Teaching Text Grammar to Undergraduate Students: Proverbs, Phoric Elements and Metalinguistic Awareness

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show the outcomes of a didactic proposal carried out with three groups of undergraduates of Teacher Training studies. Wishing to achieve, within the subject, the essence of the concept of register, proverbs –as representative of the natural language– are used to be the first discourse in the didactic sequence, whose object of study is constituted by certain mechanisms of cohesion such as the phoric elements. Afterwards, the taught activities are explained in detail. These consist of analyzing the elements in various text genres such as the journalistic –between natural and artificial language– and the literary –prototypically artificial. The main conclusion assumes two factors. On the one hand, the innovation can be given by the kind of (speaking and listening) discourse –such as the proverbs– we use to teach the language. On the other hand, the more artificial the object language is, the bigger the effort will be to learn it. As a consequence, there is a need to make a methodological approach in first language teaching towards the teaching of foreign languages, because in both contexts the study language is, more or less, unfamiliar to the student.