management of the four basic language skills.

The law (Real Decreto 967/88, September 2nd) also established the possibility of providing courses on languages for specialized purposes, a new challenge for the EOI which could be a solution for the probable oncoming crisis. However, the ESP schedule at Language Schools was born with an overwhelming drawback: the a priori restrictions imposed by the public administration in the creation of specialized courses for professionals, setting up students registration minimals, syllabus and timetable restraints and excessive fees among others. A study on the academical and pedagogical objectives based on methodological principles, strategies and techniques established by experienced ESP researches, such as P. Strevens, H.G. Widdowson and G. Swales, T. Hutchinson and A. Waters, follows in the second part of this dissertation, omitting any political and socioeconomic considerations; otherwise, it would make this paper into a treatise.

METHODOLOGICAL CRITERIA Analysis of the General Methodological Criteria applicable to the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language

Since linguists and language teachers are both concerned in different ways with the same language material, it is natural to ask whether a knowledge of linguistic grammars can make any contribution to language teaching methodology, and if so what the nature of the contribution is likely to be. (J.P.B. Allen, 1974).

The question of whether to follow any theoretical or formal linguistic principles to apply to practical language teaching or not is still a matter for discussion among language professionals, linguists and language teachers. As language is a system and teaching a programmed activity, it seems to be obvious that language teaching should be based on some kind of principles. Whether these principles derive from the description of the system or they arise really as a practical result from the application of the system (the use of language) deserves to be the eternal dilemma. Anyway, more and more often textbooks introduce their objectives and the explanation of the course as based on 'multiapproach' principles and techniques, a 'multisyllabus' (Cambridge English Course), a varied or 'balanced syllabus' (Gateway), an 'eclectic approach', or a 'flexible approach' (Language Issues: a textbook whose main objective is stated in this declaration sentence: 'The ability to work out at least a rough idea of a grammar rule from examples, to use dictionaries for connotation or collocation work, to build up vocabulary independently, to organize learning so that it is effective are examples of skills which are implicitly or explicitly taught in the book'. p.5). That is the same as saying that they will not follow any systematic method, but will use all the interesting techniques they come across to develop an attractive course to be sold up as soon as possible.

Other courses follow the idea of being the most fashionable realization of the most successful prevailing modern approach (currently the Communicative Approach) and start the lessons by presenting the portion of language for the day with a Reading Comprehension activity and ending the lesson with a Cloze Test, which, if provided the grammar category of the requested words, are some of the most traditional techniques of the (so considered by the authors) 'obsolete', 'unpractical', 'useless', 'timeconsuming' Grammar Translation method, after repeating three or four times a tiring Audio-Lingual telephone conversation activity where you only have to change the arranged time and the meeting point.

Others are more sincere and clearly define themselves as textbooks to be studied to pass an exam, such as the so-called First Certificate or Proficiency Courses (Think First Certificate, and other Cambridge First Certificate and Proficiency courses). They do not follow a method based on linguistics or language acquisition or learning processes, but a systematic activity based on a secondary skill of passing specific exams, with particular tasks to evaluate certain language knowledge, conceiving that secondary skill of passing an exam not as a means but as an end itself.

Of course, most of them work in some way and even most of them introduce new techniques that reflect some practical innovation in language teaching and learning, but I think it is so as a result of experienced teachers' intuition. However, most teachers occasionally find ourselves wasting lots of time practising useless exercises which, hidden by some intricate reason, pass our exhaustive preselection of interesting goal-oriented class activities. This is the final outcome of many courses and it is the hardworking student and the experienced involved teacher who finally help them get some success, giving the whole course the necessary systematicity required by a programmed activity. The well-proven failure of do-it-yourself courses, even those including the most advanced technological improvements, confirms the importance of the teacher and the students' motivation as the central integrative elements in the systematic process of teaching and learning a foreign language. This integrative participation in language learning will be dealt below.

Textbooks are not, as they should not be, the compendium of principles governing language learning, but they form the final practical part of a three-fold process of teaching a foreign language, 'the actual materials used in language teaching' elaborated following some superordinate criteria concerning teaching procedures and techniques, which are the syllabus or methodology. That syllabus or structure of the course derives from some theoretical principles formed from a scientific analysis of language as a system, what Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens (1964) called methodics, and which is currently referred to as theoretical approach. These linguists considered the process as a top-down process, from general to practical. However, who is first the linguist or the language teacher? There is not a firm assertion; a good coursebook is usually the pedagogical application of a theory of language, but in a textbook we also find procedures and techniques which do not follow the theoretical basis but as they are good for the teaching objective they are included, sometime expand to other syllabuses and they can finally become the practical reasons supporting a theory of language. This is the case of the exercises of the kind of repeating stereotyped dialogues, the origin of the Situational Approach, and the exercises of the kind of Guessing from the Context, which appeared before Discourse Analysis established as a theory of language.

Let me present a short summary of how the theories of language developed different approaches for the teaching of languages and how some teaching procedures could be the origin of a scientific approach to language learning.

To start with, some researchers claim that there is not a direct relation between the analysis of the formal properties of language and the practical techniques for learning the use of a language. This view was supported by the so-called Natural Approach, later the Direct Approach. They consider that a language should be learned as a native child does, without being aware of the formal properties of the language, without a systematic teaching of its grammar, just facing the students with real or stereotyped situations where they are impelled to react. They focus merely on the social component of language: a language is learned through the mere use of that language. This Natural/Direct approach is the first example of how practical learning techniques can form a general formal theory of language acquisition (not the other way round).⁽¹⁾

The other way round is found in the analysis language acquisition (Krashen, 1981). First Language acquisition is achieved by repetition of the language elements, starting from the shorter ones (prosody, isolated words, intonation, sentences) at an early age before the restructuring stage at the age of 6, when an internalization of the language system happens in the mind of the native child. Linguists, following the appraisal of psychology as a new science applied to human processes of learning, find out the existence of an individual psychological component, a mechanism for learning a language. There must be an internal innate device for language, and by means of mechanical repetition (as native learners do) it would make the adult learner of a second language achieve a native-like knowledge of the language. It is the behaviourist principle of the Audio-Lingual Approach: the learning process is achieved by means of the acquisition of habits as a response to environmental stimuli. However, language is not such a simple mechanical response to stimuli, but a more complex mentalistic cognitive process. Although repetition and mechanical response to stimuli can be proved successful in first language acquisition, there is not a central parallel process in the learning of a second language. The psychological components are important when considering the practical setting of techniques and procedures and the elaboration of teaching materials and exercises. We still continue using some successful drilling exercises. We can use the technique of repetition to manage the correct pronunciation or to learn common collocations, but it is not the basic procedure to learn with.

In the learning of a second language it seems to be necessary to consider, then, a theoretical formal awareness as the foundation on which to base the practical realization of language learning. It is the view supported by the first trends in language studies. Linguists analysed language formulating the linguistic components of language as a system and establishing formal grammars, the so-called Traditional Grammar, and on the basis of this theory of language, a method for the learning of a second language was widely established, the Grammar Translation Method, which combined the knowledge of the properly linguistic elements in the system of a language, the structure and the vocabulary to be transferred to the linguistic properties (the structure and the vocabulary) of a second or foreign language. The learning process was not to be achieved inductively like in the first language acquisition but as a deductive process looking for similarities and contrasts between a first language and a second or foreign language. They based their teaching textbooks and materials on a linguistic description of the language system, exercising the analytical process which is characteristic of a great number of classroom activities and tasks (exercises about comparisons, conditionals, phrasal verbs, and so on, are usually developed from grammar translation techniques). The important contribution of this method was to take the linguistic elements into account and although there is not an explicit reference to the difference in the acquisition of the first language and the second or foreign language, it seemed to be obvious that the learning process was not the same, but it derived from the transference of the linguistic features of the first language into the ones of the second language.

It was the focus on the components of language that established first the basic approaches to language teaching and learning. It was not the job of linguists setting up the theory and teachers developing techniques to apply the theory or viceversa. It was a symbiotic work, till in the late 60s and in the 70s, the upraising linguistic sciences looked for scientific partners in their formulation of theoretical principles about language, becoming multidisciplinar. So taking the componential focus as the axis, they developed three main branches of the theory of language: sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and formal linguistics or structuralism. Linguists left the practical application of teaching a language to teachers, who engaged themselves in the production of diverse teaching materials depending on their particular goals, taking some peculiar factors into consideration. It was a period which led teachers to get fully aware of those distinctive factors of teaching a language as a second or foreign language. But before that could happen as a reaction, there was a tendency of linguists to impose scientific advice on 'language teachers in the hope of influencing what they do in the classroom' (Allen, 1975). It resulted in a complete failure. The Situational Approach set the foundations on Sociolinguistics, the Cognitive/Psychological Methods (the Silent Way, the CLL, and Suggestopoedia) based on Psycholinguistics, and the Structural Approach based on Formal Linguistics, Structuralism. Anyway, teachers at least took advantage of the new theories specifying new techniques to apply to the practical teaching of a language. The ones influenced by the cognitive aspect of psycholinguistics got the clue of the different process between language acquisition and learning a second language. These are two quite different processes that can be even complementary in a complex human activity. Acquisition is unconscious and learning is conscious. There are quite different factors intervening in the learning a foreign language and the first language acquisition: the students, their age and motivation, the linguistic environment, the use of the memory, etc.

At this stage of linguistic theories, a new comprising theory derived from the structuralism (F. Saussure, 1955) taking some cognitive elements into consideration apart from the linguistic components. It was the Transformational Generative Grammar (N. Chomsky, 1965), which stated the need for acquiring a linguistic competence mingled with a mentalistic view, that is, there is a cognitive element which enables the acquisition of language in human beings, it is the Language Acquisition Device which makes the code of language, the linguistic competence, and an ulterior language development and application is the use of that code into practical utterances of a grammatical system. It is the performance that makes it practical, the surface structure, different in every language and even in every person. From Chomsky's point of view this surface structure only deserves observation to check if it follows the grammaticality of the code, as it is a varied personal realization. The advance achieved by Chomsky's transformational grammar is the renewed importance on the linguistic components of language which were previously neglected as reaction to the Grammar translation methods, but the assumption that learning a language involves a deep knowledge of the grammatical system of the language is far from the language teachers' practical objectives. Nevertheless, a great quantity of materials have been elaborated following this view, consisting of definitions, rule descriptions, diagrams and exercises of the kind of pattern-practice and substitutions, which enable students get an understanding of the deep structure of the language and check for grammaticality, but which are useless when they want to produce meaningful language practice or use the language for communication.

That point is the one upon which pragmatical linguistics developed the teaching of language in use. The Communicative Approach established the Functional Notional Syllabus, centering their efforts on the social aspect of language in use. It has been widely applied by language teachers and textbooks in the last decade. It proved successful, but its success was only partial, as its goals were limited to use the language in determined social circumstances, usually for survival purposes or for specific purposes. Language teachers developed courses following the theoretical basis of the pragmatic linguistics (Halliday, 1973), who considered language as an act for social communication with some cognitive foundations. Again they neglected an important language component: the properly linguistic elements. Nevertheless, this trend was quite productive in the elaboration of teaching materials, and they achieved great success in the primary purposes of language for communication, that is, the skills of speaking and understanding speech.They retook the previous cognitive considerations of language learning as a conscious process different from first language acquisition; they even elaborated the kind of syllabus depending on the kind of learner and their peculiar communicative purposes, producing materials for ESP, EFL, ESL and exam-oriented textbooks. The omission of the linguistic components led to the failure (if we can consider it that way) in language teaching as a complete unitary task. The teaching of more advanced levels of language practice lacked the necessary linguistic knowledge required to acquire not only fluency but also accuracy in the general communication, producing a series of basic mistakes, such as the morphological features of certain grammatical categories (adjectives with plural -s), difficulty of distinguishing modality from functional formulas, difficulty in distinguishing the different levels of registers in the writing production (misusing contractions in formal writing) and in the reading comprehension. The common reaction to solve these problems was the reinforced acceptance that language teachers should use materials from diverse formal sources to complete the advice given by the current trend of linguistics, and so this Communicative approach was loaded with grammatical explanations and terminology (modals became 'defective verbs followed by infinitive without to' again), repetition exercises (at least, they were abridged from 20 to 5 sentences on the same structure!), pattern-practice exercises (but now the description of people is guided with photographs). As writing was not a very general communicative activity any more, it was relegated to letter writing (see Streamline and Synthesis textbooks) although more and more qualified students were asked to write a report in their jobs or an argumentative essay.

The proposed multisyllabus solution does not seem to be very effective, since a great number of students of English as a foreign language are registered in two courses in the same year as they think they need reinforcement and revision. When faced with real use of language in a formal accurate skilful situation, they feel strangely disappointed and dissatisfied with their results. We need a general approach including the necessary stress on the three focusing components from both the most recent views on the theory of language and the most complete set of multisyllabus procedures and techniques, accomplishing a unitary objective of the process of learning a foreign language. The theory of language which identified the three components (social, cognitive and linguistic components) as three intended meanings or functions governing language was established by the pragmatics of Halliday and settled in a theory known as Discourse Analysis (Brown and Yule, 1983). Before going on making a formal description of the resulting Textual Discourse Approach, developed into the practical teaching objectives of the Textual Syllabus and the corresponding techniques applied to the graded process of learning English as a foreign language in the Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas, I would like to draw a summary table of the referred language studies up to now.

Table 1.

As we can see, Discourse Analysis already introduced an element focusing on the linguistic aspects: the textual meaning, a basically linguistic component comprising some cognitive constraints, as stated by the Schema theory (Rumelhart,1976, and Schrank and Albenson, 1977) and the Speech Acts Theory (Searle, 1969). Textual coherence (Van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983) can help us determine a practical syllabus based on text superstructures (De Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981) which will justify the different techniques in the language teaching materials necessary for the most complete pragmatical learning activities.

THE TEXTUAL DISCOURSE APPROACH

Foundations for a New Theory of Language to apply to Language Teaching and Learning

Functions and components of language

Discourse Analysis considers language as a system of signs rather than a enclosed structure of linguistic elements (Firth,1957), and discourse as language in use. The system has a series of components which make it function to achieve its communicative purpose, this is, to communicate meaning. Five of Jackobson's classification of six communicative functions applied to language (i.e., 1. to express inner states, 2. to communicate information, 3. to describe language itself, 4. to maintain social relations and 5. to affect the behaviour of others) are simplified into two metafunctions by Guy Cook (1994): a) Communicating information (which includes 1., 2. and 3.) and b) Maintaining social relations (which includes 4. and 5.). These resulting metafunctions would merge into a direct protofunction of language: to manipulate environment.

Halliday (1973) distinguishes three metafunctions as the various kinds of meanings reflected by language in use: textual, ideational and interpersonal meanings. The ideational meaning focuses on the content of the meaning and its components (the participants, the circumstances and the process). It deals with the representation of the users' experience of the world through language with the help of fundamental logical relations. It is a reflection of what has been called the semantics of language. The interpersonal meaning is seen as the exchange of information with assignment of speech roles (mood) and users' attitudes. The textual meaning deals with the message as conveying meaning through context: the context of text and the context of situation. The central aspect of the textual function is the information structure, based on New and Given information, elements which determine the organization of the text into discourse units in the context of situation. So, the organization of language, its information structure, must be determined by its textual function. The concepts of New and Given information should be analyzed at a textual, not only sentential, level. As language is a representation of the world and our experience and it is not a presentation of concepts and relations per se, users need common ground where lots of concepts and relations, events and situations can be considered as elements of Given information, and their manipulation of deviant New information can imply inferences of experiences of a new textual world. Another important aspect is theme, which together with rheme, are the components of the message giving shape to the organization of text into sentence structures in the context of text. This is the grammar of discourse.

These three kinds of meanings are the functional components of the semantic meaning which in fact organizes language. Halliday determined the quality of the textual component as the instrument which combines the ideational and interpersonal functions, a necessary condition to communicate through language and interact through language, creating and recognizing discourse.(Halliday, 1973)

The two views (Halliday's and Cook's) converge in the results but diverge in their origins, since Halliday conceives meaning as the construction of the system for communication and Cook sees meaning as encoding / decoding of the system. From both semiotic theories we can assume that language is used as a code of signs with multiple variables governed by a system of functional structures. The system is interactive, non-fixed and empirically grounded. Because of the necessity to communicate, the interpersonal (as social interaction) and the ideational (as experience of the world) functions provide signs with a conventional dimension to be shared socially in a kind of complex code system giving shape to the phonological element (prosody), its structure (morphosyntax or grammar) and the notional content (semantics) of a text in particular situations (context). It is the code that is different in different language communities.

There is a conventional interaction between the elements of textual meaning. This interaction, or linking force, is realized mainly through coherence as the ordering and relation of the functional components in text. We can conceive coherence as the element which gives unity to a text, and so as the crucial axis of discourse, among text, context and users.

De Beaugrande & Dressler (1981) clarify the notions of cohesion and coherence as the basic 'metastructures' of language centered on text. These metastructures constitute, in combination, a series of models of textual organization. Taking the cognitive meaning as a basis, coherence is the actual meaning of the expressions (with cohesion) in a text. That actual meaning or 'sense' is formed by a continuum of 'concepts and relations' organized in the knowledge of the users by a set of stereotyped 'global patterns', from where the choices selected in the real communication will make up the textual world as a whole. This is the point of contact between discourse analysis and schema theory research.

The global patterns form a world of representations which is the common ground of communication between users. The representation as the interaction between the world of knowledge (the cognitive component) and the participants (social component) in the world of text (textual instrument) is the essence of the process of communication achieved through speech acts (Searle, 1969).

For Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) discourse is a social activity consisting of speech acts affecting interpretation and representation by means of strategies as a mixture of cognitive behavior and mental acts. When they are organized we can talk about plans with goals dominated by a macro-action, giving unity to a set of actions as a result of the specific functions or plans employed to communicate at any level. Textual coherence uses strategies to handle cognitive and contextual information. They focus on semantic coherence of two types: conditional, based on cause, consequence and temporality; and functional, based on example, specification, explication, contrast, comparison, generalization, conclusion. Since these strategies for coherence derive from knowledge structures common to all men, they seem to be the same in similar sociocultural environments (a situational context), although they have different linguistic realizations (different kinds of language and even different languages).

In using language, we are more interested in the communicative linguistic effects and also in the determinants of those effects (the communicative elements of the effective use of language). The description of a house by students in a classroom situation, apart from using a higher proportion of certain syntactic structures (adjectives, relative constructions, verb 'to be', prepositional phrases as noun determiners, etc.) over other ones and specific lexical items, usually features a common order of the description sequence -from the outside, through the entrance hall, to the bottom of the house; and from the general framework to the particular details- following, in this way, a plan of description with stereotyped schemas where a great quantity of details are not referred, but inferred. This is due to the previous acquisition of a common global pattern in the shared knowledge of students about the description of a house. The same process seems to apply to linguistic units of a higher level. There must be specific knowledge structures (macrostructures) for different discourse conventions and those macrostructures can be the same in different languages.

Effects of Discourse on Language Learning: Textual Organization of Interlanguage

If we conceive the acquisition of a foreign language as a communicative objective in itself, all the linguistic acts leading to achieve our aim can give shape to a typical schema for a conventional text form, this is, what van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) call a mascrostructure, made of conventional progressive categories often hierarchically organized into a discourse type with relevant features as a cognitive model. It is what other linguists (Seliger and Sohamy,1989; Tarone, 1989) call interlanguage 'a second language learner's knowledge of the target language' or more accurately ' a language-learner language' (Ellis, 1985).

The notion of interlanguage appeared from the very beginning (in the 60s) in connection with the learner's knowledge as a unified whole, in which new knowledge is integrated and systematically reorganized with previous knowledge of the native language' (Spoltsky, 1989; 31) That is what first Tarone (1988) and later Spoltsky (1989) define as the first necessary condition of a language, the System condition: 'A second language learner's knowledge of a second language forms a systematic whole'. That systematized organization of a second language could be considered as deriving from the common knowledge macrostructure of speakers in both languages sharing similar textual conventions where communication is to be realized in specific superstructures imposed by the target language with particular conventional textual, ideational and interpersonal realizations. There are basic common knowledge structures in both languages, common schemas, situational and world experiences, communicative purposes and social roles and the properly linguistic realization in a specific target language is what makes interlanguage function as a superstructure, a type of discourse.

THE PROCESS OF LANGUAGE LEARNING

Language Acquisition, Language Learning and the Role of Memory

N. Chomsky (1965) considers language as a integrated complex system of rules, which are the base of the linguistic realization. It is something essential in itself. Man possesses an innate capacity to learn it, a mechanism of learning, the L.A.D. (Language Acquisition Device). According to him, in spite of the abstract and complex nature of the rules of language, children dominate the maternal language in a short period of time, and, although the language is full of irregularities and there are a great deal and very different languages, there must be a previous preferent knowledge common to all the languages: it is the one which Chomsky calls the 'language universals' which are included in the LAD. The acquisition of the language and the linguistic development are produced by means of some internal forces activated by experience.

Although language is not acquired from the mere exposition to situations as behaviourists assumed, this innate mechanism must be deduced, since it is not checkable with objective data. A detailed exposition of those universals of language has not yet been made. One must suppose a series of non-explicit mechanisms like the order of acquisition of structures, a mechanism of formation of hypothesis on the universals, a mechanism of contrast in order to discern the sounds and organize them in a system, a mechanism of structuring by which the child should already possess certain knowledge of the concepts expressed by grammar relations (the idea of agentivity, action, determination, transitivity, modification, gradation, dependence, etc.) that personal experience will be in charge of activating in order to get a complete linguistic development.

It was Piaget (1952) with his studies on the cognitive development of the child who comes to conjugate the two previous repelling trends: behaviourism and innatism. Chomsky only considers language as the specific separate inheritance of other intellectual functions. For him, language development is only centered in linguistic categories. Piaget, on the other hand, considers the linguistic capacity of the child, not as determined by a linguistic specific inheritance, but due to an intellectual or cognitive development, to the processes of knowledge.

The child is not an amorfos being ready to be manipulated by environment as behaviourists say, neither s/he possesses a complex internal mechanism that determines their future development. Piaget as a psychologist considers the human behavior to be a reflection of a subjacent organization and distinguishes two categories of organization: the one which determines the form in that the human being interacts with environment, learning from it (he calls it 'function') and the one which is the product of that interaction ('structure'). Learning carries 'invariants' for some principles that Piaget calls 'universals', certain characteristics inherited from mental operations common to knowledge at all levels. These, linked to the features of the environment of learning form the cognitive structures ('schemata') or models of internal organization. Here is the solution to the problem of the innatism in Chomsky; it is not the structure the innate, but the function, the disposition of the mental operation in man, the one that is inherited. The importance resides in the connection with the environment of learning, with the external world, whose characteristics are essentially similar for all men (stimuli, maternal communication, necessary linguistic components for oral communication...) and they originate those common universal features or 'schemata' found in knowledge, the ones that the Chomskyan innatist theory lacked when considering the experience as an element of development of language learning only, but not of unconscious acquisition.

Piaget distinguishes, then, between function, which is inherited, and structure, which develops with the interaction of the child and their environment. Language, for Piaget, relies on knowledge. The development of mental operations of this type (that Piaget calls 'logic') leads us to deal with abstractions. Those are the basis for the universals where the LAD resides. Language departs from those knowledge universals to communicate by means of linguistic realizations.

The development of language relies on a senior development of the symbolic function. The actions are seen as symbols the same as the words, but once we have acquired the language it could be converted, for its flexibility, into a primordial instrument of development of the knowledge.

Following van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), as we have referred before, textual coherence uses strategies to handle information, constructing propositions on-line. It gives unity represented via local and global semantic properties of discourse, reformulated as strategies for handling surface structure and using cognitive and contextual information. It relies on semantic coherence. Local coherence strategies establish meaningful connections between successive sentences or constituents of sentences. On the other hand, global coherence organises and orders predicates, referents and properties around the central propositions providing unity and sequence. Schematic structures apply to the organization of language locally and globally. Local coherence strategies operate both bottom-up with words and phrases and top-bottom with a schema frame, script or macroproposition.

Macrostructures involve the processes which generated them, the strategies for handling information (macrostrategies), the memory constraints and representations for macrostructures, the knowledge types involved, the retrieval and the (re)production of discourse, and the tasks (summarizing, question answering, problem solving or learning).

In cognitive semantics, a proposition is the fundamental cognitive unit, the conceptual representation assigned to sentential surface structures. There is overall coherence among propositions. The relevant information activated by the first propositional interpretation about possible facts applies a ready made strategy: matching the propositions with a conditional (cause, consequence and temporality) or functional category (specification, explication, contrast, comparison, generalization, conclusion), searching potential links between the facts, eg. identical referent or related predicates, participants, circumstances.

When learning a foreign language, all these propositions are received as macropropositions with a coherent link between language and the situational context. We use the same macrostrategies for understanding a foreign language as in first language communication although the strategies for foreign language learning are quite different from the strategies for first language acquisition. As to foreign language learning, then, we should analyze the process departing from the conception that the knowledge universals (macrostructures) and the symbolic function are already commonly acquired and developed by adult learners of a foreign language through their first language acquisition process. As these universals are common to all languages and variety resides on sociocultural features, we can set a common ground to start with, setting language teaching and learning techniques and strategies to develop cohesive signs of the foreign language code to connect with the same coherent schemas already acquired from the first language.

To establish an effective syllabus we must consider, then, the different aspects or factors influencing the process of learning a particular foreign language in particular situations with different goals. As it is a process, we should establish different procedures to activate the graded progressive learning of the textual superstructures to get to a final communicative performance.

Factors intervening in Second Language Acquisition and Learning

At the conceptual level (Seliger and Sohamy, 1989) of describing the factors intervening in the process of learning a language, we shall take a synthetic perspective first studying the phenomena which make the different factors interact to form a coherent whole, interlanguage. Then, with the procedural strategies in mind, I shall step onto the operational level to outline the design of the syllabus with the different techniques to practise the four basic skills as a means and as an end for language communication.

Every systematic methodology must have clear objectives. In this case our goal is to make students able to communicate in English. As we have previously referred, it is not English as the first language (a native language) but as a second or foreign language for general or specific purposes ('English as an international language', Abbot and Wingard, 1981). In a similar way as this main methodological criteria imposes the constraints of the process of learning (as different from the ones where English is acquired as a first language, an implicit, unconscious process, usually carried out directly in everyday situations, without the need to be explicitly taught), other particular criteria should always be kept in mind when analysing interlanguage, the foreign language learning: the participants, the setting and circumstances, and the learning process in itself. The setting and circumstances (the students -their age, qualifications, the classroom size and layout, the number in the classroom, if it is a monolingual or multilingual classroom-, the teacher, the classroom materials, etc.) could be considered as extralinguistic factors, but they are factors interacting with the language and have a great importance in the effective process of learning. On the other hand, we have the internal factors of motivation, input and context. Motivation is the central aspect which often is studied as the activation trigger of the learning process. It is seen as the degree of attention a student places upon the input language material, which make him able to receive and store information, react by imitation or repetition and act by thinking and creation.

Abbot and Wingard (1981) draw a model to frame the learning process, since it is an invisible process, which will help us establish a series of teaching techniques to be effective in the common task of teaching-learning activities by means of harmonizing learning techniques. They try to answer the question: How do people learn? They need to understand something, remember it and make use of it.

To understand we need attention. The input (language in use) focuses the attention, derived from motivation, with the help of the situational language context. Motivation holds the core of the difference between first language acquisition, based on integrative motivation, where language is seen as necessary to survive and to develop knowledge, and foreign language learning, based usually on instrumental motivation (learning a foreign language to get a job, a qualification, as an instrument to do something, to sing songs, to read specialized scientific literature,...). If motivation does not exist, the teacher must create it by providing interest, fun and sense of achievement.

Remembering works at the same time as understanding. When remembering we hold the input for comprehension. This is the connection with the cognitive universals. The bases of language cognitive processes are understanding and remembering. We use memory to remember the right things and to forget the mistakes also. That is achieved by the different kinds of memory, the short term memory (STM) and the long term memory (LTM). In the short term memory the language learner establishes a series of strategies for understanding which enable them to select the information (input) and check if it accommodates with their cognitive and functional experience of the situational context. Here we find some already referred coinciding techniques based on previous mechanical syllabuses: the activity of repetition is necessary at this level of learning, understanding, to reinforce mechanical reception. Abbot and Wingard call it Rehearsal where we can also find the other element of Association, particular of the foreign language situational learning process: there is a continuous checking interference (which is not always so negative as widely admitted, but most frequently facilitating for understanding) where the learner looks for previous experience (from his/her native language and later, increasingly, from the target language) to accomplish that understanding.

Hence the partial effectiveness of some Audiolingual techniques and the Grammar Translation Method. It is the application of the ideational function at this stage of learning that must be the focus for understanding.

It is in the long term memory where the cognitive universals, the macrostructures of language, reside and where remembering takes place. The coherent textual function develops strategies for remembering through progressive practice of receptive skills (listening and reading). This enable the learner to ensure the experience of language acquire by understanding, searching for regularities, storing the rules for the target language acquired by inductive learning. This is the technique practised by the Generative Transformational Approach where the formation of language grammatical patterns serves as facilitation strategies for learning a second language, perceiving linguistic regularities (cohesion) and checking out for grammaticality. But transformationalists neglected the situational context and the experience of the world that would establish the coherence of that language knowledge into macrostructures for communication.

At the production stage we make use of language activating the STM again, developing a series of strategies for communication, where the interpersonal function provides the language situational context with a reason to exist: language in use, language as a systematic instrument for communication. The Communicative Approach worked successfully in creating techniques to develop the communicative strategies, achieving an effective practice of the productive skills: speaking and writing. It was a so marked strategy that their objectives were strongly skill-oriented influencing that way the syllabus design, limiting the general purpose courses to the most basic skill of speaking and the specific purpose courses to the more elaborated skill of writing. This can be solved with a syllabus where these three strategical principles of learning, taking the three functions (ideational, interpersonal and textual) into account, would give coherence to the three component of language as a system: knowledge, communication and text (in its widest sense).

TEACHING TECHNIQUES, TASKS AND COMPLEMENTARY STRATEGIES FOR EACH STAGE AND LEVEL

After the general considerations of the process of learning a language, studying the internal factors intervening in that process, we must go on analysing the procedure of learning a foreign language in our particular circumstances. Reviewing the purpose and the external factors, our setting and the teaching circumstances are determined by our task as teachers of English as an international language in the Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas. The classroom is monolingual, consisting of about forty Spanish native speakers with a really high instrumental motivation. These two aspects are really two opposing forces for teaching: the negative bulk of the number of students per class, and the positive environmental attitude of highly motivated learners. As to age and educational background, these aspects are quite varied. The learners are young adults with a minimal age of 14, 25% of the total being under 18, who obviously are taking their secondary education at the time. The remaining 75% are quite variable with respect to their occupations and cultural background, but we can distinguish a big number of university students, professionals, unemployed young students waiting for their first job and housewives.

The process is graded in two main parts: the Elementary Grade and the Superior Grade. The two grades comprehend five courses in total: three years for the Elementary Grade and two years for the Superior Grade. In the first year we have some real beginners and most false beginners. Our task is to make them acquire an intermediate level of English language knowledge in the Elementary Grade and make them improve to an advanced level in the Superior Grade, enabling them to understand and use the English language for general purposes by means of developing the four main skills of oral understanding, speaking, reading and writing.

The Textual Syllabus applied to EOI English Language Studies

The syllabus for the Elementary Grade will take the students from the real beginners as learners of English to intermediate students. Having the Textual Discourse Approach in mind, we must establish learning techniques which will take the different componential functions into account: the cognitive ideational function, which is to develop by learning the basic lexical elements for survival, this is, the English vocabulary and its conceptual realization into hierarchical phrases identifying their grammatical categories. Phonological and the few remaining morphological features will help students understand the basic notional contents of English words and their lexical relations. They will be able to identify people, things, processes,

The practice of the functional interpersonal meanings will provide them with the basic roles they can take to fulfil the goal of social communication through language. They will start using the language by describing, narrating, establishing social relation, interacting through language (requesting and offering things and information, suggesting, planning, reading adverts, ...)

The textual function will give cohesion and coherence to all the language items learned, establishing strategies for functional and notional realization into pragmatic textual schemas: giving and understanding information about people, things and processes, stating assertions and expressing modality, writing explanations, reading literature, giving and requesting opinions in oral debates. giving textual coherence to all these metastrategies through semantics (lexical cohesion), referents in grammar (pronouns and connectors) and situational context (inference schemata).

At the Superior Grade, the learners will develop more advanced strategies for understanding, remembering and communicating, giving prominence to fluency and accuracy in the pragmatic use of the English language. They will cope with real texts of any kind, spoken or written, and they will have to react in a coherent way, making comments on language, understanding formal speeches, reading and writing factual information, reporting the acquired information orally, expressing viewpoints orally and in writing. All these functional skills would deal with the stereotyped topics common in everyday language in the current western societies, which will help them use and progress in their knowledge of the textual world.

Sample Units for an Elementary Syllabus

Sample Units for the Superior Grade

Teachers and Teaching Materials: Bibliography, & non-written Resources

One of the main conditions a language school must have to achieve an effective language teaching is the availability of good teaching materials. Another one of course is the well coordinated organization of the staff of teachers in a Language Department. As to teachers, the characteristics of the instruction provided in a language school, the quantity of students demanding the learning of a language, mainly English language, and the established way of evaluating language knowledge at the end of the two Grades in the Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas impose a series of circumstances which should be considered.

The job of the English teacher must be oriented to help the students of English achieve a determined level of the language knowledge in a yearly progression. So a student, along the five courses, can have several teachers who must consider the syllabus as a whole, meeting and agreeing in the establishment of the objectives for the five stages.

Some scheduled meetings should be held in order to share experiences and data about the results in the classroom. Those results must be the field criteria to evaluate the methodology employed and particularly the setting of teaching, focusing first on the teaching circumstances where the teaching materials play an important part. Every year a scheduled meeting of the English teachers should be held to analyse the effectiveness of those teaching materials and other global strategies such as extra activities, educational journeys, cultural meetings, lectures, etc.

As to teaching materials, the central one is the textbook, the one that reflects the connection between the theoretical teaching syllabus and the practical teaching situation. A good textbook should be selected for every year and every course, and then at the end of the year, it should be checked for effectiveness and adequacy to the students' needs and both the teachers' and students's expectations, studying the accommodation to the general syllabus of the Grade and even the Level.

Currently English textbooks are not an only book but they include a series of additional materials that should be acquired and use along the course. These materials usually are books with exercises and writing activities (Workbooks or Practice Books) and audio materials (cassettes for the practice of dialogues and conversations in the listening activities of the textbook, some of them including drill oral exercises and pronunciation exercises). However, these materials should not be considered enough for the global contextual teaching when applying a Textual Syllabus. The classroom should be minimally provided with some little library, where good monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, basic and more advanced grammar books for reference and practice, diverse written material for sporadic use, such as newspapers, magazines and diverse information leaflets, should be available. Of course, audiovisuals are necessary, too. A good TV set, video and audio record-players, and an OHPs are of great help if permanently available in the classroom. Anyway, these materials are essential in the English Department. The Department library should be well provided with resource books for teachers and additional visual, audio and video materials. At least, English teachers should have the following materials at hand:

Resource Books for Teachers and Students:

Textbooks (Textbooks used in previous years should be available, where the teachers can easily use activities which were specially fruitful for a particular technique). To give a short list of the most effective ones from my point of view, we can have, among others,:

- Hartley, B. & Viney, P., (1978), StreamLine Series, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

- Fowler, W. S. & Pidcock, J., (1992). Synthesis Series, Edinburgh: Nelson.

- Soars, L. & J. (1993), Headway Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

- Doff, A. & Jones, A., (1991), Language in Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Books for practising Skills and for Exams (First Certificate and Proficiency):

- Greenall, S. & Garton-Sprenger, J. (1987), Horizons. Oxford: Heinemann.

- Hinton, M. & Marsden, R. (1983), Crossroads. London: Nelson.

- (1989), Penguin ELT Skills Series, London: Penguin.

- Low, O. (1983), First Certificate and Proficiency in English Course and Practice Series. London: E. Arnold.

- O'Connell , S.(ed.), (1991) Cambridge First Certificate Skills, Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.

- Doff, A. (ed.), (1992) Cambridge Skills for Fluency, Cambridge: Cambridge U.P

- Jones, L. (1991). Cambridge Advanced English, Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.

Grammar Books

-Sinclair, J. (ed.). (1990) Collins COBUILD English Grammar, London: Harper Collins.

- Sinclair J. (ed.). (1992) Collins COBUILD Student's Grammar, London: Harper Collins.

- Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. & Crystal, D. (1985), A Comprehensive Grammar of Contemporary English Language, London: Longman

- Huddlestone, R. (1984), Introduction to the Grammar of English, Cambridge: C.U.P.

- Eckersley, C.E. & Eckersley J.M.,(1978), A comprehensive English Grammar, 1ª ed. 1960, London: Longman.

- Swan, M., Practical English Usage, Oxford, O.U.P.

Diccionaries:

- Hornby,A.S. (1977), Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, Oxford: Oxford U.P.

- Collins COBUILD Essential English Dictionary

- García-Pelayo y Gros, R.,(1988) Diccionario ModernoLarousse Español-Inglés, Paris: Larousse

- Word Selector, London: Longman

Pronunciation

- CUNNINGHAM & BOWLER, (1990). Headway Intermediate Pronunciation, Oxford. O.U.P.

- FINCH, F.D. & ORTIZ, H. (1982). A Course in English Phonetics for Spanish Speakers,London. Heinemann

- JONES, D. (1976). An Outline of English Phonetics, Cambridge, Cambridge U. P.

- JONES, D. (1956). The Pronunciation of English. Cambridge. CUP.

Videos:

- Impact, ed. Macmillan Publishers, Yorkshire Television.

- A Weekend Away, (Streamline Series).

- The English Teaching Theatre, ed. Itaca.

- Video English One, ed. Macmillan Publishers, Yorkshire Television.

- That's English, TVE (ed.)

- At Home in Britain

- Play Games in English.

Other printed materials

- Word Games with English.

- Communication Games.

Films from Speak Up Magazine

Resource Books for Teachers:

- Maley, A. (ed), (1990), Resource Books for Teachers Series, Oxford: O.U.P.

- Swan, M. (ed). Cambridge Handbooks for Teachers Series, Cambridge University Press.

Library for the reading of Literature

A good library of abridged Reader's Books

Original Literary Works and short stories of the kind in TAYLOR, P.J.W. (1967), Modern Short Stories, Oxford: O.U.P.

Other books for teachers (such as the ones in the Bibliography sections - for this dissertation and for ESP) should also be available at the Department Library.

ESP

Project on English for Specific Purposes: Professional English

CONTENTS

I. Introduction.

1.1 Definition and Stages in ESP Development

II. An ESP Skill Syllabus: Reading Strategies

III. Development of the activity of Reading

3.1. Definition.

3.2. Skills.

3.3. Techniques.

3.4. Exercise types.

IV. Bibliography.

I. INTRODUCTION

The stress on the setting and circumstances as factors strongly influencing the language learning process and consequently the teaching techniques brought into existence the elaboration of specific syllabuses to meet the special needs of certain students. Considering as specific purposes the needs of people who wanted to use a foreign language for specific situations only, some practical but unstructured learning materials appeared early in the first half of the century: the Travel Guides. They just followed some kind of Direct Method or Situational Approach in which people have to learn or refer to certain set of sentences (usually translated to the user's native language) to enable them to survive in a foreign language speaking society, without having learned the language before.

These first need-oriented materials were not really specific materials for learning the language. It was not after the II World War finished when the need to train professionals intensively in learning a foreign language to reconstruct Europe that courses for that specific purpose appeared. The expansion in technology and commerce 'generated a demand for an international language. For various reasons, most notably the economic power of the United States in the post-war world, this role fell to English' (Hutchinson and Waters,1987).This happened at the same time as the communicative research on the Threshold Level (Van Ek,1975) for the Council of Europe established the need of ESP courses to advance from the Survival level of a language knowledge to more specific fields of language to enable communication in the specialiced scientific disciplines. It was the Communicative Approach, centered on the needs of the learners to communicate, the one that began to research on ESP and elaborate ESP syllabuses to accomplish with the particular requirements of the learners.

Then it was the particular features of this kind of language used in these fields that centered the research on the development of more specific syllabuses and teaching techniques for ESP. The Discourse Analysis research on genres and registers as having common linguistic (in a broad sense) features originated the elaboration of specialized courses focusing on the most useful skills for the particular kind of ESP discipline. These were the pioneering outcomes on the new trend of the Discourse Approach, which proves to be the most successful, effective and intensive way of learning a language for specific purposes as well as for general purposes. At the same time it shows the previously referred symbiosis between formal theories and practical techniques as this approach arose from the practical needs of specialized learning materials.

1.1 Definition and Stages of ESP development

To get to a clear understanding of the courses for ESP, we can start remembering the most authoritative definitions of the term.

P. Strevens (1978), following the Communicative Approach, defines ESP courses as 'a set of notional and functional knowledge of English to cope with the special purpose of the learner's needs'. The content of these ESP courses are determined by a restriction, selection and grading of the four basic skills according to the lexical content deriving from the learner's needs.

According to Kennedy and Bolitho (1984) 'ESP has its basis in an investigation of the purposes of the learners and the set of communicative needs arising from those purposes'. Those communicative need will guide the design and selection of the contents of the ESP syllabus.

A second stage in the development of ESP syllabuses generated from the Discourse Analysis considerations of the textual identity of the different types of discourse, deriving from

the linguistic properties of functional varieties or registers of a language. Quantitative studies were designed to provide a descriptively-adequate account of distributional frequencies in the target language variety and thus offer a basis for prioritizing teaching items in specialized ESL materials. So, in this way, the restriction and selection of ESP materials and techniques were not only notionally and functionally based, but also textually, considering both aspects, the linguistic grammatical structure (Barber (1962) pointed out that the progressive verbal aspect was not frequently found in scientific English, so it was not to be an important teaching item in ESP) and the mode of communication, parallel to the concept of skill (reading and writing were to recover their prominence in teaching and learning).

But ESP analysis was to get narrower and deeper. As Swales (1990) points out, registral labels (medical, business, legal) perhaps were misleading because the apparent homogeneity of content was the focusing criterium for selection at the expense of variation in communicative purpose, addresser-addressee relationships and genre conventions. Recognition of differences between subgenres (medical journals and articles) has developed slowly. ESP researchers show how differentiating influences such as changing communicative purpose can operate within a single spoken or written discourse of a type (between sections of a Research Articles or even between paragraphs in newspapers editorials).

This narrowing of textual scope has been compensated for by an interest in a deeper or multi-layered textual account. As a result, there is growing interest in assessing rethorical purposes, in unpacking information structures and in accounting for syntactic and lexical choices (as contributions to communicative effectiveness, not as a stylistic appropriacy).⁽²⁾

The current trend in ESP has turned from the analysis of the surface forms of the language (notions or topics and functions or purpose) into the analysis of 'the thinking processes that underlie language use' (Hutchinson and Waters, 1987), this is, the mode of discourse, the development of skills and strategies. The most common skills used in the register object of study become the Skills for Learning. 'The principal idea behind the skill-centered approach is that underlying all language use there are common reasoning and interpreting processes, which, regardless of the surface forms, enable us to extract meaning from discourse. The focus should then be on the underlying interpretive strategies, which enable the learner to cope with the surface forms, for example guessing the meaning of words from the context, using visual lay-out to determine the type of text, exploiting cognates, etc. A focus on specific subject registers is unnecessary in this approach, because the underlying processes are not specific to any subject matter.' (Hutchinson and Waters, 1987,13).

These considerations bring several advantages to the usefulness of a concrete ESP syllabus: a) Since the skills are not specific to any subject matter, a career or a discipline, we can elaborate more general ESP syllabuses that can be used for diverse branches of scientific or technical disciplines.

b) Since, as it is widely admitted, a ESP teacher does not need to be a specialist professional on the subject matter, he can focus best on the teaching strategies with the help of specialized materials.

c) Since the demand of one-subject ESP courses outside university and enterprise organizations is not high enough (at least in middle size towns) to convince the public administration to invest on projects for ESP courses, all those professionals who, though having different subject matter objectives, share the same skill-oriented purposes can form groups big enough to deserve public investment, especially in the Spanish Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas educational language centers.

d) Finally, as the most common specific purpose of ESP learners is the reading of specialist literature in English, when elaborating a general project for a ESP syllabus we should focus on the teaching of reading strategies with the use of authentic material. This was my perspective for the following section in this paper.

An additional procedural advantage for this paper deserves notice: The skill-centered approach releases us from the tiring and repetitive task of referring to the yet unfinished long list of different disciplines whose subject matter ESP can cope with, where by the way, at least in the consulted bibliography, it is difficult to find any reference to perhaps the most widely ESP-using discipline: English for Business and Commerce.

II. A ESP SKILL SYLLABUS: READING STRATEGIES

The Activity of Reading: Skills, Techniques and Exercises

We assume that the activity of Reading is adquirid through different stages. The different steps we present here are directed to the students who already have an intermediate level of the basic skills of English language and are taking studies of ESP.

It is of great importance to show the students the different reading skills and techniques that can be applied to a written text to achieve a good comprehension of it.In an ESP course, the learning of the reading for comprehension is the learners' most important need. Nowadays, everybody knows that the English language is the "lingua franca" used as the international instrument of communication throughout the world. Statistics says that about 85 % of all researching work that is done everywhere is written in this language. Technical and scientific research is the one in which we are most interested. We must keep in mind that is our students' world, not only while they are studying but even once they have finished their studies.

The objectives of the reading activity in an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course are bound to extract the required information of an specialised written text that our students can encounter in the specific subjects which form the curriculum of their technical studies. The main aim is to make the student feel confidence when dealing with the bibliography in English related to his studies and research.

For Rivers and Temperley, (1978) : "There are various ways of approaching the teaching of reading. The approach will be selected according to the objectives". Five possible objectives for a reading course are: "reading for information, reading for informal material, direct reading of all kind of materials, literary analysis and translation of the text".

The paramount objective for our students is the first one, that is to say, reading for information. So, we must have in mind, from the very beginning, that we have to provide our students with texts of their own interest. They show their satisfaction from the ability to draw the information they need quickly from the text, without attention to style.

For Rivers and Temperley, this type of students need the following skills:

1. Complete control in recognition of points of grammar which impede comprehension of the written language.

2. Knowledge of word formation which helps them to recognize the function and nuances of the meaning of words derived from the same radical.

3. Practice in recognizing English words which they already know sometimes in a disguised form.

4. Recognition knowledge of the most frequent "false friends". Two languages may share cognates that are easily recognizable but whose meaning have diverged. Students need to have a recognition knowledge of these words and they would keep their own cumulative lists of them with a short sentence illustrating the use of each word in English.

5. Recognition knowledge of the most frequent borrowings into English from non-cognate languages.

More recently during the fourth phase of the ESP, which was at the beginning of the 80's, some linguists were devoted to the study of the reading strategies. The most well-known, among others, are Grellet and Nuttal.

For Grellet, (1981) "Reading is a constant process of guessing, and what one brings to the text is often more important than what one finds in it". This is why from the very beginning, ours students should be taught to use what they know to understand unknown elements, whether these are ideas or simple words. This is best achieved through a global approach of the text.

Grellet's approach could be summed up in the following way:

For Nuttal (1982), the main objective of reading is 'To enable the student to read without help, unfamiliar texts, at appropriate speed, silently with adequate understanding':

-'To enable the student' means that we can help the student to develop his reading capacity.

-'To read without help' because the pupil will have to manage by himself when reading English technical texts.

- ' Unfamiliar texts'. We have to teach the students how to face to unknown texts. So it is very advisable to recommend them extensive reading.

- 'At appropriate speed'. The student must be trained to read at different speed depending on the text and its aim. The students must be encouraged to read longer texts within a shorter period of time.

- 'Silently'. That is the way the student reads outside the classroom.

- 'With adequate understanding' means that they do not have to understand all the words in the text to extract the required information. Everything will depend on the purpose of each reading. To fulfil this objective, the teacher will have to train the student to get the different skills and techniques through a big variety of exercise types.

After reading different views about the activity of reading and the objective of reading, I have drawn my own conclusions about how to teach our students the different skills and techniques to get a successful reading for comprehension.

III. DEVELOPMENT OF THE ACTIVITY OF READING.

3.1. Definition.

Reading is not a passive process, not only the identification of the symbols on the page where the reader gets the information provided by the writer. The activity of reading is 'an interactive process where the reader extracts meaning based on the information supplied in the text, the purpose of reading and on the world knowledge that the reader brings to the text'.

So, one can say that reading is not a mere linguistic exercise but a real communicative activity. In our situation it is the skill to which we pay more attention.

3.2. Skills

There are many reading skills we can develop to get a good reading comprehension of a written text. I have extracted the skills I consider more important from a long list made by Munby (1981):

These skills can be achieved through an 'extensive' or 'intensive' reading. The first skill, that is to say, extracting the main idea will be reached through an 'extensive' reading, the rest will be achieved through an 'intensive' reading as this way of reading is performed when a more detailed information is required.

3.3. Techniques.

There are many different techniques we can develop to get the skills mentioned above.

1. Anticipating.

Motivation is of great importance when reading. That means that if the student feels motivated when he starts reading the text and he is prepared to find a number of things in it, and he is expecting to find answers to a number of questions and specific information. This 'expectation' is inherent in the process of reading which is a permanent interrelationship between the reader and the text.

This technique is developed using the title, drawings, pictures, tables or charts which will give the student some clues about the ways the text may develop.

2. Inferring.

In order to be able to read quick and efficiently through a text, students must know where to look for the main information. This technique tries to show the student the importance of looking at the first and last paragraph of a text, the headings of the paragraphs or even the first sentences. (The first words of each paragraph often tell us precious clues to the discourse function as well as the content of what follows).

The technique of inferring includes the activities of Predicting and Previewing; that means making constant guesses about what can follow and then confirm or reject those guesses.

3. Skimming.

This technique consists of running one's eyes quickly over a text to get the gist of it. To get this the teacher has to train the student to recognize the key sentences of the text. This will show the student that one sentence usually sums up the main idea of the paragraph. The student will check that the key sentence often appears at the beginning of each paragraph. But this is not always true because we can find different types of paragraphs; Trimble (1985): The paragraph in EST.

4. Reading Speed.

The student must be taught to read to different speed depending on his reading purposes. If the purpose of reading is to have a general view of the text he will read the text quicker than if he wants to find an answer to very specific questions.

1. Scanning

Scanning as skimming is a very specific reading technique both are necessary for a quick and efficient reading. The technique of scanning consists of trying to locate specific information. When scanning we do not even follow the linearity of the passage. We simply let our eyes 'wander' over the text until we find what we are looking for, whether it be a name, a date or a less specific piece of information.

1. Understanding word formation.

This technique means being aware of how words are formed and understanding the meaning of the most frequent affixes (prefixes and suffixes) in technical English. This will help the student to deduce the meaning of some unfamiliar words.

2. Recognizing synonyms and antonyms.

It is extremely helpful to recognize synonym and antonym words when reading a text since both of them give clues to the meaning of words that may not be familiar to the students. The last skill which we consider essential to achieve a good comprehension of the texts is: Understanding structures and complex sentences. This skill can be reached practising several techniques such as:

1. Referring.

One common way of linking structurally independent sentences to get a meaningful text is to use words such as this, which, those, they, it, etc. which refer to something already mentioned (anaphora), or something which is going to be mentioned (cataphora). Failure to understand such anaphoric links will probably lead to a serious misunderstanding of a text.

2. Recognizing link words.

This technique is very useful not only because it will help to understand ideas or facts mentioned in the passage, but they will indicate the rhetorical value of what follows. For example, reinforcing, explaining, contrasting, etc. All the techniques mentioned previously can be practised in the classroom through different exercise types.

3.4. Exercises.

We will devote now to show some exercises that can be done in order to apply the techniques explained above.

Anticipating

a) It consists of making use of the non-verbal information such as: pictures, drawings, tables , charts. etc

Inferring

a) Note-taking (of the most outstanding points of the text) b) Summarising (to get a general idea of the text using all the notes taken before).

Skimming

a) Pre-reading questions. The answers to these questions will help the student to get the gist of the text. To be able to do this exercise the student must be trained to recognize the key sentences of the text that will allow him to answer the pre-reading questions.

Reading Speed

a) Timing. This is the most known exercise to improve the reading speed. It consists of making a table to check how many words the student is able to read in a minute.

b) Matching. It consists of, given two columns, match those ones that have the same meaning or any relation between them.

Scanning

a) To answer specific questions.This exercise needs a very detailed reading of the paragraph where one can find these answers.

b) Fill-in-the blanks. It consists of inserting a word or expression in the blank spaces.

c) Multiple choice. Which means making an option of three or four given answers.

Recognizing synonymy and antonymy.

a) Given a number of words or word expression locate in the text their correspondent synonym or antonym.

Understanding word formation.

a) Underlining the affixes we find in the text and then explaining their meaning.

b)Writing down words which have the same affixes than those found in the text.

Referring.

a) Anaphoric reference exercises which consists of matching the pronouns with the nouns they refer to.

Understanding sentences and ideas .

a) Classifying the link words for their rhetorical value.

b) Fill-in-the blanks with the appropriate link word.

V. BIBLIOGRAPHY for ESP.

- BARES, M. & DUDLEY-EVANS, T. (1982). Nucleus Series.London: Longman

- BROOKES, B.C. (1973) Scientifically Speaking. Alhambra.

- BROUGHTON et al. (1980): Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Roudhledge and Kegan Paul.

- GRELLET, F. (1981): Developing Reading Skills.Cambridge. CUP

- LONG, M.H. (1980) : Reading English for Academic Study. Newbury House.

- ROYDS-IRMAK, D.E. (1975) Beginning Scientific English. (2 vols.) London: Nelson.

- SMITH, F. (1978): Reading. Cambridge University Press.

- STREVENS, P. (1977). Special Purpose Language Learning. Language Teaching and Linguistics: Abstracts.

- SWALES, J. (1985). Episodes in ESP. Oxford: Pergamon.

- TRIMBLE, L. (1985). English for Science and Technology. Cambridge. CUP

- YATES, C. (1989) English for Academic Purposes Series, London: Cassell.

- WIDDOWSON, H. G. (1980), Reading and Thinking in English (4 vols.), Oxford, OUP.

- WIDDOWSON, H. G. (1983), Learning Purpose and Language Use. Oxford, OUP.

Bibliography

- ALLEN, J.P.B. & PIT CORDER, S. (ed.),(1974) Papers in Applied Linguistics, Oxford, O.U.P.

- BARBER, C. L. (1962), "Some measurable characteristics of modern scientific prose", en Contributions to English syntax and phonology: 1-23, Stockholm, Almquist & Wiksel.

- BATES, M. & WEISCHEDEL, R. M., (ed.) (1993), Challenges in Natural Language Processing, Cambrige: Cambridge University Press.

- BAUER, L. (1983), English Word Formation, Cambridge: C.U.P.

- BEAUGRANDE, R. DE, (1991), Linguistic Theory, London: Longman

- BEAUGRANDE, R.DE, & DRESSLER, W.(1981), Introduction to Text Linguistics. London, Longman

- BELLUGI, U. (1971). 'Simplifications in Children's Language', in R. Huxley & E. Ingram (eds.) Language Acquisition: models and methods, New York: Academic Press.

- BLAKE, B. (1990), Relational Grammar, Routledge

- BRAMLEY, S. & PATZOLD, K. (1992), A Survey of Modern English, Routledge

- BROWN, R. (1976). A first language: the early stages, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

- BROWN, G. & YULE, G., (1983), Discourse Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press.

- BROWN, K. & MILLER, J., (1992), Syntax, 2ª ed., Routledge

- BURTON-ROBERTS, N.(1986) Analysing Sentences: An Introduction to English Syntax, London: Longman

- BUTLER, C., (ed), (1992), Computers and Written Texts, Oxford: Blackwell.

- BUTLER, C. S. (1985) Computers in Linguistics, Oxford, Blackwell.

- BUTLER, C. S. (1985) Systemic Linguistics. Theory and Application, Oxford, Blackwell.

- CAMPBELL, R. & WALES, R. (1970). "The Study of Language Acquisition", in J. Lyons, (ed.), New Horizons in Linguistics, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

- CARNEY, E. (1994), A Survey of English Spelling, Routledge

- CARTER, R. & SIMPSON, P. (eds.), Language, Discourse and Literature, Routledge

- CHOMSKY, N. & HALLE, M. (1968), The Sound Pattern of English, N.Y.: Harper &Row.

- CHOMSKY, N. (1965), Aspects of the theory of syntax, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

- CLARK, R. (1974), "Adult Theories, Child Strategies and their Implications for the Language Teachers", in J.P.B. Allen & S.Pit Corder (ed.), Papers in Applied Linguistics, Oxford, O.U.P.

- COLE, P. & MORGAN, J.L. (eds.),(1975), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts, New York, Academic Press.

- COLE, P. & MORGAN, J.L. (eds.),(1978), Syntax and semantics 9: Pragmatics, New York, Academic Press.

- CONNOLLY, J. H. & DIK, S. C. (eds) (1989) Functional Grammar and the Computer, Dordecht, Foris.

- COOK, G & SEIDLHOFER, B. (eds.), (1995), Principle & Practice in Applied Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

- COULTHARD, M. (ed.), (1994), Advances in Written Text Analysis, Routledge

- COUTURE, B. (ed), (1986) Functional Approaches to Writing: research perspectives, Norwood, NJ, Ablex.

- CROFT, W., (1990), Syntactic Categories and Relations: The Cognitive Organization of Information, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

- DAKIN,J. (1969),"The teaching of reading", in Applied Linguistics and the teaching of English, London, Longman.

- DAVIES, A. & WIDDOWSON, H.G., (1974), "Reading and Writing", in J.P.B.Allen & S.P.Corder (ed.),Techniques in Applied Linguistics, The Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics, vol.3, Oxford, O.U.P.

- DOWNING, A. & LOCKE, PH. (1992), A Universtity Course in English Grammar, E.Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

- DURKHEIM, É., (1985). Las Reglas del método sociológico, Barcelona: Orbis.

- ECKERSLEY, C.E. & ECKERSLEY J.M.,(1978), A comprehensive English Grammar, 1ª ed. 1960, London: Longman.

- FILLMORE, C.J., 1968. "The Case for Case", in Bach and Harms (eds.) Universals in Linguistic Theory, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1-90.

- FIRBAS, J. (1992) Functional sentence perspective in written and spoken communication, Cambridge, CUP

- FIRTH, J. R. (1957) Papers in Linguistics Oxford University Press.

- FOLEY, W. A. & VAN VALIN, R. D. JR. (1984) Functional Syntax & Universal Grammar, Cambrige: CUP

- FRANCIS, W.N. (1980), "A tagged corpus - problems and prospects." In Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik (eds.) Studies in English Linguistics - for Randolph Quirk. London: Longman.

- FREIDMAN, J. (1969), A Computer System for Transformational Grammar, Comm. ACM 12 (4).

- GARNHAM, A. (1988) Artificial Intelligence, An Introduction, Routledge & Keagan Paul.

- GARSIDE, R. LEECH, G. and SAMPSON, G. (eds.) (1987) The Computational Analysis of English: A corpus-based approach, London and New York: Longman.

- GELDEREN, E. VAN, (1993), The Rise of Functional Categories,Amsterdam, Benjamins

- GIEGERICH, H.J. (1992), English Phonology: An Introduction, Cambridge: C.U.P.

- GREGORY, M. & CARROL, S. (1978), Language and situation: language varieties and their social contexts, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

- GRICE, H. P. (1975), 'Logic and conversation' in Cole, P. & Morgan, J. L. (eds.), Syntax & Semantics 3: Speech Acts New York, Academic Press.

- GRISHMAN, R., (1986) Computational Linguistics, C.U.P.

- HALLIDAY, M.A.K. (1970), "Language Structure and Language Function", in J. Lyons, (ed.), New Horizons in Linguistics, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

- HALLIDAY, M.A.K. & HASAN, R., (1989), Language, context and text: aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

- HALLIDAY, M.A.K. (1985) Introduction To Functional Grammar, London, Edward Arnold

- HALLIDAY, M.A.K. (1975), Learning how to mean: explorations in the development of language, London, E.Arnold

- HALLIDAY, M.A.K. (1978), Language as a social semiotics, London, Edward Arnold.

- HALLIDAY, M.A.K. (1989), Spoken and written language, Oxford: Oxford U.P.

- HALLIDAY, M.A.K., McINTOSH A. & STREVENS P. D. (1964), The linguistic sciences and language teaching, London, Longman.

- HASAN, R. (1989), Linguistics, language and verbal art, Oxford: Oxford University Press

- HAWKINS, P. (1984), Introducing Phonology, London: Hutchinson

- HAYCRAFT, J.(1978), An Introduction to English Language Teaching, London: Longman.

- HIGGINS, J. & JOHNS, T.,(1984), Computers in Language Learning, London: Collins.

- HOEDT, J. et al. (eds.) (1982), Pragmatics and LSP, Copenhagen, Copenhagen School of Economics.

- HOEY, M. (1991). Patterns of Lexis in Text, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

- HUDDLESTONE, R. (1988), English Grammar: An Outline, Cambridge: C.U.P.

- HUDDLESTONE, R. (1984), Introduction to the Grammar of English, Cambridge: C.U.P.

- HURDFORD, J. R. (1994), Grammar: A Student's Guide, Cambridge: C.U.P.

- HUXLEY, R. & INGRAM , E. (eds.) Language Acquisition: models and methods, New York: Academic Press.

- IIDA, WECHSTER & ZEC, (1987), Working Papers in Grammatical Theory and Discourse Structures, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

- INGRAM, D. (1978) Sensori-motor intelligence and language development, in A. Lock (ed.), Action, gesture and symbol: the emergence of language, Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen.

- KARMILLOF-SMITH, A. (1986) "Some fundamental aspects of language development after 5", in Fletcher P. & Garman, M. (ed.), Language Acquisition,Cambridge, C.U.P.

- KARMILOFF-SMITH, A. (1979), A functional approach to child language, Cambridge, C.U.P.

- KREIDLER, C.K. (1989), The Pronunciation of English: A Course Book in Phonology, Oxford: Blackwell.

- KRESS, G., (1982), Learning to write, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

- KUNO, S. (1986), Functional Syntax, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

- KUNO, S. (1976), "Subject, theme and the Speaker's Empathy", in Subject and Topic, C. Li (ed.) Academic Press.

- LARSEN-FREEMAN, D. (1986), Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching, Oxford: O.U.P.

- LÁZARO CARRETER, F., (1984), Diccionario de Términos Filológicos, 3ª ed., Madrid: Gredos.

- LEECH, G. & SVARTVIK, J., (1975). A Communicative Grammar of English, Singapore, Longman

- LEECH, G., DEUCHAR, M., HOOGENRAAD, R. (1982), English Grammar for Today. London: Macmillan.

- LONGACRE, R. E. (1983), The grammar of discourse, New York, Plenum.

- LYONS, J. (ed.), New Horizons in Linguistics, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

- LYONS, J., (1977), Semantics, vol. 1 & vol 2., Cambridge, C.U.P.

- MARTIN, J. R. & ROTHERY, J. (1986) 'What a functional approach can show teachers ...' in COUTURE (ed.)

- MINSKY, M. (1975), 'A framework for representing knowledge' in WINSTON, P. H. The Psychologyof Computer Vision, New York, McGraw-Hill.

- MOODY, H.L.B., (1975), Varieties of English, Londres: Longman, 1a. ed. 1970

- MORENO FERNÁNDEZ, F. (1990). Metodología sociolingüística. Madrid: Editorial Gredos.

- MUNBY, J. (1978), Communicative Syllabus Design, Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.

- NEWMEYER, (1983), Grammatical Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

- OUHALLA, J., (1991), Functional Categories and Parametric Variation, Routledge

- PERERA, K., (1986) "Language acquisition and writing", in Fletcher, P. & Garman, M. (eds.), Language Acquisition, Cambridge, C.U.P.

- PETÖFI, J. S.,(ed.), (1987), Text and Discourse Constitution: Empirical Aspects, Theoretical Approaches, Berlin: de Gruyter.

- PIAGET, J. (1952), The origins of intelligence in children, New York: Norton./ International University Press

- POLLARD, C. & SAG, I., (1987), Information-based Syntax and Semantics. Vol 1: Fundamentals, Chicago: the University of Chicago Press.

- GREENBAUM, S., QUIRK, R., (1990), A Student's Grammar of the English Language, London: Longman.

- QUIRK, R., GREENBAUM, S., LEECH, G. & CRYSTAL, D. (1985), A Comprehensive Grammar of Contemporary English Language, London: Longman.

- QUIRK, R., GREENBAUM, S., LEECH, G. & SVARTVIK, J. (1972), A Grammar of Contemporary English, London: Longman.

- RADFORD, A. (1988) Transformational Grammar: A First Course, Cambridge: C.U.P.

- REICHMAN, R. (1985) Getting computers to talk like you and me: Discourse , Context, Focus and Semantics, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

- RIVERS, W.M. (1983), Communicating Naturally in a Second Language, New York: O.U.P.

- RIVERS, W.& TEMPERLEY, M. (1978) : A Practical Guide to the Teaching of English.

- SCHANK, R., ABELSON, R., (1977), Scripts Plans Goals and Understanding, LEA, Hillsdale.

- SCHANK, R. C. & COLBY, K. (eds) (1973) Computer Models of Thought & Language, San Francisco, Freeman.

- SCHOLES, R., (1985), Textual Power, Yale U. P.

- SEARLE, J. R. (1969), Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language, Cambridge, C. U.P.

- SELIGER, H.W. and SHOHAMY, E. (1989). Second Language Research Methods. Oxford: O.U.P.

- SELL, R. D. (ed.) (1990) Literary Pragmatics, Routledge.

- SIEWIERSKA, A., (1991), Functional Grammar, Routledge

- SINCLAIR, J. M., HOEY, M. & FOX, G. (eds.), (1993), Techniques of Description, Routledge

- SINCLAIR, J., (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

- SMITH, Ph.T., (1986), "The development of reading: the acquisition of a cognitive skill", in Fletcher, P. y Garman, M. (eds.), Language Acquisition, Cambridge, C.U.P.

- SMITH, E. L. Jr. (1985), "Text type and discourse framework", in Text Vol. 5/3, Amsterdam, Mouton Publisers.

- SPENCER, A. (1991), Morphological Theory, Oxford: Blackwell.

- SPOLSKY, B. (1989), Conditions for Second Language Learning, Oxford: O.U.P.

- SWALES, J., (1990), Genre Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.

- TARONE, E. (1988), Variation in Interlanguage, Edward Arnold. London.

- THELANDER, M. (1982), "A Qualitative Approach to the Quantitative Data of Speech Variation", Sociolinguistic Variation in Speech Communities, S. Romaine (ed.), London: E. Arnold,. pág. 65-83.

- THOMSON, S., (1994), "Aspects of Cohesion in Monologue", in Applied Linguistics, Vol. 15/1, Oxford, OUP

- TOMLIN, R.S., (1986), Basic Word Order. Functional Principles, London: Croom Helm.

- TOOLAN, M. J., (1991), Narrative, A critical linguistic introduction, London: Routledge.

- VAN DIK, T. A., (1977), Text and Context. Explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of discourse, London: Longman.

- WARDHAUGH, R. (1995), Understanding English Grammar: A Linguistic Approach, Oxford: Blackwell.

- WATERSON, N. (1971), "Child Phonology: A prosodic View". Journal of Linguistics, 7: 179-211.

- WELLS, (1982), Accents of English, 3 vols. Cambridge: C.P.U.

- WELTE, W., (1985), Lingüística Moderna. Terminología y Bibliografía, Madrid: Gredos.

- WIDDOWSON, H. G. (1990), Aspects of Language Teaching, Oxford: Oxford U.P.

- WINOGRAD, T. (1983) Language as a Cognitive Process, Vol. 1: Syntax, Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley.

- WINOGRAD, T. (1972) Understanding Natural Language, New York, Academic Press.

- WINTER, E. O. (1982) Towards a Contextual Grammar of English, London, George Allen and Unwin.

1. But they miss some factors: the distinction between first language acquisition and second or foreign language learning, two different processes and with two different participants: a native child at an early age and a young or adult learner. Their motivation is also different, and lots of additional aspects and circumstances, too. (These factors will be taken into account and analyzed in the following practical sections about the learning process and the teaching of English as a Foreign Language in the EOI).

2. This is the field where my current research activity at the university is engaged, the analysis of lexicosyntactic and textual features of the different types of written discourse as stylistic, communicative and cognitive (knowledge-developing) components of developmental knowledge and learning. (see P. P. Sánchez Villalón, (1992) 'Rasgos distintivos de las variedades del lenguaje escrito' in Revista del Departamento de Filología Moderna, and P. P. Sánchez Villalón, (in print), 'Inference as Coherence. Function as Determinant of Textual Organization ')