INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN EFL TEACHING

When speaking or writing in a foreign language, being grammatically and semantically competent may not be enough to convey the necessary information to the interlocutors in dual conversations or to the readers who read our texts in various genres such as personal letters, formal letters, e-mails, etc. Namely, individuals who communicate in a foreign language may generate grammatically and semantically well-formed sentences or phrases but their sentences and phrases may still not be comprehensible enough because they fail in highlighting the new information (unfamiliar information) and deemphasizing the given (old) information. Therefore, teaching how to utilize intonation, sentence stress and pitch when speaking English and teaching how to utilize various syntactic constructions such as fronting, left-dislocation, clefting, pseudoclefting, passive structures and word order in order to highlight new information and deemphasise given information when both speaking English and writing a text in English are of great importance in foreign language teaching. In this article, the concept of information structure is reviewed, examples are given both in Turkish and English and suggestions are made for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes.