Conectando texto: propuesta para el desarrollo de la expresión escrita en inglés como lengua extranjera

Abstract

This article analyzes the didactic potential of the discourse notions of Theme and Rheme (Halliday, 1985/1994) to help our ESL students resolve problems related to a lack of cohesion in their written essays. These discourse notions, closely related to information progression in texts and shown to be important cohesive elements in several studies within the scope of Discourse Analysis, are not often present in ESL teaching materials, adding to a lack of clear guidelines for our students to follow in distributing information throughout their texts. Our aim in this article is to further explicate this state of affairs, and to transform these notions into tools for evaluation of writing and for teaching writing in the ESL classroom.