Suggestions toward some discourse-analytic approaches to text difficulty: with special reference to ‘T-unitconfiguration’ in the textual unfolding

This paper represents some suggestions towards discourse-analytic approaches for ESL/EFL education,with the focus on identifying the textual forms which can contribute to the textual difficulty. Textualdifficulty / comprehensibility, rather than being purely text-based or reader-dependent, is certainly amatter of interaction between text and reader. The paper will look at some of the textual factors whichcan be argued to make a text more or less readable for the same reader. The main focus here will be onacademic texts. The high cognitive load and low readability of the expository texts in various academicdisciplines will be argued to belong to certain textual strategies as well as variations in theconfigurations of the T-units as the prime scaffolding for the textualization process. Different categoriesof these variations to be discussed here will be exemplified from a few academic and expositoryregisters. More extensive textual analyses will, of course, be necessary in order to be able to makeevidential suggestions for possible correlations between certain types and clusters of T-unitconfigurations on the one hand, and cognitive load and readability indices on the other, across variousacademic registers, genres and disciplines.

Keywords:

discourse-analysis , expository texts , T-unit configuration , textual forms , textual difficulty , contextual factors , register