In order to maximise reliable comparisons and generalisations, Christian Matthiessen and Kazuhiro Teruya (e.g. Matthiessen 2015c) has developed a typology of registers based on the contextual parameter of field of activity to support typological work (following Jean Ure's text typology).
These contributions, however, do not explicitly deploy this text typology.
I then classified the text types to a further degree of delicacy of text typology, as shown in Fig. 4.
Context-based text typology and field, mode tenor from register theory were used to analyze the participants' writing.
Pun (2011) applied the context-based text typology to investigate texts from Hong Kong secondary chemistry textbooks and identified the major text types and their lexicogrammatical features.
Teruya (2009) applied text typology to investigate how adult intermediate Japanese learners progressed from intermediate to advanced language learning by engaging with different text types.
As well as the genre studies, we also have other theoretical lenses for looking at texts, like text typology (Matthiessen et al. 2010; Matthiessen 2015).
In this study I employed context-based text typology (Matthiessen 2006; Matthiessen 2015; Matthiessen & Teruya 2014; Matthiessen et al. 2010; Teruya 2009) to analyse students' writing.
Drawing on the framework of functional text analysis, namely context-based text typology and register theory, the present study aimed to explore Chinese adolescent L2 writing from the perspective of writing as meaning making.
Fig. 1 Context-based text typology — field of activity Fig. 2 Socio-semiotic Process (1) Expounding means the use of language or other semiotics to explain experiences or scientific knowledge.
