COMMENTS: Omnia Mostafa

In order to make the reader grasps the information easily, Nunan employs some maps and illustrations.He,for instance,makes a list in which he collects the categories and subcategories of cohesion in English.This way fixes(another verb) the information in the reader’s mind.Another example is when Nunan examines,in one of the book’s sections, the ways in which information is organized beyond the sentence.He mentions that there are number of different approaches to discourse analysis.One of these is what the writer calls the “super sentence” school.This has concerned itself with identifying regularly recurring patterns in discourse .This approach is similar to that taken by sentence grammarians.Those grammarians aim to establish rules for describing sentences of a language.Such rules are concerned of(rephrase) those elements that are obligatory to the sentence and those that are optional.One of the rules stipulates that a well-formed sentence must contain a noun phrase,followed by a verb phrase,followed by another noun phrase..The sentence may contain an adverbial phrase and it is optional.In the same way,discourse grammars would specify those optional and obligatory elements that would differentiate between coherent and non-coherent discourse.Then, Nunan brings an extract of a second language classroom interaction.The interaction seems to be made up of a series of recurring patterns.To illustrate, the teacher initiates the interaction by asking a question, and then , one or more students respond and the teacher provides some sort of evaluation of the response.Here ,the author uses a pattern to describe this three-part structure.As a matter of fact,the pattern is not Nunan’s but Sinclair’s and Coulthard’s.They called the three-part structure “an exchange” and the three components making up the exchange “moves”.The moves are made up of “speech acts”.They found that entire lessons consisted of transactions which are made up of these three-part exchanges.

Well-written.