The importance of teaching systemic functional linguistics and text linguistics to improve writing in bilingual education programs in the USA

Abstract

The study reported in this paper examines a corpus of essays written in English by pre-university Mexican students who followed a Bilingual Education program in the USA. Working as a bilingual teacher offered me the opportunity of concentrating on the writing process and observing different aspects related to written texts in English that students should be aware of to improve their writing skills such as the following ones: the importance of understanding the text as an authentic product and as a way of communication, the importance of paragraph division to organise content and the analysis of theme and rheme and information structure. In this article I intend to demonstrate that the study of Text Linguistics helps students to increase their level of literacy. I will point out that Text Linguistics has a crucial role in literacy since it concentrates on the production and analysis of texts in a given language. I will highlight the relationship between, literacy, Text Linguistics and effective writing with an applied educational emphasis. Systemic Functional Grammar will be used as a framework of analysis to evaluate students¿ writing and reflect on the relationship between linguistic links across sentences and textual coherence.