Text types, discourse and reading strategies
Text and Discourse
Anything can be identified as a text, if it let people engage with it and produce meanings about
themselves, their beliefs and their society; in this sense, is important to consider the connection
between text and meaning, defined from the media-audience and the media-society relationships.
The text is seen as a vehicle for meaning or achieve different reactions: in this respect, Roland
Barthes believed that the readerly text is “familiar”, because there are conventions and features
which simplifies his sense. In this regard, Barthes formed the Hermeneutic code, in which, through
the genre feature, the reader’s ability of choosing meanings is limited. The writerly text, instead,
stimulates reflection and alternative meanings, because of conventions weakness.
The texts, however, can exist only in a context, which are divided in:
-Conceptual context, where we refer to the residual,
-Environmental context, in which both text and reader exist (such as a film viewed at home,
via DVD, so seen differently to the movie viewed instead at the cinema),
-Social context, results, in part, of social conventions,
-Ideological context, related to the values of the culture that produced the text
As to the structure, the text is a product of a language, held together by cohesive devices or
linguistic elements, like pronoun and conjunction. Beside the semantic cohesion, a text needs also
of pragmatic coherence, that refers to the meaning produced in the reader and the writer.
Texts can also be examined through Discourse analysis, that study the language use, so its
references to the social and psychological factors which influence communication, identifying its
meaning, intention, and interpretation. These features also include the paralinguistic study, that
exam facial expressions and body language, used by speakers, who are freer than writers, because
of they can change the power and the meaning of the text, right trough these linguistic means.
Text types
A text type is an historical type of text with accepted standards for subject matters and textual
forms by which the sender and the receiver collaborate for social purposes, showing, so a common
direction for the verbal exchange. Any text can be described and identified according their:
-function, the social practice under which it’s produced,
-structure, that is its typical form, its layout, physical aspect,
-aspects of language, which represent specific linguistical and styling features
For the analyses of a text, we must consider four elements:
- the context, that is the physical environments in which a text is created, so determinates
its meaning,
