Article published In:
Australian Review of Applied LinguisticsVol. 23:1 (2000) ► pp.109–122
Organisers in expository text
This paper presents the concept of ‘organisers’ in expository text, as a tool for discourse analysis and the teaching of writing skills. The notion of an ‘organiser’ is based on the work of Harold (1995) in which he suggests that there is a universal cognitive function of early position in the paragraph called ‘organisation’. For Harold, the ‘organiser’ serves to both group and divide text, and link to what has gone before. The present classification was developed to account for differences between expository essays, judged by readers on the basis of coherence. Characteristics of essay organisation could be clearly discriminated when ‘organisers’ were given clear operational definition, and a distinction was made between ‘unifying’ and ‘dividing organisers’. The classification includes lexical and grammatical units that are not traditionally considered to be discourse ‘signposts’. Extended to other genres of expository text, the usefulness of this approach can be demonstrated and validated. This method of analysis has pedagogical implications for the teaching of writing by offering another way to explain to students the practical means and strategies available to create an ‘organised’ expository text that is easy for a reader to comprehend.
References
Attenborough, D.
(1979) Life on earth: a natural history. London, Collins.
Boyden, D.D.
(1971) An introduction to music. London, Faber and Faber Ltd.
Carrell, P.
(1998) Can reading strategies be successfully taught? Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 21,1: 1–20. 
Chafe, W.
(1976) Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In C.N. Li (ed.) Subject and topic. New York, Academic Press
Du Bois, J.W.
(1987) The discourse basis of ergativity in discourse. Language 631:805–55.
Evensen, L.S.
(1990) Pointers to superstructure in student writing. In U. Connor and A.M. Johns (eds) Coherence in writing. Alexandria, Virginia, TESOL Inc.
Gernsbacher, M.A.
(1990) Language comprehension as structure building. Hillsdale, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum and Assoc.
Gernsbacher, M.A, and D.J. Hargreaves
(1988) Accessing sentence participants: the advantage of first mention. Journal of Memory and Language 271:699–717.
Givon, T.
(1993) English grammar: a function based introduction. Philadelphia, John Benjamins.
Halliday, M.A.K.
(1985) An introduction to functional grammar. London, Edward Arnold.
Harold, B.B.
(1995) Subject-verb word order and the function of early position. In P. Downing and M. Noonan (eds) Word order in discourse. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, John Benjamins.
Jarvella, R.J.
(1979) Immediate memory and discourse processing. In G.H. Bower (ed.) The psychology of learning and motivation: advances in research and theory 131:279–421 New York, Academic Press.
Lautamatti, L.
(1987) Observations on the development of the topic of simplified discourse. In U. Connor and R.B. Kaplan, (eds) Writing across languages: analysis of L2 text. Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley.
Lawe Davies, R.M.
(1998) Coherence in tertiary student writing: writers’ skills and readers’ expectations. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Graduate School of Education, University of Western Australia.
Vande Kopple, W.J.
(1985) Some exploratory discourse on metadiscourse. College Composition and Communication 361:82–93.
Winter, E.O.
(1977) A clause-relational approach to English texts: a study of some predictive lexical items in written discourse. Instructional Science 61:1–92.