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Tema-1 In this unit we are going to study language and its major functions: * We will show how Communication is one of these Functions. * We will show how learning a language is not only a grammatical process but also a Social Process. * We will also analyse the differences between Writing and Speech. * We will discuss some important Communicative Theory defining their key factors. * Finally, we will show how important it is to create Real Communication Situations in our Classrooms in order to improve language teaching. A conclusion summing up what has been said throught the unit will follow, ending up with the bibliography used for the elaboration of this discussion.
We must point out that language is not just a "subject" in the sense of a package of knowledge. It is not just a set of information and insights. It is a fundamental part of being human. Traditional approaches used to treat a language as if it were a free-standing package of knowledge by analysing and observing it. Many of us learnt a language that way. But this process is a very abstract one and experience has shown that it does not appeal to everyone. To learn to use a language at all well for ourselves rather than for textbook purposes, most of us have to become involved in it as an experience. We have to make it a human event not just a set of information. We do this by using it for real communication, for genuine giving and receiving of messages. * Now that we have introduced this particular topic we are going to deal with the study of language as Communication, its functions and the concept of communicative competence. The word language has prompted many definitions. For example; Sapir said that " language is a purely human and non instinctive method of commicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols ". Hall defined language as " the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each other by means of habitually used oral-auditory symbols "
The most widely acknowledged comparative approach has been that proposed by Charles Hockett. This set of 13 design features of communication using spoken language are as follows: 1. Auditory-vocal channel: sound is used between mouth and ear. 2. Broadcast transmission and directional reception: a signal can be heard by any auditory system within earshot and the source can be located using the ear's direction finding. 3. Rapid fading: auditory signals are transitory. 4. Interchangeability: speakers of a language can reproduce any linguistic message they can understand. 5. Total feedback: speakers hear and can reflect upon everything they say. 6. Specialization: the sound waves of speech have no other functions than to signal meaning. 7. Semanticity: the elements of the signal convey meaning through their stable association with real world situations. 8. Arbitrariness: there is no depency between the element of the signal and the nature of the reality to which it refers. 9. Discreetness: speech uses a small set of found elements that clearly contrast with each other. 10. Displacement: it is possible to talk about events remote in space or time from the situation of the speaker. 11. Productivity: there is an infinitive capacity to express and understand meaning, by using old sentence elements to produce new elements. 12. Traditional transmission: language is transmitted from a generation to the next by a process of teaching and learning. 13. Duality of patterning: the sounds of language have no intrinsic meaning, but combine in different ways to form elements, such as words, that do convey meaning. * After having studied the main properties of language, and communication,
we will now see how the learning of a language involves a Social Process. One of the most common uses of language, the expressive or emotional one, is a means of getting rid of our nervous energy when we are under stress, when we are angry, afraid, etc. We do not try to communicate because we can use language in this way whether we are alone or not. Malinowski termed the third use of language we are studying Phatic Communication. He used it to refer to the social function of language, that is, to signal friendship or lack of enemity. Also, to maintain a comfortable relationship between people. The fourth function we may find is based on Phonetic Properties.
The persuasive cadences of political speechmaking, or the chants used
by prisoners or soldiers have only one apparent reason: people take
delight in them. The fifth function is the Performative one. A performative is an utterance that performs an act. This use occurs in the naming of a ship at a launching ceremony, or when a priest baptises a child. We can also find other functions such as: - recording facts - instrument of thought - expression of regional, social, educational, sexual or occupational identity.
1) The Idealistic Funtion: is to organise the speaker's or writer's experience of the real or imaginary world. 2) The Interpersonal Function: is to indicate, establish or maintain social relationships between people. 3) The Textual Function: which serves to create written or spoken texts which cohere within themselves and which fit the particular situation in which they are used.
Chomsky defined language as a set of sentences, each finite in length
and constructed out of a finite set of elements. An able speaker has
a subconcious knowledge of the grammer rules of his language which
allows him to make sentences in that language. However, Dell Hymes
thought that Chomsky had missed out some very important information: For Hymes the Communicative Competence had four aspects: 1) Systematic Potential: 2) Appropriacy: 3) Occurence: 4) Feasibility:
1) Grammar Competence.
3) Sociocultural Competence.
5) Strategic Competence.
* Up to this point we have studied the concept of language as means
of communication, amongst other functions. Before summarising the main differences between spoken and written language we will outline their main features independantly. On the one hand we have spoken language, which is the most obvious aspect of language. Speech is not essential to the definition of an infinitely productive communication system, such as is constituted by language. But, in fact, speech is the universal material of language. Man has almost certainly been a speaking animal. The earliest known systems of writing go back perhaps some 5000 years. This means that for many hundreds of thousands of years human languages have been transmitted and developed entirely as a spoken means of communication. The description and classification of speech sounds is the main aim of phonetics. Sounds may be identified with reference to their production, their transmission and their reception. These three activities occur at the physiological level, which implies the action of muscles and nerves. The motor nerves that link the speaker's brain with his speech mechanism activate the corresponding muscles. The movements of the tongue, lips, vocal chords, etc, constitute the articulatory stage of the speech chain, and the area of phonetics that deals with it is articulatory phonetics. The movement of the articulation produces disturbances in the air pressure called sound waves which are physical manifestations. This is the acoustic stage of the chain, during which the sound waves travel towards the listener's ear. These sound waves activate the listener's ear drum.
1) Non-Phonological Systems. 2) Phonological Systems.
Now let's study the main differences between writing and speech. The most obvious is the contrast in physical form. Speech uses phonic substance typically in the form of air-pressure movements, whereas writing uses graphic substance, typically in the form of marks on a surface. As writing can only occasionally be thought of as an interaction, we can establish the following points of contrast: 1) The permanence of writing allows repeated reading and close analysis. The spontaneity and rapidity of speech minimises the chance of complex pre-planning, and promotes features that assisst speakers to think standing up. 2) The participants in written interaction cannot usually see each other, so they cannot make clear what they mean. However, in speech interactions feedback is possible. 3) The majority of graphic features presents a system of contrasts that has no speech equivalent. Many genres of written language, such as tables, graphs and complex formulae, cannot be conveyed by reading aloud. 4) Some contructions may only be found in writing, others only occur in speech, such as in slang and swear words. 5) Finally we can say that writing tends to be more formal and so it is more likely to provide the standard that society values. Its performance provides it with a special status.
* Now we have examined the differences between speech and written
language According to Ivor Armstrong Richards, "communication takes place when one mind so acts upon its environment that another mind is influenced, and in that other mind an experience occurs which is like the experience in the first mind, and is caused in part by that experience." From this definition we can conclude that any communicative act necessarily happens among persons or between a person who acts as a speaker and a listener or between various people who act as receivers. Besides these people there are other elements in a communicative act: * The Message * The Channel * The Code * The Context * As we have seen communication is the exchange of meanings through
a common system of symbols. Now it is time to ask ourselves: Many studies of classroom language have shown that in most native speaker ? is used for function rather than for direct teaching. These extra functions include: greetings, discussion, health, attendance,the weather and so on. Barnes (1969), in his description of classroom language, labelled these functions "social". Social interaction also takes placein foreign language and 2nd language classrooms, but in many such classrooms native language is used for this purpose. Fanselow (1977) attempted to set up a system for observing and recording different types of communication in the language classroom. He established five headings in the form of questions: 1) Who communicates ? 2) What is the pedagological purpose of the communication ? 3) What mediums are used to communicate content ? 4) How are the mediums used ? 5) What areas of content are communicated ?
The second, Procedure, concerns those times when the teacher is managing the classroom, explaining what to do next, how to do it and so on. Some teachers use English for classroom management, and others use the children's mother tongue, at least during the early stages. The third of Fanselow's categories, Subject Matter, concerns those times when the language is being used to convey some specific topic as a part of a lesson. For example, if the teacher tells the story "The Frog Got Lost", the subject matter is the frog and its adventures. In this case the teacher's aim might be to illustrate the use of the past simple tense, but the content area of language used in that part of the lesson is not tense but the tale of the frog. In the language classroom, this part of the lesson would be conducted in English. The final content category identified by Fanselow, Life, concerns
communication between teacher and pupils about Real Life Matters,
not directly about the lesson. This category embraces the type of
questioning that Barnes called "social" as well as any other
type of communication about the real world. Strategies that parents use intuitively to draw children into the use of the first language must be used deliberately by the teachers to draw children into using the second language. Research has shown that parents generally speak more slowly, articulate more carefully, and use gesture, facial expression and tone when talking to young children to aid their understanding and to encourage them to produce.
To conclude, we could bear in mind that an important aspect of interaction in the English classroom is that it must be managed by the learners as well as by the teacher. That is to say that learners must be confident enough to initiate communication in English, and not merely respond when they are addressed by the teacher. A pupil that has something to say, an apology or a request to make, a question to ask, a greeting to give, should be encouraged to express him/herself in English. If resources are not to be wanted and opportunities to be missed, children must learn English in the same way they learnt their mother tongue, as a living language that can be used for active communication as much as for establishing personal relationships.
The bibliography used for the elaboration of this topic is as follows: * "Teaching the Spoken Language" by Gillian Brown and George Yule C.U.P. 1997. * "Teaching English to Children" by Christopher Brumfit, Jayne Moon and Ray Tongue. Longman 1992. * "Teaching English in the Primary Classroom" by Susan Halliwell. Longman 1992. TEMA 1 LA LENGUA COMO COMUNICACIÓN: LENGUAJE ORAL Y LENGUAJE ESCRITO.
1.1. Language definitions. 1.2. Language functions. 1.3. Communicative competence.
2.1. Spoken language. 2.2. Written language. 2.3. Historical Attitudes. 2.4. Differences between writing and speech.
3.1. Communication definition. 3.2. Main Models. 3.3. Key factors.
Traditional foreign language teaching concentrated on getting students consciously to learn items of language in insolation. These bits of information would be mainly used to read texts and only occasionally for oral communication. The focus was not on communication but on a piece of language. Following Krashen's distinction between acquisition and learning we can say that people got to know about the language (learning) but could not use it in a real context (acquisition). The British applied linguist Allwright tried to bridge this dichotomy when he theorised that if de language teacher's management activities were directed exclusively at involving the learners in solving communication problems in the target language, then language learning wil take care of itlself. We may or may not agree with this extreme rendering of the Communicative approach, but we all agree nowadays on the importance of letting ous pupils use English for real communication during at least, the production stage. In this unit we are going to study language and its functions to see that communication is one of thes functions. We wil then posit that learning a language is not only a grammatical and lexical process but also a social process. We also analyze the differences between writing and speech; and finally we will discuss the most important communication theory models, defining their key factors. 1. LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION. 1.1. Language Definitions. The word language has prompted innumerable definitions. Some focus on the general concept of language (what we call lengua or lenguaje) and some focus on the more specific notion of a language (what we call lengua or idioma). SAPIR (1921) said that "language is a purely human non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols". HALL (1964) defined language as "the institution whereby humans communicate and interact whith each other by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols". As we can see in these two definitions it is diffi cult to make a precise and comprehensive statement about formal adn functional universal properties of language so some linguists have trien to indentify the various properties that are thought to be its essential defining characteristics. The most widely acknowledged comparative approach has been the one proposed by Charles HOCKETT. His set of 13 design features of communication using spoken language were as follows: - Auditory-vocal channel: sound is used between mouth and ear. - Broadcast transmission and directional reception: a signal can be heard by any auditory system within earshot, and the source can be located using the ears' direction-finding ability. - Rapid fading: auditory signals are transitory. - Interchangeability: speakers of a language can reproduce any linguistic message they can understand. - Total feedback: speakers hear and can reflect upon everything that they say. - Specitalization: the sound waves of speech have no other function than to signal meaning. - Semanticity: the elemens of the signal convey meaning through their stable association with real-world situations. - Arbitrariness: there is no dependence of the element of the signal on the nature of the reality to which it refers. - Discreteness: speech uses a small set of sound elements tha clearly contrast whith each other. - Displacement: it is possible to talk about events remote in space or time from the situation of the speaker. - Productivity: ther is an infinite capacity to express and understand meaning, by using old setence elements to produce new sentences. - Traditional transmissión: language is transmitted from one generation to the next primarily by a process of teaching and learning. - Duality of pottering: the sound of language have no intrinsic meaning, but combine in diferents ways to form elements, such as words, than do convey meaning. After having studied thje main properties of language (what is language?) we will now see its function (whats language for?).
We may also finde other functions such as: - recording facts. The British linguist HALLIDAY grouped all these functions into three metafunctions, shich are the manifestation in the linguistic system of the two veryu general purposes shich underlie all uses of language combine whith the rhird component (textual) shich brethes relevance into the other two. 1.- The ideational function is to organize the speaker's or writer's experience of the real or imaginary world, i.e. language refers to real or imagined persons, things, actions, events, states,etc. 2.- The interpersonal function is to indicate, establish or mantain social relationships between people. It includes forms of address, speech function, modality ... 3.- The third component is the textual function which serves to create written or spoken texts which cohere within themselves and which fit the particular situation in which they are used.
CHOMSKY (1957) defined language as `a set of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements. A capable speaker has a subconscious knowledge of the grammar rules of his language which allows him to make sentences in that language'. However, Dell HYMES thought that Chomsky had missed out some very important information: the rules of the use. When a native speaker speaks, he does not onlu utter grammatically correct forms, he also knows where and when to use these sentences and to whom. Hymes, then, said that competence by itself is not enough to explain a native speaker's knowledge, and he replaced it with his own concept of communicative competence. HYMES distinguishes 4 aspects of this competence: - systematic potential
Appropriacy means that the native speaker knows what language is
appropriate in a given situation. His choice is based on the following
variables, among others: Feasibility means that the native speaker knows whether something is possible in the language. Even if there is no grammatical rule to ban 20-adjective prehead construction, we know that these constructions are not possible in the language. These 4 categories have been adapted for teaching purposes. Thus, the Royal Decree 1006/1991 of 14 June (BOE 25 June), which establishes the teaching requirements for Primary Education nationwide, sees communicative competence as comprising five subcompetences: - Grammar competence (competencia gramatical, o capacidad de poner
en práctica las unidades y reglas de funcionamiento del sistema
de la lengua). The terms grammar, sociolinguistic and sociocultural competence are quite self explanatory so we will only analyze discourse and strategic competence. CANALE (1980) defined discourse competence as an aspect of communicative competence which describes the ability to produce unified written or spoken discourse that shows coherence and cohesion and which conforms to the norms of different genres. Our pupils must be able to produce discourse in which successive utterances are linked through ruoles of discourse competence. Strategic competence may be defined as an aspect of communicative competence which describes the ability of speakers to use verbal and non-verbal communication strategies to compensate for breakdowns in communication or to improve the effectiveness of communication.
It is traditionl in language study to distinguish between spoken and written language. Before summarizing their main differences we will outline their main features independently.
The description and clasification of sounds is the main aim of phonetics. Sounds may be identified with reference to their production, transmission and reception. These three activities occur at a physiological level, which implies the action of nerves and muscles. The motor nerves that link the speaker's brain with his speech mechanism activate the corresponding muscle. The movements of the tongue, lips, vocal folds, etc. Constitute the articulatory stage of the speech chain, and the area of phonetics that deals with it is articulatory phonetics.The movement of the articulators produces disturbances in the air pressure called sound waves, which are physical manifestations. This is the acoustic stage of the chain, during which the sound waves travel towards the listener's ear-drum. The study of speech sound waves correspons to acoustic phonetics. The hearing process is the domain of auditory phonetics. This can be seen in the following table:
In this table we can see how phonetics is the study of all possible
speech sounds. 2.2. Written language. Myths and legends of the supernatural shroud the early history of writing. One point, at least, is fairly clear. It now seems most likely that writing systems evolved independently of each other at different times in several parts of the world -in Mesopotamia, China... There is nothing to support a theory of common origin. We can classify writting systems into two types: Non-phonological systems do not show a clear relationship between the symbols and the sounds of the language. They include the pictographic, ideographic, cuneiform and egyptian hieroglyphic and logographic. In the pictographic system, the graphemes or pictographs or pictograms provide a recognizable picture of entities as they exist in the world. Ideograms or ideographs have an abstract or conventional meaning, no longer displaying a clear pictorial link whith external reality. The cuneiform method of writing dates from the 4th. Millennium BC, and was used to express both non-phonological and phonological writing systems. The name derives from the Latin, meaning 'wedge-shaped' and refers to the technique used to make the symbols. Egyptian hieroglyphic developed about 3000 BC. It is a mixture of ideograms, phonograms and determinative symbols. It was called hieroglyphic because of its prominent use in temples ad tombs (Greek, 'sacred carving"). Logographic writing systems are those where the graphemes represent words. The best known case is Chinese and Japanese kanji. The symbols are variously referred to as logographs, logograms or characters.
In a system of syllabic writing, each grapheme corresponds to a spoken syllable, usually a consonant-vowel pair. This system can be seen in Japanese Kataka. Alphabetic writing establishes a direct correspondence between graphemes and morphemes. This makes it the most economic and adaptable of all the writing systems. In a perfectly regular sustem there is one grapheme for each morpheme. However, most alphabets in present day use fail to meet this criterion. At one extreme we find such languages as Spanish, which has a very regular system; at the other, we find such cases as English and Gaelic, where there is a marked tendency to irregularity.
Historically speaking, written language was considered tobe superior to spoken language for many centuries. It was the medium of literature, and literature was considered a source of standards of linguistic excellence. Witten records provide language with permanence and authority and so the rules of grammar were illustrated exclusively from written texts. On the other hand, spoken language was ignored as an object unworthy of study. Spoken language demostrates such a lack of care and organization that cannot be studied scientifically; it was said to have no rules, and speakers have thought that, in order to speak properly, it was necessary to follow the correct norm. As this norm was based on written standards, it is clear that the prescriptive tradition rested supremacy of writing over speech. This viewpiont became widely criticized at the turn of our century. Leonard Bloomfield insisted that "writing is not language but merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks". This approach pointed out several factors, some of which we have already mentioned:
If speech is the primary medium of communication, it was also argued that it should be the main object of linguistic study. Actually, the majority of the world's cultures' languages have never been written down and this has nothing to do with their evolutionary degree. It is a fallacy to suppose that the languages of illiterate or so-called primitive peoples are less structured, less rich in vocabulary, and less efficient than the languages of literate civilization. E. Sapir was one of the first linguistics to attack the myth that primitive peoples spoke primitive languages. In one study he compared the grammatical equivalents of the sentence "he will give it to you" in six Amerindian languages. Among many fascinating features of these complex grammatical forms, note the level of abstraction introduced by the following example: Southern Paiute Maya-vaania-aka-anga-'mi= guve will visible-thing visible-creature thee Many linguistics and ethnographerstherefore stressed the urgency of providing techniques for the analysis of spoken language and because of this emphasis on the spoken language, it was now the turn of writing to fall into disrepute. Many linguistics came to think of written language as a tool of secundary inportance. Writing came to be excluded from the primary subject matter of linguistic science. Many grammarians presented an account of speech alone. Nowadays, there is no sense in the view that one medium of communication is untrinsically better. Writing cannot substitute for speech, nor speech for writing. The functions of speech and writing are usually said to complement each other. On the other hand, there are many functional para llels which seem to be increase in modern society. We cannot use recording devices to keep facts and communicate ideas. On the other hand writing is also taken the social of phatic function typically associated with the immediacy of speech. Despite these parallels we can obviously find striking differences. 2.4. Differences between writing and speech Research has begun to investigate the nature and extent of the differences between them. Most obviously, they contrast in physical form: - Specch uses phonic substance typically in the form of air-pressure
movements Differences of structure and use are the product of radically different communicative situations. Crystal (1987) pointed that `speech is tme-bound, dynamic, transient, part of an interaction in which, typically, both participants are present, and the speaker has a specific addressee in mind´. Writing is space-bound, static, permanent, the result of a situation in which, typically, the producer is distant from the recipient and, often, may not even know who the recipient is. As writing can only occasionally be thought of as an interaction it is just normal that we can establish the following points of contrast: 1.- The permanence of writing allows repeated reading and close analysis. The spontaneity and rapidity of speech minimizes the chance of complex preplanning, and promotes features that assist to think standing up. 2.- The participants in written interaction cannot usually see each other, and they thus cannot rely on the context to help make clear what they mean as they would when speaking. As a consequence, deictic expressions are normally avoided. On the other hand, feedback is available in most speech interactions. 3.- The majority of graphic features present a system of contrast that has no speech equivalent. Many genres of written language, such as tables, graphs, and complex formulae, cannot be conveyed by reading aloud. 4.- Some constructions may be found onlu¡y in writing, such as the French simple past, and others only occur in speech, such as `whatchamacallit´, or slang expressions. 5.- Finally we can say that written language tends to be more formal and so it is more likely to provide the standard that society values. Despite these differences, there are many respects in which the written and the spoken language have mutually interacted. We normally use the written language in order to improve our command of vocabulary, active or passive, spoken or written. Loan words may come into a country in a written form, and sometimes, everything we know about language is its writing.
3.1. Definition Communication, the exchange of meanings between individuals through a common system of symbols, concerned scholars since the time of ancient Greece. In 1928 the English literary critic and author Ivor Armtrong Richards offered one of the first definitions of communication. Since about 1920 the growth and apparent influence of communication technology have attracted the attention of many specialists who have attempted to isolate communication as a specific facet of their particular interest. In the1960s, Marshall McLuhan, drew the threads of interest in the field of communication into a view that associated many contemporary psychological and sociological phenomena with the media employed in modern culture. McLuhan's idea, `the medium is the message´, stimulated numerous filmmakers, photographers, and others, who adopted McLuhan´s view that contemporary society had moved from a print culture to a visual one.
1.- The mass communication industries In short, a communication expert may be oriented to any number of disciplines in a field of inquiry that has, as yet, neither drawn for itself a conclusive roster of subject matter nor agreed upon specific methodologies of analysis. 3.2. Models Fragmentation and problems of interdisciplinarity outlook have generated a wide range of discussion concerning the ways in which communication occurs and the processes it entails. Most communication theorists admit that their main task is to answer the query originally posed by the U.S political scientist H. D. Lasswell, `Who says what to whom with what effect?´. Obviously all of the factors in this question may be interpreted differently by scholars and writers in different disciplines. Scientists may make use of dynamic or linear models. 3.2.1. Dynamic models. Dynamic models are used in describe cognitive, emotional, and artistic aspects of communication as they occur in sociocultural contexts. These models do not try to be quantitative as linear ones. They often centre attention upon different modes of communication and theorize that the messages they contain including messages of emotional quality and artistic content, are communicated in various manners to and from different sorts of people. Many analysts of communication such as McLuhan assert that the channel actually dictates, or severely influences, the message, both as sent and received. For them, the stability and function of channel or medium are more variable and less mechanistically related to the process than they are for followers of Shannon and Weaver. 3.2.2. Linear models: Shannon and Weaver's. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver's Mathematical Model of Communication is one of the most productive schematic models of a communication systems that has ever been proposed. The simplicity, clarity, and surface generally of their model proved attractive to many students of communication in a number of disciplines. As originally conceived, the model contained five elements arranged in linear order:
This model was originally intended for electronic messages so, in time, the five elements of the model were renamed so as to specify components for other types of communication transmitted in various manners. The information source was split into its components to provide a wider range of applicability: - a source Another concept, first called a `noise source´ but later associated with the notion of entropy was imposed upon the communication model. Entropy diminishes the integrity of the message and distorts the message for the receiver. Negative entropy may also occur in instances where incomplete or blurred messages are nevertheless received intact, either because of the ability of the receiver to fill in missing details or to recognize, despite distortion or paucity of information, both the intent and the content of the communication. But not only negative entropy counteracts entropy. Redundancy, the repetition of elements within a message that prevents the failure of communication of information, is the greatest antidote to entropy. Redundancy is apparently involved in most human activities, and, because it helps to overcome the various forms of entropy that tends to turn intelligible messages into unintelligible ones, it is an indispensable element for effective communication. We can see that the model, despite the introduction of entropy and redundancy, is conceptually static. To correct this flaw, Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, added the principle of feedback, ie, sources tend to be responsive to their own behaviour and to the context of communication. Interaction between human beings in conversation cannot function without the ability of the message sender to weigh and calculate the apparent effect of this words on his listener. We will now analyze each of these key factors. 3.3. Key factors This unit title mentions some of the key factors affecting any communicative interaction such as the sender and the receiver. After putting them in the broader framework of the Mathematical Model of Communication we will analyze the intended effects of our communicative interactions (speech acts) and the environment in which they are exchanged (social context). The information source selects a desired message out of a possible set of messages. The transmitter changes the message into a signal which is sent over the communication channel where it is received by the receiver and changed back into a message which is sent to the destination. In the process of transmission certain unwanted additions to the signal may occur which are not part of the message and these are referred to as noise or entropy; negative entropy and redundancy counteract entropy. For somo communication systems the components are simple to specify as, for instance: - information source: a man on the telephone In face-to-face communication, the speaker can be both information source and transmitter, while the listener can be both receiver and destination. 3.3.1. Speech acts. J.L. Austin (1911-1960) was the first to draw attention to the many functions performed by utterances as part of interpersonal communication. He distinguishes two main types of functional potential: - performative A performative is an utterance that perform an act: to say is to act, as we have already seen when studying language functions. Performatives may be explicit and implicit performatives, which do not contain a performative verb. Constatives are utterances which assert something that is either true or false. In speech act analysis the effect of utterances on the behaviour of speaker and hearer is studies using a threefold distinction: A locutionary act is the saying of something which is meaningful and can be understood. For example, saying the sentence `shoot the snake´ is a locutionary act if hearers understand the words `shoot´, `the´and `snake´ and can identify the particular snake referred to. An illocutionary act is using a sentence to perform a function. For example `shoot the snake´may be intended as an order or a piece of advice. A perlocutionary act is the result or effect that is produced by means of saying something. For example, shooting the snake would be a perlocutionary act. Austin´s three-part distinction is less frequently used than a two part distinction between the propositional content of a sentence and the illocutionary force or intended effects of speech acts. There are thousands of possible illocutionary acts, and several attempts have been made to classify them into a small number of types: - representatives In declaratives the speaker is committed in varying degrees, to the truth of a proposition. In directives the speaker tries to get the hearer to do something. In commissives the speaker is committed, in varying degrees, to a certain course of action. In expressives the speaker expresses an attitude about a state of affairs. In declarations the speaker alters the external status or conditions of an object or situation solely by making the utterance. As we can infer from the examples there are some fuzzy areas and overlappings between different types of illocutionary force. But an utterance may lose its illocutionary force if does not satisfy several criteria, known as felicity conditions. For example the preparatory conditions have to be right: the person performing the speech act has to have the authority to do so. Ordinary people automatically accept these conditions when they communicate. If any of these conditions does not obtain, then a special interpretation of the speech act has to apply. Both normal and special interpretations of utterances have much to do with the context in which they are made. 3.3.2. Context. Context is defined by the Collins English Dictionary as: 1. The parts of a piece of writing, speech, etc, that precede and
follow a word or passage and contribute to its full meaning. The first definition covers what we may call linguistic context, but as we can infer from the second definition, linguistic context may not be enough to fully understand an utterance understood as a speech act. In fact, linguistic elements in a text may refer not only to other parts of the text but also to the outside world, to the context of situation. The concept of context of situation was formulated by Malinowski in 1923. It has been worked over and extended by a number of linguistics, specially Hymes and Halliday. Hymes categorizes the communicative situation in terms of eight components while Halliday offers three headings for the analysis: HYMES HALLIDAY We will now analyze Halliday´s more abstract interpretation as it practically subsumes Hymes´s one. The field is the total event, in which the text is functioning, together with the purpose activity of the speaker or writer; it thus includes the suject matter as one element in it. The mode is the function of the text in the event, including therefore both the channel taken by the language, and its genre or rethorical mode, as narrative, didactic, persuasive and so on. The tenor refers to to the participants who are taking part in this communicative exchange, who they are and what kind of relationship thay have to one another. It is clear that role relationships, ie, the relationship which people have to each other in a act of communication, influences the way they speak to each other. One of the speakers may have, for instance, a role which has a higher status than that of the other speaker or speakers.
- Collins English Dictionary. Collins. Glasgow, 1992. - Crystal, D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. CUP. Cambridge, 1987. - Encyclopaedia Britannica. Enc. Brit. Inc. Chicago, 1990. - Halliday, M. A. K. Spoken and written Language. Geelong, Vic. Deakin University Press, 1976. - Halliday, M. A. K. Language as social semiotics. Arnold. London, 1978. - Halliday, M. A. K. Functional grammar. Arnold. London, 1982. - Halliday, M. A. K and Hasan, R. Cohesion in English. Longman. London, 1976. - Richards, J. C, Platt, J., and Platt, H. Longman Dictionary of
Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. Longman. London, 1992. - Steinberg, D. D. Psycholinguistics. Longman. London.1982
LA LENGUA COMO COMUNICACIÓN: LENGUAJE ORAL Y LENGUAJE ESCRITO. FACTORES QUE DEFINEN UNA SITUACIÓN COMUNICATIVA: EMISOR, RECEPTOR, FUNCIONALIDAD Y CONTEXTO.
Traditionally, theories of language have concentrated on the study of its different components in isolation, such as grammar, semantics, phonology, seeing language as a system that included all of them. However, when language is first acquired in childhood, is merely by means of communicating with the people around. In this sense, new approaches in the last third of the 20th C, paid attention to language as communication. We, as human beings, need to communicate, and as most of us live in a literary society, we normally use oral and written language to transmit or receive information. As far as oral communication is concerned, most human beings speak using oral language in order to exchange information and interact with other people, but the use of oral language entails the knowledge of certain particular elements, norms, routines, formulae and strategies that are put into work when we are in conversations. On the other hand, writing and reading require formal instruction, and children face a series of difficulties when learning these skills, because they have to comfort oral to written discourse, adapting rules, learning spelling, dividing speech chains into chunks called words, etc. However, learning to write and read is probably the most fundamental step in education, because is the basis for future instruction and access to many fields of knowledge. In this unit, we are going to review the main characteristics of oral and written language, and then we will analyse the factors that define a communicative situation, namely the sender and the receiver of the message, the functionality and the context.
Among all the communication codes which are used by human beings (music, kinesics, sign language), written and oral language is the most efficient for the transmission and reception of information, thoughts, feelings and opinions. In addition, these linguistic codes are exclusively human and make us distinct from animals. But written and oral language are different processes: whereas we learn to write through a formal instruction, speaking and listening come naturally along different stages of the child´s evolution. Therefore we can say that oral language comes first in our history as individuals. Therefore, speech and writing are not alternative processes, but rather we must consider them counterparts: all oral language should have a good representative system in a written form. From a psychological point of view, oral communication is a two-way process in which both speaker (encoder) and hearer (decoder) must be present in the same situational context at a particular time and place (unless we talk about special cases of oral communication such as phone conversations). The functions of oral communication are, as we said before, to communicate or exchange our ideas or to interact with other people. Unlike written communication, in oral interaction we can monitor the reactions of the hearer through the feedback so that we can our speech in the course of the communication, as well as use different linguistic and non-linguistic features (gesturing, intonation...) to make our messages clearer. However, as it takes place in a particular place and time, the interlocutors have to make their contributions at a high speed, without much time to think, unlike writing. Along history, the study of spoken language has not much tradition, unlike written language, due to several reasons: - it was considered a secondary type of language as it was not reserved
only to cultivate people. Prepared speech The formal setting is organised as writing (syntax,
lexis & discourse organisation) It is memorised or written down
before (lectures, speech, oral poetry) But because of its pervasive and everyday nature, its scientific study has proved particularly complex. It has been difficult to obtain acoustically clear, natural samples of spontaneous conversation, especially of its more informal varieties. When samples have been obtained, the variety of topics, participants, and social situations which characterise conversation have made it difficult to determine which aspects of the behaviour are systematic and rule-governed. 2.1. ELEMENTS AND NORMS THAT RULE ORAL DISCOURSE Linguistic elements STRESS When we talk we have to bare in mind there is a regular distribution of accents along words and sentences. However, if we want to give special emphasis to a particular word or phrase, we change that regular pattern of stress and accent in order to make more prominent what we want. RHYTHM It is the relationship we make between accents (chunks of words) and silences. Rhythm can range from very monotonous one (in quick or prepared speech) to rhythm with contrasts in order to give expressiveness and sense to our speech. Pauses are also important, because sometimes are made to divide grammatical units and other times are unpredictable and caused by hesitations. INTONATION is the falling and rising of voice during speech. Any departure from what it is considered "normal" intonation shows special effects and expresses emotions and attitudes. Normally, falling tones show conclusion and certainty, whereas rising tones may show inconclusion or doubt (I´ll do it / I´ll do it... )
We cannot consider oral verbal communication without remembering that the whole body takes part. In fact, many times, a person can express sympathy, hostility or incredulity by means of body and facial gestures. This "body language" is normally culturally related & is learnt the same way as verbal behaviour is learnt, although it allows for spontaneity and creativity: we use head, face, hands, arms, shoulders, fingers...
Speed of speech is relatively rapid; there are many assimilations & elisions of letters; compressions of auxiliary sequences (gonna); it can be difficult to identify sentence boundaries in long loose passages; informal discourse markers are common ( you know, I mean); great creativity in the vocabulary choice, ranging from unexpected coinage (Be unsad) to use of vague words (thingummy).
When we use language, we do not only utter grammatically correct sentences, but we know where, when and to whom we are addressing our utterances. This is the reason why a speaker needs to know not only the linguistic and grammatical rules of a language (Chomsky´s linguistic competence) or rules of usage, but also how to put into effect these rules in order to achieve effective communication, so that we also need to be familiar with rules of use. Rules of usage In order to produce and understand messages in a particular language we need to be familiar with: PHONOLOGY We need to know the organisation, characteristics and
patterns of sounds to communicate. Rules of use To be communicatively efficient, we need to show our linguistic competence in real speech through: APPROPRIATENESS or knowledge of what type of language suits best
in a given situation, taking into account the context with its participants
and their social relationships, the setting, the topic, the purpose..
Man´s ability to be creative with language is something obvious, but there are times when we choose how, when and why not to be creative, to repeat what has been said or heard many times, often in exactly the same form. Linguistic routines are fixed utterances which must be considered as single units to understand their meaning, and they are of a learned character (Hi! familiar or empty How do you do?), the process through which we acquire ritual competence being perhaps the most important socialisation we make of language. Understanding routines & formulae require shared cultural knowledge because they are generally metaphorical in nature and must be interpreted at a non-literal level. People are often quite opposed to routines, formulae and rituals because they are meaningless and depersonalise our ideas, because literal semantic value is largely irrelevant. Some typical routines and habitual formulae are used in funeral condolences, religious ceremonies, weddings, graduation ceremonies... 2.4. STRATEGIES SPECIFIC OF ORAL COMMUNICATION Particular attention has been paid to the markers of conversational turns: how people know their turn to speak. In formal dialogue, there are often explicit markers, showing that a speaker is about to talk; in debate, the person in the chair more or less controls speakers´ turns. In conversation, however, the cues are more subtle, involving variations in the melody, rhythm, and speed of speech, and in patterns of eye movement. When people talk in a group, they look at and away from their listeners in about equal proportions, but when approaching the end of what they have to say, they look at the listeners more steadily, and in particular maintain closer eye contact with those they expect to continue the conversation. A listener who wishes to be the next speaker may indicate a desire to do so by showing an increase in bodily tension, such as by leaning forward or audibly drawing in breath. In addition, there are many explicit indications, verbal and non-verbal, that a speaker is coming to an end (Last but not least...), wishes to pass the conversational ball (What do you think?, staring to someone), wishes to join in (Could I just say that...), leave (Well, that is all...), change the topic (Speaking of Mary...), or check on listeners´ attention or attitude (Are you with me?). The subject-matter is an important variable, with some topics being "safe" in certain social groups (in Britain, the weather, pets, children, and the locality), others more or less "unsafe" (religious and political beliefs, questions of personal income such as How much do you earn¿). There are usually some arbitrary divisions: for example, in Britain, it is polite to comment o the taste and presentation of a meal, but usually impolite to enquire after how much it cost. In Grice´s view, we cooperate in a conversation in order to produce a rational and efficient exchange of information, so that to reach a good final result in a communicative process, we apply 4 cooperative principles or maxims: - Maxim of quality: Our contributions have to be sincere, believing
what we say & avoiding things we lack evidence of
Written communication is a type of communication, and as such, its main purpose is to express ideas and experiences or exchange meanings between individuals with a particular system of codes, which is different to that used in oral communication. In written communication, the encoder of the message is the writer and the decoder and interpreter of the message is the reader, and many times, this interpretation does not coincide with the writer´s intended meaning. When we write, we use graphic symbols, which relate to the sounds we make when we speak. But writing is much more than the production of graphic symbols, just as speech is more than the production of sounds: these symbols have to be arranged, according to certain conventions, to form words, and words to form sentences. These sentences then have to be ordered and linked together in certain ways, forming a coherent whole called text. Since classical times, there have been two contradictory approaches to speech and writing: firstly, the view that writing is the primary and speech the secondary medium, because writing is more culturally significant and lastingly valuable than speech; and secondly, the view that speech is primary and writing secondary because speech is prior to writing both historically and in terms of a child´s acquisition of language. But leaving aside this dichotomy, the first thing we must notice is that speech and writing are not alternative processes: speech comes first, but writing demands more skill and practice, and they have different formal patterns. Most important of all, however, is that written and spoken language are counterparts: a writing system should be capable of representing all the possible wordings of a person´s thoughts. This implies that both systems could be regarded as the two sides of the same coin. From a psychological point of view, writing is a solitary activity, the interlocutor is not present, so we are required to write on our own, without the interaction or the help of the feedback usually provided in oral communication. That is why we have to compensate for the absence of some linguistic features which help to keep communication going on in speech, such as prosody and paralinguisic devices such as gesturing, intonation, etc. Our texts are interpreted by the reader alone, and we cannot monitor his or her reactions, unlike the speaker: we have to sustain the whole process of communication and to stay in contact with our reader through words alone, and this is why we must be very clear and explicit about our intentions when we write. However, not all the acvantages are on the side of the oral communication: in writing, we normally have time to think about what we are trying to express, so that we can revise it and re-write it, if need be, and the reader, to understand a text, can also read and re-read it as many times as wanted.
There are some features characteristic of written language, but this should not be taken to imply that there´s a well-delimited dividing line between writing and speech. However, the extend to which each of them makes use of different resources is directly related to the nature of the two channels: speech is the language of immediate communication, and writing is a type of communication with a distance in between. This is the reason why written texts present the following formal elements: Linguistic features of written language A good writing system must be fixed, flexible, and adaptable at a time, so that: - it must provide a codified expression for the elements expressed
by oral language: each idea = a written form - markers and rhetorical organisers for clauses relationships and
clarity (written texts are more permanent) - more accuracy in the use of vocabulary, avoiding redundancy and
ambiguity (due to its permanent nature) In any case, what is most characteristic of written communication is that we see it (the organisation, length...).
In writing, communication also takes place following system and ritual
constraints: this is the reason why when we look at a text we can
distinguish and obtain information regarding different types of organisation,
different purposes and different lengths. Postcards Pieces of writing normally directed to friends or family when travelling ,and sometimes used for congratulations and greetings. We just write on one side and the language used is colloquial. Letters They can be formal (to enterprises or someone we are not
closed to) and informal (to friends or family) There are some routines
to write letters: apart from the writer´s address on the top
right-hand corner, the date, the first line (dear + name/sir/madam/Mr/Mrs...),
the closing (Yours...) and the signature, present in both types of
letters, each type of letter follows this structural organisation
into paragraphs: Filling-in forms Consist of answering what you are asked, as briefly as possible, so no writing style is needed to do so. Curriculum vitae Consists of a clear summary to give the academic knowledge and experience someone has on a certain matter, so it includes personal details, current occupation, academic qualification and professional experience. Summaries Brief résumés of articles, booklets and books that due to their special form of composition and writing they allow the reader to gather the main information about the original work without reading it. Reports They are used to present clearly and with details the summary of present and past facts or activities, and sometimes of predictable future facts from checked data, sometimes containing the interpretation of the writer but normally with the intention of stating the reality of an enterprise or institution without deformative personal visions, and can be expositive, interpretative & demonstrative Narrative texts The most universal of all the types of written texts,
refer back to the story-telling traditions of most cultures. In fact
there seem to be some basic universal structure that governs this
type of texts: Descriptive texts They are concerned with the location and characterisation
of people and things in the space, as well as providing background
information which sets the stage for narration. This type of texts
is very popular in L2 teaching, and all types have the same pre-established
organisation. Within descriptive texts we might find: Expository texts They identify and characterise phenomena, including
text forms such as definitions, explanations, instructions, guidelines,
summaries, etc...They may be subjective (an essay) and objective (definitions,
instructions), or even advice giving. They may be analytical, starting
from a concept and then characterising its parts, and ending with
a conclusion. Argumentative texts They are those whose purpose is to support or
weaken another statement whose validity is questionable. There are sometimes when we choose how, when and why not to be creative with language to repeat what is normally used in a given situation: we use linguistic routines and formulae. These are defined as fixed utterances or sequences of utterances which must be considered as single units, because their meaning cannot be derived of them unless considered as a whole. In written texts we find different types of routines and formulaic expressions, which vary depending on the type of text, as we have been previously seeing. Understanding them usually requires sharing cultural knowledge, because they are genarally metaphorical in nature and must be interpreted at a non-linguistic level (for instance, Dear in a letter does not always carry affective meaning). All those phrases and sentences that, to some extend, have a prescriptive character, can be considered as routines and formulaic expressions: to consider all the different existing routines would take too long, but some examples are, in letters & postcards (Yours sincerely) in C.V´s, the organisation of info in different blocks, in narration (Once upon a time) in descriptions (on the left, high above),etc... All in all, we can say that they are sometimes very useful but often meaningless & depersonalise our expressions & ideas.
Definition Generally speaking, communication is the exchange of meanings between individuals through a common system of symbols, and this has been the concern of scholars since the Greeks. Communication refers to the transmission of information (a message) between a source and a receiver, using a signalling system. At the turn of the century, the English literary critic Ivor Armstrong Richards offered one of the first definitions, saying that communication takes place when one mind so acts upon its environment that another mind is influenced, and in that other mind an experience occurs which is like the experience in the first mind, and is caused in part by that experience. The study of human communication in all its modes is known as semiotics. There are several types of communication, and although in principle any of the five senses can be used as a medium of communication, in practice only three (tactile, visual and aural) are implemented in both active-expressive and passive-receptive ways. Tactile communication involves touch (e.g. shaking hands, grasping the arm) and the manipulation of physical distance and body orientation in order to communicate indifference or disagreement, and is studied by proxemics. Visual communication involves the use of facial expressions (smiling, winking..., which communicate a wide range of emotions) and gestures and body postures of varying levels of formality (kneeling, bowing...). Visual non-verbal communication is studied by kinesics. Often, visual and tactile effects interact closely with verbal communication, sometimes even conveying particular nuances of meaning not easy to communicate in speech (such as the drawing of inverted commas in the air to signal a special meaning), and most of the times culturally related. The chief branch of communication studies involves the oral-aural mode, in the form of speech, and its systematic visual reflex in the form of writing. These are the verbal aspects of communication, distinguished from the non-verbal (kinesics and proxemics) aspects, often popularly referred to as body language. The term language, as we understand it, is usually restricted to speech and writing, because these mediums of transmission display a highly sophisticated internal structure and creativity. Non-verbal communication, by contrast, involves relatively little creativity. In language, it is commonplace to find new words being created, and sentences varying in practically infinite complexity. In this respect, languages differ markedly from the very limited set of facial expressions, gestures, and body movements. According to Harmer, the characteristics apply to every communicative situation is that a speaker/writer wants to communicate, has a communicative purpose, and selects language, and a listener/reader wants to listen to something, is interested in a communicative purpose, and process a variety of language. Models In order to study the process of communication several models
have been offered; fragmentation and problems of interdisciplinary
outlook have generated a wide range of discussion concerning the ways
in which communication occurs. Most communication theorists admit
that their main task is to answer the question Who says what to whom
with what effect? The most important models are: In theory, communication is said to have taken place if the information received is the same as that sent. In practice, we have to allow for all kinds of interfering factors, such as entropy (noise distorsion) which can be counteracted by negative entropy (receiver´s ability to clear blurred messages), by redundancy (used by the encoder), or by feedback (the sender calculates and weights the effects on the receiver and acts accordingly); and then we have the context, which covers the references to the linguistic aspects of the message or endophora (anaphora and cataphora) and the external aspects of situation or exophora (such as the field, or total event and purpose of the communication, the mode, or function of the text in the event, including channel and genre, and the tenor, which refers to the participants and their relationships).
The most usual answer to the question "why do we use language?" is "to communicate our ideas". But it would be wrong to think that communicating our ideas is the only purpose for which we use language. Several other functions may be identified where the communication of ideas is marginal or irrelevant. We hardly find verbal messages that would fulfil only one function , although the verbal structure of a message depends primarily on the predominant function; Following Jakobson, we agree that language must be investigated in all the variety of its functions, but an outline of these functions demands a concise survey of the constitutive factors in any act of verbal communication: the ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE that to be operative requires a CONTEXT referred to and to be grasped by the addressee (either verbal and situational, a CODE, fully or partially common to the addresser and addressee, and a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connection enabling them to enter and stay in communication If the main purpose of our use of language is to communicate our ideas, concentrating on the context to which these ideas refer to, then we are dealing with the referential or ideational function. If there is a direct expression of the addresser´s attitude toward what is being communicated, tending to produce an impression of a certain emotion, that is the emotive or expressive function (also very common), which differs from the referential one in the sound pattern, and it flavours to some extend all our utterances. If we orientate our message towards the addressee because we want a certain reaction, we are dealing with the conative function, syntactically and often phonetically deviate from other functions (vocatives and imperatives). We talk about the phatic function when the language we use is for the purpose of establishing or maintaining social relationships, to check if the channel or contact works, to attract or confirm the attention of the interlocutor or to discontinue communication, rather than to communicate ideas, and is normally displayed by ritualised formulas (Well..., How do you do?). If we use the language to talk about the language, such as when checking if addressee is using the same code as the addresser (Do you follow me? Do you know what I mean?), we talk of the metalingual function. If, on the contrary, the focus is on the phonetic properties of the message, althogh not being the sole function of the message, we say that we are using the poetic function of language. To end up, we will say that Halliday grouped all the functions into three interrelated metafunctions: ideational, to express ideas or experiences, the interpersonal to indicate, establish or maintain social relationships, and the textual, to create written or spoken texts that fit in the particular situation in which they are used.
However, if communication were simply a matter of applying the adequate schema, we wouldn´t have to worry about the addressee´s response to the communication process. Therefore, we need procedures to integrate these abstract schemata into the concrete process of discourse itself. All communication depends on the alignment and adjustment of each interlocutor´s schemata, and the procedures we use are the interactive negotiating activities that interpret the directions provided and enable us to alter our expectations in the light of new evidence as the discourse proceeds, and this procedural ability which traduces the schematic knowledge into communicative behaviour is called capacity (inference, practical reasoning, negotiation of meaning, problem solving...). This capacity apply to two different dimensions: one referred to the kind of schema that is being realised, and the other to the kind of communicative situation that has to be negotiated, that is, to the way in which the relationship between the schemata of the interlocutors is to be managed. We find that there are occasions in which we use procedures to clear up and make more explicit and evident the frame of reference, or use rhetorical routines to specify more accurately our illocutionary acts (the intended effects of our utterances) or that felicity conditions are not satisfactory so that we must use those procedures. Other procedures, this time on the part of the addressee, are interpretative (as in A-"I have two tickets for the theatre" B- "I´ve got an exam tomorrow"). In some occasions, however, negotiation is too long, too difficult or even fails (as in interethnic interaction) because the schemata are very different, so that interlocutors may use other signalling system (e.g. pictorial), or use (re)-formulation procedures (So what you say is... Now let´s put it straight..) 7. CONCLUSION Communication is , therefore, the main purpose of a language, and the use and function that fulfils depends greatly on the characteristics of the information or the form of the message. In any case, for a communication process to be complete, it is necessary that both addresser and addressee negotiate the meaning of what is being transmitted, overcoming any possible obstacles difficulting that process.
Halliday, M. A. K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar Chapter 9 1985 Tannen, D. Conversational Style Chapter 8 1984 MacArthur, T. The Oxford Companion to the English Language OUP Oxford 1992 Hedge, T. Writing. OUP. Oxford. 1993 UNIT 2: COMMUNICATION IN THE LANGUAGE LESSON. LINGUISTIC AND NON-LINGUISTIC COMMUNICATION 1. COMMUNICATION 2. COMMUNICATION IN THE CLASSROOM 3. COMMUNICATIVE LEARNING AND TEACHING ACTIVITIES 4. NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION 5. EXTRALINGUISTIC STRATEGIES Procedure: "COMMUNICATION IN THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM: VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION. EXTRALINGUISTIC STRATEGIES: NON VERBAL REACTIONS TO MESSAGES IN DIFERENT CONTEXTS".- INTRODUCTION.-
Chomsky was one of the first language investigators to try to explain why a child learns language; he says that the enfant begins to produce language by a process of deduction using the input received and with natural resources construct an internal grammar. But later, linguists such as Hymes, noted that a child doesn´t know just a set of rules. He/she learns how and when to use them, and to whom.He says that when a native person speaks, he or she takes into account factors such as: 1. Systemic potential. Whether something (word, structure...) works
grammatically or not if it fits into the grammatical system. Halliday considers that language is, indeed, learned in a functional context of use. To summarize all the above, a communicative context governs language use, and language learning implies an acquisition of these rules of use. Grammar is not enough, as we can be grammatically correct and socioculturally incorrect or with ill-designed strategies. And so communication breaks down. Canale and Swain developed the idea of communicative competence, a design taken on by the M.E.C. as the basis for objectives in the curricular design and as a guide for teaching methodology. This communicative competence consists of 5 subcompetences: grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, strategic and sociocultural. - GRAMMATICAL or the ability to use the rules of the language system.
(example: the position of the adjective in English).' systemic potential. This communicative competence and its subcompetences seeks to help children to provide opportunities for gaining real language in real use. Communication is the activity or process of giving information to other people or to other living things, usign signals such as speech, body movements or radio signals. Communication is then the basis of a foreign language class from the basic curricular design and aims to lesson plans and methodology. In the 20 th Century worl of international travel, commerce, culture, technology and news/information, communication needs to be optimun and our pupils will want to, or need to have the four skills in language on many occasions for communicative purposes. We shall now look at what this means in terms of verbal and non verbal communication. This is part of their preparation for life in general, and for their development as people. VERBAL COMMUNICATION: This consists of two skills, namely listening and speaking. LISTENING precedes speaking. It consists of the decoding of sound according to acquired rules.It can be defined as the process of discriminating the sounds of the English language through a process of hearing and understanding them. Listening is related to PHONOLOGY' This science studies the phonemes, the relationship between units of sounds and differences in meaning. We need to remember that there are differences between the Spanish sounds and the English sounds. We must allow the children to be clear on these differences, using accent, rhythm and entonation. All material used in teaching sounds and meaning should be based
on its usefulness in real communicative interaction. SPEAKING is the encoding of the acquired sounds, deduced by listening, into signals.The end of this is to communicate something to someone and is related to PHONETICS ' The study of sounds: how they are produced and how they are received. Pupils need a lot of practise in comprehension (listening) in order to hold a conversation in English. Both skills (listening and speaking) are linked in the learning process, since the people need to absorb the elements of a message if they are going to contribute to a conversation. This encoding and decoding is not only on a grammatical level, as Chomsky inferred at first, but as Guiraud affirms a process which takes logic from phonology, semantics, etc, but also subjective experience and social rules. So, we will begin talking about oral-comprehension techniques. If we want to develop this ability in our children we shall need to observe the processes used by the learner in listening comprehension. At first, the pupil hears a series of noises and he/she can´t tell what the difference is between them. After some time, he/she begins to note that the sounds are in some sort of order, with regularity in the pauses and voice pattern. As he/she learns some simple expresions, he or she begins to see that there are recurring sounds, and he/she associates them with meaning. So, he or she is starting to recognise familiar elements, but doesn´t see all the relationship. He/she does not really understand. As he or she becomes more familiar with the language, he/she recognizes the different elements, but doesn´t remember what he/she recognized. This is because he/she is recognizing single elements and not the whole message. The mind is eliminating information which it can´t take at first; only a certain amount can be taken into short-term memory. The receptive system in the brain then takes these selected elements into long-term storage. But only a small part of the total message will be remembered, this is why pupils seem to be able to understand very little at first. They have to concentrate very well to be able to take in not only the sounds, but their meaning, the brain is not able to do this too fast, and we must remember this. That´s why we help our pupils by giving them short sequences of sounds so that they can get the meaning easily and store it automatically. So, REPETITION is essential for acquiring this process The LOGSE, in its 9 objectives of the curricular design, reflects the importance of proficiency in these skills. No child can ever really communicate in English without some ability to listen and speak. In traditional "Grammar Translation" these skills were often neglected. The reason for this neglect was that some people consider speaking and listening to be primitive skills. They saw that children acquired these abilities naturally and so it was felt that verbal communication was less sofisticated than the written form of the language. So, more importance was given to a study of the written language and for many years verbal communication was nor considered to be worthy of study. This is reflected in the approaches to teaching of languages wich followed a classical methodology imitating latin and greek approaches which by their very nature center on reading and writing. In this century however, and thanks to the contributions on social anthropologists and linguistics we have come to understand that the spoken form of a language is a valuable communication tool full of sophisticated rules of use and which is a vehicle for social interaction. We can think of Vigotsky studies on ethnic groups where he demonstrates how complex the verbal communication is within societies which some people consider to be primitive. So, speaking and listening are complex skills and even though they are acquired in an apparently natural way there is a process involved which is intricate. As an example of this we can look at some of the features which are unique to verbal communication. Goffman highlited some of these. We could mention that in verbal communication there are signals which the adresser and adressee recognize as open-close signals such as the word "well" or a cough to open and there are other non-verbal signalssuch as hand movemet to open or close a conversation. We could also think of the fact that in verbal communication there is an inmediate and constant response from the adressee which we don´t have in written communication. This leads to the possibility of the speaker using strategies to ensure the message is being received. These strategies include back signals such as the hearer nodding his/her head or expressions such as "really" or "umhm". These demonstrate to the hearer that the message is being received. If he or she feels that the adressee is having difficulty in receiving the message because he/she notes a lack of interests,comprehension, etc, he/she may choose to use strategies such as raising the voice, repetition or gestures to improve attention or understanding. We can not do this in written communication because the adressee is not usually present and we can´t judge the receiver´s response and then react. Further to this in verbal communication speakers and listeners pay attention to the norms of what is acceptable in a given context as regards quantity, for example.We could imagine that a British conversation consists of shorter exchanges than in an anaerobic context.There are also, of course, complex rules of what is socially and culturally acceptable in specific contexts depending on the relative age, social class and regional origin and so on of speaker and hearer. For example, the speaker is aware of taboo words or topics and of conventions which are appropiate in a given situation.It would be inappropiate, for example, to use some swearwords in polite company. In written communication the writer does not always know who will read the message and cannot always select suitable exppressions, topics and vocabulary. Taking the above into account we can affirm that when a child begins to listen with understanding and to speak with intelligibility he/she is acquiring very useful social skills for everyday use. These skills are not primitive instruments but elaborate competences which society demands and values. Within verbal communication we recognize that there are non verbal elements. We will now look at these aspects of spoken communication. NON VERBAL COMMUNICATION. In all verbal communication we are aware that the message is sent through a code that is made up of sounds travelling trough the air, having been emitted trough the articulation of the speaker´s speech organs. But this message is communicated by non verbal signals too real componets of normal communication. The following are typical contextual non verbal elements. Knapp clasifies the non verbal aspects as follows: 1. Body movements: includes gestures, movements of the body, limbs,
hands, head, feet, facial expressions (smiling), eye behaviour such
as blinking, direction of sight and also posture. The purpose of non verbal communication is to be part of the functional
aspect The cultural specificness of these elements should highlited (Spanish and English gestures are different). Meaningful language includes a knowledge of these aspects for true communication. The importance of drama, mime, action songs, role-plays, simulation of real life situations to include as many non-verbal elements as possible cn not be underestimated. EXTRALINGUISTIC STRATEGIES: NON VERBAL REACTIONS TO MESSAGES IN DIFFERENT CONTEXTS.- In this part of the topic we will see how the use of extralinguistic elements is linked not only to achieving grammatical and sociocultural competence but to strategic competence. This is the ability to plan and adapt communication, so that the desired end is achieved. In different contexts different strategies are required. We should make some points here: 1) Strategies develop and are sought when a need is seen. Children
look for extralinguistic help when they are interested in, or enthusiastic
about, or are seeing the advantage in communicating. One method which focuses on the aid of non-verbal communication is
Total Though we may not wish to use a TPR methodology with all its implications, the contributions it makes to the teaching-learning process as part of our methodological plan in an eclectic approach can be valuable. As teachers we will be aware that elements such as furniture, space, decorations and so on can help or hinder communication. There will be occassions when we will want to re-arange desks, chairs, decorations, posters or other objects, so that they can help in a communicative process. For example, if we are perfoming a play we can set up various objects as scenary so that the children fell contextualized. For instance, in a play about Goldilock and the three bears we could put a table in the centre of the classroom with three different-size chairs beside it.This extralinguistic elements help children, who can use them as aids in communication. To give an example of a Total Physical Response methodology which uses extralinguistic strategies we can consider for instance the game of "Simon says" where, in the context of a game, children learn to understand simple imperatives along with associated parts of the body. They obey the orders of the teacher only when he or she speaks on behalf of Simon. To help the children the teacher performs the action, which the children initate. Eventually they do not need this extralinguistic back-up. From the very first days of learning a foreign language, children become accostumed to deducing meaning from the context, which is full of extralinguistic clues. When we say: - " close the door, please" pointing to the open door and miming a closing movement. This is a very simple but effective T.P.R. activity. Not only do children learn to understand spoken messages in this way. They begin to try to communicate using non-verbal and stralinguistic strategies at their disposal, from gestures to mime and with the use of other artifacts. CONCLUSION.- In this topic we have attempted to demonstrate the nature of verbal communication. The spoken language in each productive and receptive forms depends not only on the understanding of sounds or the creation of these sounds. The context of this communication includes many elements which are aids in the process and we should be aware of how we can maximized verbal and non-verbal items to encouraged children to infer meaning and to use all sorts of extralinguistic strategies to improve communication. By means of meaningful, motivating activities which use aspects
such as body-movement, gestures, artifacts, the five senses, we can
motivate our young learners of English to believe that communicating
in the English language is within their reach. TOPIC 3
0. INTRODUCTION In the society where we live, the possibilities of cultural interchanges
studying abroad, watching TV, so on, determines that, communication,
at least one foreign language is a necessity.
Within this communicative competence, we as teachers have to develop
the four main skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing.
In the RD 1344/ 91 of 6 of September about teaching Requirements
in the territory managed by the old Ministry of Education and Culture,
we can read that" the development of the basic linguistic skills
it has to be seen as a process of integration. In the real life, communicative
acts use different skills, so, it's not logic, to treat them in an
aisle form." 1. Listening or learning to listen in order to hear and understand properly. -First of all, there are several general principles in teaching /
learning listening comprehension, and these principles are: - And, finally, in this point, I will talk about PLANNING CONSIDERATIONS.
First of all, these are a number of steps that we have to bear in
mind when planning the listening work for our class: 2. Speaking, or learning to speak in order to be understood -First, I will say several GENERAL PRINCIPLES in SPEAKING SKILL: We have to bear in mind that once we have chosen a context for the
presentation, we must decide on a procedure, which includes points
in this order: 3. Learning to read and write " Learning to read a foreign language is obviously not a primary
aim of early learning of English. Nevertheless, the two skills of
reading and writing are learning tools, which it would be wrong to
ignore, as they occupy a position of fundamental importance in the
objectives of primary school education and in the activities of the
pupils. " We can also talk about READING ACTIVITIES, and are commonly
divided into THREE TYPES: PRE- READING, WHILE READING and POST- READING
ACTIVITIES. " Finally to say that reading in English in the early stages
will usually remain at the word level, where children play simple
games as dominoes, snap or bingo. And about the last skill, writing, we can say that in the early stages of learning English, the pupils will generally write very little. It is a good idea to use copying in a way, which encourages pupils to think, this means using crosswords, and matching, sequencing or classifying activities. We also have in this skill several stages: Now, I will talk about the other main point. 2. THE COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE IN ENGLISH Chomsky defined language as a set of sentences each finite in length
and constructed out of a finite set of elements + These four categories have been adapted for teaching purposes Finally and 3. CONCLUSION of this topic, to say that the integrated
education of the four main skills, beside to permit us the use of
material for practising different linguistics activities, it answer
to natural phenomenon in our everyday life: sometimes we talk (orally
way) not only what we see, listen, but we also talk about something
that we have just read, or, we write about something that we have
heard or read.
1. FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION. 2. TEACHING LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 3. CONTENTS THEME 4 THE SECOND LANGUAGE AS A MEANS OF COMMUNICATION AMONG PEOPLE AND
NATIONS. GENERATING AN INTEREST IN LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY THROUGH ANOTHER
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE PART ONE: TABLE OF CONTENTS 3. BIBLIOGRAPHY PART TWO: PRACTICAL DEVELOPMENT PART ONE: TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION Thus, in addition to contributing "to the process of the development of the child's intellectual, social, emotional, and physical skills," and fostering "improved learning skills", teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) should also include aspects related to intercultural appreciation and communication. 2. CONTENTS The Modern Languages Programme of the Council for Cultural Co-Operation of the Council of Europe has specifically defined the political objective which guides the programme in the following manner: "to facilitate communication and interaction among Europeans of different mother tongues in the service of European mobility, mutual understanding and cooperation, and in order to overcome prejudice and discrimination (Trim 1981: I)." The following members of the CDCC Project Group 4, D. Coste, C. Edelhoff, R. Bergenthoft, J. L M. Trim, each other has something to say in this respect. Daniel Coste writes, "As far as we are concerned, 'learning to communicate' does not involve learning something totally new: all language learners are communicators already; what foreign language learning involves is learning to communicate differently and to communicate with a different set of people." Coste holds that different ways of communicating have to be learned (and not just linguistic ones). Furthermore, it is his belief that in order to learn to communicate with a different set of people, one must also learn about them. Hence, communication is inseparable from a cultural context. The learning process itself becomes one of learning to communicate: "For adults, adolescents and children alike, learning is a process which, however slightly, involves and changes the whole individual as a person and social agent; when it comes to learning a different language to communicate differently with a different set of people, it is a fair assumption that the changes and the involvement will be all marked (34)." 2.2. Language and different cultures Rume Bergentoft reminds us, "In the final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, signed in Helsinki in 1975 by the heads of state of the participating nations, the latter expressed their conviction regarding the role now played by a knowledge of languages in connection among other things with closer international cooperation. It was decided that a wider knowledge of languages was needed to promote world peace and cooperation (33). Finally, J. L. Trim warns of the "classical paradigm" of language teaching and "elitism" in traditional language teaching at school. "The 'classical paradigm' continued to dominate grammar schools until recently, and is till strong in many member countries..." The author explains that the 'classical paradigm' tends to extend certain values and attitudes, which reflect the classics to the languages and cultures of modern Europe. He points out that from this perspective, the study of a foreign language is but an intellectual discipline, based on the translation of passages from the classics which have little bearing on the real world in which learners actually live. Trim further declares, "This 'classical paradigm' is avowedly elitist." He feels that it creates barriers to communication which tend to reinforce and perpetuate divisions in society. However, Trim concludes that, though the classical paradigm continues to be powerful, contemporary creative writing no longer employs the criteria of clarity and refined taste "to which the classical paradigm attaches the greatest importance (p. XX-XXI)." Other authors have taken similar positions. Earl W. Stevick refers to a language class as being "one area in which a number of private universes intersect one another (1980: 7)." He feels that each learner, though a total individual, is in fact affected by what the others do. The teacher should be aware -and sympathize with the fact- that there are times when a learner will resist learning something which violates certain peer norms. For example, learners may at first reject the language simply because of its foreignness. Teachers should therefore be aware that the fear of losing support from those closest to the learner (peers, parents, etc.) may be an inhibiting factor. Stevick refers to a "world of meaningful action", which, he says, tends to draw peers, family members, and life-goals during the language learning process. He concludes, "Foreignness, shallowness, irrelevance, and the subordinate position of the student -all may be obstacles to a learner's feeling of 'primacy in a world of meaningful action' (10)." 2.3. Language as an instrument of holistic learning Gertrude Moskowitz defends a system of "Humanistic Education", which she describes as "combining the subject matter to be learned with the feelings, emotions, experiences, and lives of the learners (1978: 11)." She is concerned with educating the whole person, both intellectually and emotionally. In the author's opinion, second language learning not only stimulates better human understanding, but it also leads to greater independence and self-steem. By learning another language, learners care more both for themselves and others. Caleb Gattegno believed in "the spirit of language." He felt hat by learning another language one absorbs the culture and history of the language users. Human beings incorporate into their languages conscious or unconscious collective aims, passions, and vision, which are taken on by the learner. He suggested that languages are reflections of the various modes of thought of a people: "The spirit of each language seems to act as a container for the melody and the structure of the language and most users are unconscious of it (1978: 19)". 2.4. The importance of having materials in the resource room to achieve
a good intercultural atmosphere 2.5. 'Immersion approach' to second language learning On a similar note, Stern asserts that two of the most interesting research endeavours in the seventies were the Council of Europe Modern Languages Project and the Canadian French immersion experiments, of which he was a participant. The Council of Europe Project, which was initiated in 1971, involves the co-operation of school-ars in several countries. The French immersion research programme in Canada, which began in 1965, "illustrates the effectiveness of an 'immersion' approach to second language learning (1984: 66)". In both studies, communication or communicative competence was one of the prime objectives. Stern further points out that the term "communicative competence", is a term which is used a great deal. Hymes was the first to employ the term, in contrast to Chomsky's "linguistic competence". "Communicative competence" reflects the social view of language. The concept of communicative competence is integral with communicative language teaching. It has become a central focus for EFL teaching, which involves the study and practice of functional, structural, lexical and sociocultural aspects. The learning experience itself should be personal and engage in a direct use of the language and contact with the target language community (Stern 1984: 26). 2.6. How to experience the culture of the English-speaking world
in the classroom 3. BIBLIOGRAPHY FINOCCHIARO, M.: (1974). English as a second language: from theory to practice. Reprint ed. New York: Regents. FINOCCHIARO M. And BRUMFIT, C.: (1985). The functional-notional approach: from theory to practice. Reprint ed. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. GATTEGNO, C.: (1978). Teaching foreign languages in schools: the silent way. 2nd ed. New York: Educational Solutions. LA FORGE, P. G.: (1983). Counseling and Culture in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon Press. MOSKOWITZ, G.: (1978). Caring and sharing in the foreign language class: A sourcebook on humanistic techniques. Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House. PORCHER, L.: (1980). Reflections on language needs in the school. Strasbourg: Council for Cultural Cooperation of the Council of Europe. STERN, H. H.: (1984). Fundamental concepts of languge teaching. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. STEVICK, E.W.:(1980). Teaching languages: a way and ways. Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House. TRIM, J. L. M., project adviser: (1981). Modern languages programme 1971-1981. Strasbourg: Council for Cultural Co-Operation of the Council of Europe. VILKES, B.: (1994). Fanfare. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. 1. LEVEL 2. TIME OF SESSION 3. OBJECTIVES 4. METHODOLOGY 5. THE TEACHING UNIT: SPECIFIC CONTENTS 7. MATERIALS 8. FINAL TASK TEMA 5: GEOGRAPHIC, HISTORIC AND CULTURAL FRAMEWORK OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING CONUNTRIES. DIDACTIC APPLICATION OF THE MOST MEANINGFUL GEOGRAPHIC, HISTORIC AND CULTURAL ASPECTS. 1.- INTRODUCTION: English is spoken in all continents. English is the most widespread
language on earth. 2.- GEOGRAPHIC, HISTORIC AND CULTURAL FRAMEWORK OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES. 2.1.- EXTENT AND SIGNIFICATION OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 2.2.- ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 2.3.- GEOGRAPHIC, HISTORIC AND CULTURAL FRAMEWORK OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING
COUNTRIES.
3.- DIDACTIC APPLICATION OF THE MOST MANINGFUL GEOGRAPHIC HISTORIC AND CULTURAL ASPECTS. The teacher of a modern language must teach not only the foreign
language but also the civilization of the countries and people who
speak that language.
2. Practices of oral expression. 3. Didactic use of songs.
SECOND LANGUAJE ACQUISTION THEORY THE MONITOR HYPOTHESIS Thus, it can be easily deducted that monitor "overusers"
may have difficulty in acquiring fluency. Monitor, however, can be
a great help if used for grammar tests and writing. Younger acquirers tend to attain higher levels of proficiency in
second languages than adults in the long run due to a lower affective
filter. The unit under consideration is entitled: "INFLUENCES OF LINGUISTICS ON THE TEACHING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES. THE SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE ACQUISITION OF THE FIRST SCHOOL LANGUAGE AND THAT OF THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE"
Secondly, we will look into the language learning process and we shall try to find the differences between the acquisition of the mother tongue and the learning of a foreign language. Within this block, we will also refer to the Curriculum, and the Constructivist Model proposed by it; the difference between acquisition and learning is established and different suggestions to avoid problems in the second language learning. A conclusion summing up what has been discussed throughout the unit
will be fo- Once having begun the unit we are going to deal with the first block of our discussion; which considers the influences of Linguistics on FLT. The teaching of any subject must be supported by a series of general disciplines that are common to the teaching of any subject, such as Psychology, Sociology and so on. In LT these disciplines assist in the teaching from any perspective. Linguistics are included here, or more accurately Macrolinguistics, which includes Sociolinguistics and Microlinguistics. The findings from these disciplines used on the teaching of L, help us to make decisions to overcome the problems involved in teaching. The so called, Linguistic Science or Linguistics, that is, the study of language is a very recent science. For centuries, the interest was only centred on the research of a universal grammar. In the 19th century Compared Linguistics, appeared which established that the relationship among language can be explained in a scientific way. Nowadays, however Applied Linguistics deal with collecting data from those disciplines whose objectives are the study of language, its learning, its use, and to utilise those facts to clarify the factors related to LT. Let's move on now to consider what Applied Linguistics is for. It collects data and interprets the results that may achive its aim and uses its findings to carry out its own experimental research. Applied Linguistics has to do with all those theories that analyse how they can be useful LT and then proceed with their pedagological application. This knowledge is use to build grammars, to do comparative analysis between two or more languages, to carry out research on the illiteracy rates of the population and to study languages and their regional varieties. The most interesting field of study deals with second L learning and acquisition. Applied Linguistics uses these findings from other sciences and applies them to LL. We are going to consider some sciences on which the concept of FLT
is based. The most important theories are Structuralism and Generative
Grammar.These theories are example of how research in Applied Linguistics
can be helpful in explaining the process of mother tongue acquisition
and second LL. The application of structuralism in LT was developed after the 2nd World War. Linguistics examined and classified the structure of the first L and the second L being studied. They analysed which structures were similar to that language and which offered interference, they made drills. Structuralism is based on "behaviourist psycology stimulus
answer response", and its attitude towards teaching is based
on the premise that 2nd L acquisition is the result of habit and condidional
reflexes, we learn by imitation and repetition. Before Chomsky students were given correct grammatical examples, nowadays students can compare sentences with and without errors, and they are allowed to make mistakes because that is understood as an important step in an autonomous process of learning. This theory gives special importance to free expression and creativity. Chomsky establishes a distinction between competence (the knowledge that the person has about his mother tongue) and performance, that is the effective use of this knowledge in his normal speech. We should point out here an essential aspect of the research of applied linguistics, that is, to what extent can the process of first L acquisition be equivalent to the process of 2nd L learning. Thus it can be seen that the process is the same, 2nd Language learners draw hypothesis about the L system, apply the rules and modify them according to the feedback they receive. A 2nd L learner learns from his effort to communicate. If what the learner wants to communicate lies within the possibilities of his system, he will have no problems. The problem arises when he wants to communicate something that is not in his system. Therefore, he can choose to follow other paths, such as using gestures, or transfering the limits he knows, in other words, he will take a risk. We could conclude from the above that errors that students make reveal the state of development of his system. We must give him enough information on the success or failure of his communicative attempt. He requires input to contrast his production. The student then learns through the process of communicating; he who takes a risk will be the one who learns most. Up to this point we have shown some of the linguistic theories which help us to explain the acquisition of a mother tongue and the learning of a FL. Now let us move on to mention the importance of another science: Sociolinguistics. This science studies and states the relationship between the possession of a L and the control of reality. The social level of the family conditions the development of speech abilities and level of performance. The classroom can be a useful substitute for a poor linguistic environment. We should also mention the studies of some linguists, like Firth and Martinowsky. They spoke about the concept of situational context, that is the meaning of an utterance is a consequence of the cultural and situational context where it takes place. In the Eighties many programs in ELT were developed. All of them
were based on the consideration of a L as an instrument of communication.
The threshold level, for instance, whose author is Wilkins, established
a program model for a European adult student of foreign L in terms
of his communicative needs. It was intended to In Europe L teaching was slowly changing. Linguistics were mainly concerned with oral language as a means of communication. Learners were taught to comprehend and then to speak. The interferance of the first L had to be avoided. Conversation was the main focus of the class. The process of LT goes parallel to the learning process. In the 70s special attention waspaid to this learning process. The concept of interferance, introduced by Corder, refers to the problems of interferance caused by the mother tongue on the learning of a foreign language. Now, we shall study the contributions of other sciences to the process of foreign LT. On the one hand, we find Pedagogy whose contribution to the teaching of foreign L and to the concept of modern education is the following: that the educational principles are flexible, and should be adapted to every social change. An individualised teaching is required, as well as the formation of an integral person with special attention to his creative ability. Group work, collaboration and the participation of students in all the educational process should also be considered. On the other hand, we find he science of Psycology. Some important studies are the following: in the teaching of foreign L motivation is very important. Apart from motivation a deep knowledge of the pupil's psychological characteristics is required; we need to know the student's abilities and rhythm of learning to better adopt the structure of the subject to his structure of knowledge. So the teacher will be able to allow pupils to learn more depending on their own needs and rhythm. Summarising, we could say that the most important contribution of
Pedagogy and Pedagogy to foreign L teaching is that the teaching must
be centred on the pupils' needs and personality; creativity whilst
imagination should be developed through motivation. The starting point of the theoretical basis of the conception of 2nd L learning is found in the Curriculum: " The foreign L acquisition process can be characterised as a creative construction process during which the student, relying on a set of natural strategies, based on the input received, formulates hypotheses in order to make up the internal representation of the new L system." Knowing a L implies knowing its sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic
aspects. The sociolinguistic aspect implies the knowlwdge of the rules
related to a given sociolnguistic context; the discourse aspect organises
cohesion and coherence in different spoken and written statements;
the strategic aspect is responsible for completing the interaction
when taking into account the objective of The Contructive Model proposed by the Curriculum is based on the following aspects: 1- The student is considered the centred of the teaching process; 2- The student has a certain knowledge that adds to the new information
Another important aspect of the contructive model is that of learning through discovery. L functions as regards rules are learned by a process of discovery. The students generates hypotheses himself and check that they match the established rules. Before moving on to study some of the theories on the L learning process, let us focus on the differences between the acquisition and learning. Krashen in his book Language Acquisition Hypothesis makes a clear distinction between acquisition and learning. According to him, the acquisition is a natural process whereas learning is conscious formal process. Acquisition implies an implicit knowledge of rules in contrast with learning which implies the explicit knowledge of rules. Acquisition is the way a child acquires his mother tongue, whereas learning is the way students learn a foreign language. After having looked into the differences between acquisition and learnig, we are going to study some of the theories on the acquisition and learning of a second language. Vigotsky establishes three main stages in language acquisition. The first one is when language is only a means of external communication in a child, both in form and function. The third one is when language is interiorised and becomes verbal thought and then guides cognitive development. Today it is believed that the first statements of children are due to their individual system, independent from that of adults; language is built or rebuilt by the child who gradually makea a system of rules, an implicit grammar and a set of communication rules with which he interprets what he receives.Thus, the child produces statements correctly but these are mere repetitive routine. The interesting aspect is that the child makes incorrect statements which shows that he is trying to create a language using his own linguistic mechanism, according to certain opearating rules that he himself has generated, it is an internal implicit grammar. The second language acquisition process goes through three different phases: 1.- Cognitive elaboration: the learner centres his attention on
types of models presented to him in the 2nd L. He has an attitude
towards comprehending or remembering the different aspects of the
models presented. 3.- Autonomy phase: the child can use what he has learned spontaneously.In order for this phase to take place, a great amount of previous practice is required. Another important aspect of the constructive model is that the student has an active role in which he will have to implement certain strategies similar to those used in first L acquisition to adapt, generalise, correct rules and so on. Lastly an assumption in the previous model is that in any learning
process there is a semantic motivation. There is a natural predisposition
for producing meaning, which is motivating when learning a 2nd L. The second similarity is the subconcious mental process; the brain organises the input received to allow the mechanisms to speak. The third similarity is the variation. Not all language learners follow the same path. There are individual variations which make some students learn slower than others. Phychological personality and others also come into play here. Now, let us consider the differences. There are three important differences between the acquisition of the mother tongue and the learning of a FL. These are: -the age, According to many authors, age is a factor that determines the success
or failure in 2nd LL. Today there is absolute unanimity in the fact
that is approximality in puberty Another difference is the phenomenon of fossilitation. Many 2nd L learners never quite learn the L correctly. Thie causes may be due to the type of teaching is given, the problems of motivation or the students personal characteristics. The third difference is the transference. When we speak a 2nd L, it is almost impossible not to make mistakes influenced by our native L.
In mother tongue acquisition there is a continuos linguistic information, and a direct contact between the L and its cultural envirinment; the correction of errors appears after training and effort. On the contrary, we find that FLL involves planning with special objectives and a specific didactic method. We should finally point out some suggestions to overcome problems in the 2nd LL process. Firstly, we should not change the natural order of the interlingual process. Secondly, pupils must receive a high input. We must respect a silent period and allow children to express themselves in a spontaneous and natural way. Finally, regarding how to overcome the fossilitation phenomenon, we find different opinions by different authors. Some of then think that pupils should be push to produce, and grammar should be taught. Others state that grammar should be taught in an inductive way, without forcing pupils to use it correctly. Summarising, we can point out the following. In this unit we have
presented some of the most important contributions to FLT; especially
the principles of Linguistics, Structuralism and Generative Grammar.
After that, we have looked into the most important differences and
similarities between the acquisition of the mother tongue BIBLIOGRAPHY: 1- The Teaching of English as an International Language by Abbot,
G and Wingard, P. Collins, 1981. UNIT 6 CONTRIBUTIONS OF LINGUISTICS TO THE TEACHING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES. THE PROCESS OF LINGUISTIC LEARNING: SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE ACQUISITION OF THE FIRST LANGUAGE AT SCHOOL AND THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE. CONTRIBUTIONS OF LINGUISTICS TO THE TEACHING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES. The teaching of foreign languages has always developed along with Linguistics,although it has been in this century when the traditional conceptions of science of language has been transformed by a widening and specializing of its knowledge. On the other hand, in the current situation of Linguistics, there is an intention to overcome the contradictions of previous beliefs, in order to elaborate a new model, much more eclectic and useful for the process of language teaching and learning.
After the World War II, the Audiolingual Method appeared, partially based on the Army courses. In this method there is a relationship between Structuralism (Bloomfield) and Psychological Behaviourism (Skinner), whose stimulus-response-reinforcement theories would have a great influence on the layout of the mechanic exercises which are characteristical of the Audiolingual Method. For this method, oral production is more important than written and the order for practising the skill is: aural comprehension (listening), oral production (speaking), written comprehension (reading), and written production (writing). In Great Britain another linguistic school appeared, which worked independently from the Audiolingual. It developed a very similar method of teaching foreign languages: The Situational Language Teaching. It is based on Structuralism but much more formal in their linguistic references.It gives more importance to the situational context and to a selection of vocabulary. Nevertheless, the exercises of both methods do not prepare the students for real situations of communication. In the Sixties, a new approach appeared in Great Britain: The Communicative Language Teaching in which the situational component of the Situational Language Teaching is the frame for communicative interactions and not only for the practice of structures. In this approach, the term communicative competence was coined by American linguist D.Hymes to refer to the ability of using the linguistic system in an efficient way to communicate in society. From the decade of the 60s,other approaches have appeared which have contributed to development of Applied Linguistics. These methods are interested in the cognitive processes and in the affective and contextual conditions which must take place for the learning or acquisition of the foreign language. The first one is the Total Physical Response, based on J.Asher´s methodological criteria. One of the main principles of this new approach is that pupils remember more easily those utterances which they can relate with actions made by themselves. Thus the comprehension of meaning the orders that the teacher asks the pupils to do lead them to produce no-verbal responses such as getting up,opening the door,drawing,etc. Following the same line, the Natural Approach, based on S Krashen and T.Terrell works, propose the possibility of acquiring a second language in an academic context if the conditions which are similar to those which can be found in the process of acquiring the first language by young children are fulfilled. Language learning as a conscient process lead children to acquire some knowledge which will help them to correct their mistakes, what is called Monitor Theory. Finally, it is important to quote some approaches, such as The Silent Way, which looks for the learners´ hard concentration on the utterances; Suggestopaedia, which uses relaxation and suggestion as helpers for language learning; and the Community Language Learning, based on group therapy and which uses the target language as a means of expressing feeling.
These two sciences deal with sounds and how they can combine to
make meanings. Phonology deals with the function of those sounds in the communicative process and gives an exhaustive analysis of the rules of the sound system within the language. Phonetics is ,together with Linguistics, one of the main sciences concerned with language and arose in the 16th century as the science that studied the relationship between spelling and sound. In 1886 the International Phonetic Association (IPA) was founded. This association devised a phonetic alphabet, or set of symbols that would serve to represent the sound of any language. This alphabet is now widely used in textbooks and pronouncing dictionaries. As our present objective is the teaching of a foreign language, the most useful view for this purpose is to regard Phonetics and Linguistics as the two Linguistic Sciences. Both of them study language, but from different angle. Phonetics is interested in sounds and how they are organized and transmitted,whereas Linguistics is concerned with how language is structured grammatically and semantically.
Within Grammar we can find two sciences: Morphology and Syntax. Morphology studies the form of the words of a language, and deals with the word flexions of genre, number and case, and with the problems which may arise in this area. It also studies among others, the changes which are produced in meaning by the influence of affixes. Syntax established the rules for sentence combination and analyses the different of the words within the sentences. Grammar has two main objectives; it gives the rules necessary to generate the meaningful chains or strings which are characteristical of a language. On the other hand, it gives rules useful for the speaker to verify that a chain of meaning belongs to the language s/he speaks. The most important ideas in the field, nowadays, are given by Chomsky´s Generative Grammar, which sets up that a language is built upon a finite vocabulary corpus, this being a group of symbols which combine to make sentences. Semantics. Semantics studies the meaning and sense of words, and it applies
its researches to three important fields:
It is a modern science which considers speech an act by itself, because language is inserted in a productive context. This context is the communicative situation and knowledge shared by the speaker and the listener. The speech act is regarded as a cooperative process in which the participants´intentions must be interpreted. H.P. Grice established in his book Logic and Conversation,that, in every speech act, there is a conventional meaning given by speakers´knowledge of the language rules, and an implicative meaning, given by the speakers´intention towards their message and towards the listeners, as well as by the context. In this sense, Grice´s Cooperative Principle established that speakers cooperate in their engagement in conversation, their engagement being on four maxims: " The maxim of Quantity, which says: Make your contribution
as informative as it is required. Normally, speakers fulfill these four maxims in their speech acts. However, when one or more of them are broken up intencionally, this fact gives place to what Grice calls a conversational implicature, that is, an implication made by the speaker who intends to say something, in an indirect way, to the listener.
Nevertheless, this conclusion says nothing about what happens in the person´s brain when learning a language, nor does it explain how some people after puberty have achieved a mastering of one or several languages, even with a great degree of perfection. Moreover, the methods and techniques of foreign language teaching are exclusively based on the results of teaching experience, but never on a precise knowledge of how the individual´s internal mechanisms work, although, on the other hand, as the process of learning the mother tongue coincides with the first years of life, when the child experiments the most spectacular physical and mental development, it is natural to think that there exists a narrow relationship between these two processes: the first and the second language learning.
Although, up to now, the several researches that have been undertaken on this matter have not been able to explain appropiately how second language learning process works, they have shown that some methods and techniques are more efficient than others. In order to establish a solid scientific basis, these researches have leaned on learning processes in general, and on the process of first language acquisition. There are essential differences between the learning of a second language and the acquisition of the first language. When children acquire their native language, they are answering to their vital necessity of dominating the environment in which they are inserted. When they have this tool, their purpose to learn another language is very different. Indeed, the circumstances in which we acquire our L1 are very different from those in which we learn a L2. Three important theories can be applied both to the acquisition and the learning of languages: " SKINNER´S Behaviourism, which is based on experiments
made with animals. According to behaviourist researchers, the way
how animals and human beings learn is similar. The theory on human
speech says that every speech act is produced as a response to a stimulus.
This stimulus can have different origins, such as the environment,
the speaker needs and another speech act made by an interlocutor.
Besides, if the appropiate answer is to be produced, it is necessary
some sort of reinforcement. In our case, this reinforcement can be
the speaker´s desire to be understood or simply to communicate.
The fact that children start acquiring their mother tongue when
they are babies suggests that it would be quite a good idea to take
advantage of this ability to make them acquire some others. Indeed,
there are people in many places who are bilingual since they were
born, this ocurring in families where two or more languages are spoken
at the same time. Besides, we must take into account that, from a
phonetical and auditory point of view, children have all the biological
characteristics to be able to acquire naturally more than one language
just from their childhood. In some cases children can acquire simultaneously their mother tongue and their father tongue. However, "bilingualism" does not mean "same lingualism", that is, both languages being used with the same frequency of time. On the contrary, their use depends on the circumstances around, and normally, one language is more often used that another. On the other hand, several researches have shown that it would be of great help for children to be bilingual since the beginning, in terms of psychological development. However, this is only possible whenever the contact with their parents´languages is as more natural as possible; if not, there may exist a possible slowing down in their acquiring process. Bilingualism is essentially the result of family circumstances, or of other natural ways of contact with different languages, such as those cases in which children live long periods of time in a foreign country, or in which two languages coexist in the same country. Nevertheless, those bilingual or multilingual countries, such as Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, or Spain, can not always offer their citizens the possibility to take advantage of this situation when they are acquiring their first language/s. The main reason for this is that those languages often compete among them, that is, they are rivals, and people belonging to one of the linguistic communities often have a negative attitude towards the other/s, as it is case of Canada. It is in Canada where an inmersion program was put into practice in 1965. The experiment began in a little village called Saint Lambert, and it was completed and assesed by the psychological department of the University of Montreal. The program consisted in the alternation of French and English. Children spoke English at home, but at school, they were taught French by using it in the different subjects they had to study. This project had great relevance and has given place to a lot of research in that country. With regard to Europe, only in bilingual countries can this program be put into practice. Luxemburg is a case apart, because it is a trilingual country: Luxemburguese is spoken at home, German is taught from the first year of Primary Education, and French, from the third year. This early trilingualism is completed in Secondary Education with the teaching of English. The citizens of Luxemburg, where there are not universities, have the possibility of choosing among those universities of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Canada and the United States. This situation is very difficult to achieve in many other European countries. However, something similar is what is called bilingual education,
which implies the teaching in a foreign language of one or more topics
well kown by the pupils. The methodology is being carried at school
in Netherlands, Germany, France and Scandinavian countries.
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