I have room here to give only a few practical examples of the kind of
classroom activities which were based on such a view of semantic organisation
and discourse predictions.
(1) The technique of cloze passages is well known. Passages are specially
prepared by deleting words; students have to make predictions from
context and complete the gaps. Such exercises are linguistically principled, but nevertheless involve artificial preparation of texts. A
real alternative which I used was to take a newspaper article in East
African English which contained a large number of Swahili loan
words, incomprehensible out of context to an English speaker. These
loan words provided real lexical gaps for students to translate into
English.
(2) A common situation in which hearers have to predict large parts of a
conversation occurs when they hear one end of a telephone call. It is
usually possible to predict much of what is said at the other end of the
line. It is easy to tape record a telephone call, and to delete one
speaker's contributions from the transcript to form a discourse cloze
passage.
(3) A short story can be divided into sections and fed to students one
section at a time. Their task is to predict what will happen next, and to
write the continuation of the story. Again, this involves some manipulation
of a text, but forces students to make explicit their expectations
in a way which is essentially similar to that involved in an
intelligent first reading of a literary text. Any such exercises can
provide material for subsequent more formal analysis of the students'
own predictions. This will inevitably involve comparison between
different students' predictions, and between these predictions and the
original. This will inevitably lead also to an analysis of the grammatical
and lexical cohesion in the passages, of semantic relations
such as paraphrase and entailment, as well as of the macrostructure of
narratives and other discourse types. (In Stubbs, 1983a, I discuss in
more detail some aspects of the semantic organisation of a literary
text and give other examples of such classroom activities, suitable for
mother tongue teaching in secondary schools.)