Page 217 - Beyond Methods

Contextualizing linguistic input 205
context. What are those realities? For the limited purpose of L2 learning and teaching, we can talk about four realities: linguistic, ex- tralinguistic, situational, and extrasituational. In the following pages, I briefly discuss each of these contexts and then connect the dis- cussion to possible microstrategies and exploratory projects aimed at contextualizing linguistic input.
Linguistic Context
Linguistic context, as I use the term here, refers to the immediate linguistic environment that contains formal aspects of language re- quired for the process of meaning-making. The formal aspects in- clude pronouns, articles, conjunctions, ellipses, substitutions, and other features of the linguistic code. Such a linguistic environment pertains mainly to the grammatical and lexical levels within a sen- tence or between sentences in a text.
At the sentence level, the linguistic environment may contain adequate contextual clues for understanding the meaning of gram- matical or lexical items. For instance, consider the meaning of the word table in the following sentences:
1. There is a large table in the dining area.
2. The table of contents shows what this books is all about.
3. I use a multiplication table to do my math problems.
4. The table reveals our company’s profit and loss.
5. The Prime Minister will table a motion in Parliament today.
The common meaning of the word is, of course, what is given in sentence 1, referring to a flat surface usually supported by four legs. However, the linguistic environment surrounding the word table in other sentences (e.g., “multiplication” and “math” in sentence 3) provide adequate clues for determining its meaning in those speci- fic contexts. While it is true that even decontextualized lexis can carry meaning in the sense that a word does have a canonical mean- ing (as in sentence 1), noticing the linguistic environment in which it occurs can ensure a proper understanding of the item in other contexts.
At the intersentential level, linguistic context relates mainly to the notion of cohesion. Halliday and Hasan (1976, p. 18) define cohesion “as the set of possibilities that exists in the language for making text