Underlying principles of organizational competence
Issue: Vol 3 No. 3 (2006) JAL Vol 3, No 3 (2006)
Journal: Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice
Subject Areas: Writing and Composition Linguistics
Abstract:
We argue that a cognitive perspective provides an understanding of the principles underlying the communication of L2 learners. Specifically we propose that learners’ knowledge of organizational competence, the ordering of information in sentences to construct texts, is principled and underlain by language and communicative universals. We assume that knowledge of language is modular; there are two basic principles that all learners have access to. There is a universal pragmatic principle based on Relevance Theory and universal principles of ordering based on the Basic Variety. We show how these assumptions provide insight into the non-target-like structures in texts composed by low-level L2 learners
Author: Roberts Yates, James Kenkel
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