Abstract:

The paper aims to explore text building strategies (with a focus on modification of connective expressions) in texts written by students and pupils. To build a coherent text that is fully functional in communication and fulfills the intended communicative goal is a difficult task especially for students and pupils because the formation of a well-structured text requires preciseness, accuracy and clarity in expressing ideas and relations that hold between them. Such skills are not easy to reach and require systematic training.

Generally, a text may be imagined as a complex of relations that can be expressed by many types of cohesive expressions. In the present paper, we focus on text creation in the area of connective modification that has been not yet fully explored in text linguistics. From this point of view, connective expressions may be divided into non-modifiable connectives (e.g. “but”, “and”, “or”, “then”) and modifiable connectives (e.g. “mainly because”, “the only reason is”, “a specific condition is”). The role of connective modification is to specify the discourse relation expressed by the connective and thus to make the text more accurate and to improve the quality of its comprehensibility.

In the paper, we focus on connective modification in Czech texts written by students. Methodologically, we use the corpus data from the Czech National Corpus. Specifically, we use a learner corpus of Czech texts written by pupils and students at elementary and secondary schools. We carry out a detailed analysis of phrases such as “důvodem je” (“the reason is”), “příkladem je” (“the example is”), “podmínkou je” (“the condition is”) used with various types of modifications, cf. “hlavním/jediným/důležitým důvodem je” (“the main/only/important reason is”). In our analysis, we explore the frequency and way of using these phrases. For comparative purposes, we do the same analysis for texts created by authors with professional knowledge of Czech. We compare the use of given connective phrases by students and professional authors.

In the analysis, we focus on several factors influencing the use of connective modifications by students. We take into account three general areas concerning: i) students as authors of the text (the analysis includes which type of school is attended by the author: elementary vs. secondary, grammar school vs. secondary technical school; author’s age), ii) the text itself (specific genres), iii) assessment of the text by the teacher (5 grade evaluating scale: excellent–fail). The results show that modified connective phrases are used mainly by students of secondary schools, specifically grammar schools, whose texts are evaluated as excellent (A) or good (B). This suggests that connective modifications belong to higher structure devices that constitute more advanced texts in terms of cohesion and coherence.

Based on these factors, we discuss the educational benefits gained from the results that are relevant to the area of teaching writing skills and text creation. We discuss how our results contribute to a detailed description of text-building strategies in students’ texts and how they may be used in teaching praxis focused on text production.

Keywords:

Communicative competence, text structuring, writing skills, cohesion, connective modification, Czech.