The quality of (oral and written) texts of university teachers is a crucial in teaching for several reasons:
- The language input that students receive is mostly composed of teachers´ oral and written texts.
- The future success of the students is related to their capacity to understand and to take in the input.
- The input that students receive from teachers is important in order to contribute for the students´ sureness about the correctness in grammar and orthography in their texts.
- The development of the ability to appropriately use academic registers is closely related to the language-model that teachers offer.
The diagram below shows the basic scheme that we follow as for the components of the linguistic quality of texts. The main components are correctness and adequacy. Each of these components has several subcomponents and each relates to a specific linguistic community: the whole Basque language community (to whom the whole grammar of the language pertains), the community of the speakers of standard Basque, and the specialized discourse communities. This distinction is fundamental, in our belief. In fact, the teachers at the university have different responsibilities with respect to the resources pertaining to the general language and those related to specialized discourse:
- They must be aware of the laws of grammar and discourse and they must use them in their texts.
- They have the responsibility to develop and fix the specialized registers of their field (terminology, phraseology).
The language quality of texts
