Text Competence and Academic Multiliteracy

How can text competence be fostered in a more efficient and effective manner? This book is among the first to combine the US-American discourse on this question with the German discourse. The topics covered range from text linguistic foundations via text comprehension and comprehensibility to text production, writing skills development and writing in a second or foreign language. Students interested in writing research will be introduced to the pertinent models and theories. Writing instructors, writing centre staff and subject-domain teachers will find guidance on how to improve their assignments and feedback. University administrators and program coordinators can inform themselves about best-practice approaches to writing instruction and support at different levels ranging from individual courses to central support structures.

Contents Introduction: The objective and scope of this book Part I: Textlinguistic Foundations 1 Basic concepts 1.1 Text linguistics and text 1.2 Textuality Part II: Text Comprehension and Text Comprehensibility 2 Levels of text processing 2.1 The legibility of texts 2.2 The readability of texts 2.3 Text comprehension as a constructive process 3 Text processing from a cognitive-science perspective 3.1 Propositional models of text processing 3.2 The structure of the human mind 3.3 The model of cyclic processing 3.4 Network models 3.5 Semantic macro-structures 3.6 Schema-theoretical approaches 3.7 The theory of mental models 3.8 Levels of comprehension 3.9 Concluding remarks 4 Text processing from the perspective of instructional psychology 4.1 The Hamburg psychologists' empirical inductive approach 4.2 Groeben's theoretical deductive approach 4.3 The Karlsruhe comprehensibility concept 5 Methods of comprehensibility assessment 5.1 Target-group-focused methods of comprehensibility assessment Part III: Text Production 6 Writing (process) models 6.1 Hayes & Flower's (1980) writing process model 6.2 Hayes' (1996) writing process model 6.3 Cooper & Matsuhashi's (1983) writing process model 6.4 Günther's (1993) phrase-oriented production system (POPS) 6.5 Bereiter & Scardamalia's (19987) models of beginners' and advanced writers' composing processes 6.6 An instruction-oriented writing process model 7 Writing competence development models 7.1 Writing development stages according to Bereiter (1980) 7.2 Kellogg's (2008) macro-stages of writing competence development 7.3 McCutchens' s (1996) capacity theory of writing (development) 7.4 Writing competence development from the perspective of dynamic systems theory 7.5 Academic writing competence development from a corpus-linguistic product-oriented perspective 7.6 Alexander's (2003) Model of Domain Learning 7.7 The bioecological model of human development and its implications for modelling writing competence development 7.8 Summary Part IV: Writing Instruction 8 Best-practice approaches to writing instruction 8.1 A theoretical framework for literacy pedagogy: multiliteracies 8.2 Teaching for transfer 8.3 Approaches to writing instruction at the macro-level 8.4 Approaches to writing instruction at the meso-level 8.5 Approaches to writing instruction at the micro-level 8.6 Writing-intensive seminars and the role of the teacher 207 8.7 Assignments for writing courses and writing-intensive seminars 8.8 Giving feedback Part V: L1 vs. L2 writing 9 Writing in the L1 vs. writing in the L2 9.1 Differences between writing in the L1 and the L2 9.2 Translation into the L2 vs. composing in the L2 9.3 Translation from the L1 as a subprocess of writing in the L2 9.4 An explanatory model of EFL writing ability 9.5 Quality losses in L2 writing and the potential role of translation for writing instruction, text quality improvement and epistemic purposes 9.6 L2 writing pedagogy References Index