Genre, Syntax and Academic Language: Communicative and Cognitive Dimensions of Later Language Development

Abstract

The later syntactic development has been studied mainly form a structuralist view of language, describing the emergence of different types of syntactic structures throughout the school years. The school in turn, depending on the traditions of teaching has shifted the explicit teaching of grammar to move to a communicative approach. In this paper, a critical review of different assumptions based on research of syntactic development is carried out to propose a theoretical link between discourse and syntax form a socio-discursive approach. Based on Bakhtin’s vision (1982) of the language as a social activity and his Speech Genre Theory, the school is conceived as a new framework of interaction with communicative and cognitive demands of its own. Thus, the school is characterized by exposing student to ´secondary speech genres’ and a new type of knowledge ‘the scientific concepts’. Therefore, the language’s conception as a social activity implies not only to put in the center of reflection the communicative dimension of language but also the link with the cognitive activity.