Text type constructs in teaching across languages

At secondary level, great importance is put on the ability to write texts that meet the conventions of text types. In school systems students are required to produce a variety of text types in different languages. For the Austrian school system, descriptions of text types for L1 German, L2 English and L3 French, Italian and Spanish are available. However, the text types differ across languages. Consequently, students are mostly left to their own devices when it comes to understanding similarities and differences among the text types.

This study uses a set of 23 descriptive statements, derived from text linguistic theory, to empirically investigate text type constructs for eight text types for L2 English held by practicing teachers. This paper identifies the statements which show sufficient agreement among teachers so that they can be used to characterise a text type and make visible discrepancies between the teachers’ views and the official text type descriptions. This approach has already been applied to L1 German (Sigott, Krieg-Holz, Struger & Cesnik, 2020) and can be applied to all other languages.

The results for English show that the suitability of the 23 statements varies considerably across text types. A subset of statements turns out to be suitable as dimensions for comparing all the English text types, an insight which seems very valuable for teaching practice. In addition, statements are identified which are suitable to characterise individual text types and those which should not be considered in describing text types. This, too, can be valuable information for teaching practice. These results are presented in a polarity profile for each text type.