Academic vs. Personal Texts: Key Differences
Comparison of Texts: Academic vs. Personal
The use of personal writing (letters, postcards, etc.) often differs significantly from academic texts. This modification is more intense among young people, for whom academic activity is primary. Specific features include:
Academic Texts
- Purpose: Demonstrate knowledge or present work results.
- Content: Derived from other texts or activities (experiments, lectures).
- Context: Decontextualized from the student’s immediate reality.
- Language: Objective, accurate, and precise vocabulary.
- Structure: Open, less defined, developed by the student.
- Recipient: Primarily the teacher, with little or no presence in the text. Formal register.
- Constraints: Often time-limited, location-specific, without reference materials, and individual work.
Personal Texts
- Purpose: Varied: to inform, thank, remember, etc. Interactive and expressive.
- Content: Based on the author’s personal experience.
- Context: Generated in the learner’s immediate environment, linked to a real context.
- Language: General language.
- Structure: Social routines determine communication patterns (dialogue, conversation). Students must comply.
- Recipient: Varied and specific, depending on the text type. The register is consistent with the recipient.
- Constraints: Usually, no limitations of this kind.
Teaching Textual Properties
Teaching Summaries and Diagrams
Summaries and diagrams relate to coherence, which involves producing and understanding textual information structures. Creating summaries and diagrams is a common school practice, considered a study technique to acquire knowledge. Although often discussed as separate exercises in language study, summaries and diagrams work on text coherence: selecting relevant information, analyzing its structure, and condensing it. Students are often asked to develop these, but rarely are they taught how. The most important microskills for producing summaries and diagrams are:
- Comprehensive reading: Discriminating relevant from irrelevant information.
- Identifying important words: Keywords, bookmarks, etc.
- Marking text: Highlighting, annotating, etc.
- Recognizing text and information structure.
- Writing (with all its microskills).
- Using different types of schedules: Brackets, diagrams, decimals.
Evaluation
Evaluation methods for overall text properties do not vary significantly from the exercises mentioned. The student might be asked to reduce the formality of a writing, simulate a parliament on the radio or TV to measure their fitness ability, create a diagram of an article or a conference (consistency), or bring cohesion to a text. In all cases, we evaluate the knowledge of one or more textual properties applied to linguistic ability. Thus, the student must read and rewrite, speak, read, or hear, respectively. The only way to measure text is through receptive and productive use.