Journal 6

The Topic of the Journal
Pick one of eight text attack skills and review one activity more carefully which are designed to practice the skill. Introduce it on your own word and add your brief comment.


My Writing
Text attack skills
1. Understanding syntax
2. Recognizing and interpreting cohesive devices
3. Interpreting discourse markers
4. Recognizing functional values
5. Recognizing text organization
6. Recognizing the presuppositions underlying the text
7. Recognizing implications and making inferences
8. Prediction

I choose ‘interpreting discourse markers.’ Discourse markers are very useful words that indicate the flow of the text. It helps students to predict easily what is coming next. These markers are very essential to construct the passage cohesively.
Students can guess the right order of the text it is shuffled. Students can infer the right marker where it is omitted. These kinds of activity can grow students’ inference power that can make students predict longer passage.
However, as there are so many discourse markers, it is a problem how we can teach those markers more effectively to learners. Although discourse markers are very effective device to comprehend the text, we have to think about how we can instruct that.