Inglés Tema 1

UNIT 1

LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION. ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE. FACTORS

THAT DEFINE A COMUNICATIVE SITUATION. SENDER, RECEIVER, CONTEXT
AND FUNCTIONALITY

- INTRODUCTION

I. LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION. ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE

A). Language as communication
- The Communicative Approach
B). Oral and written language
- Characteristics of oral language
- Characteristics of written language
- Differences between oral and written language

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C.) Pedagogical implications

II. FACTORS THAT DEFINE A COMUNICATIVE SITUATION. SENDER, RECEIVER,

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CONTEXT AND FUNCTIONALITY
A). A communicative situation
B). The Roles of the Sender and Receiver in a Communicative Act
C). The context
D). The communicative function

- REPERCUSSION IN THE CURRICULUM

- CONCLUSION

- BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INTRODUCTION
As an introduction to this unit, we can say that language is an essential and characteristic part of
being human. All languages have a similar basic structure, and they are used to transmit our ideas,
thoughts and feelings. The ability we have to understand each other and the society we live in is
what makes us different to animals. Communication between humans is a very complex
phenomenon, with many variables. Learning a second language is complicated, too. Second
language students have to learn a new system of signs to transmit a message. The final goal is the
development of students` communicative competence. This communicative competence not only
refers to the ability to use the language, but also to aspects related to the communicative context.
The social dimension of language is also taken into consideration. Students must be able to use
language to communicate information.

I. LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION. ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE

A). LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION.

We must start by asking ourselves what is language? Language is the main means by which people
communicate. It can broadly be defined as a system of signs that are combined, with the help of
conventional rules, to transmit a message. A useful approach to language, and one used by most

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current linguists, is to identify its essential definition features. Some important ones are:
- Auditory-vocal channel: human language is a system of sound signals used between mouth and

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ear.
- Total feed-back: speakers hear and can reflect upon everything they say.
- Arbitrariness: there is no link between the signal and the nature of the reality to which it refers.
- Traditional/cultural transmission: human language is acquired by a long learning process, which
is transmitted from one generation to the next.
- Duality: the sounds of a language or its phonemes don’t mean anything separately, but they
become meaningful when they are combined with other phonemes to form words.
- Displacement: people can talk about events remote in time and space.
- Productivity: human language is essentially creative, or productive. Humans can understand and
produce new sentences.
- Structure dependence: language operations depend on an understanding of the internal structure of
a sentence.

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All these features show that acquiring a language is a complicated process which is unconscious
and effortless when children learn their mother tongue, but conscious and difficult when learning a
foreign language.
However, communication isn’t the only function of language. Vygotski says “language shapes
thought” in fact, there is no doubt we think with words. The function of language as a regulator of
behaviour is closely related to the former function. According to Bruner, another function of
language is as a shaper of the vision of the world. Thus, language allows us to make up a mental
image of external reality. Our goal, as teachers is not language itself, but language as an instrument
for communication.

Traditional Foreign Language Teaching focused on teaching items of language in isolation and its
main aim was to read texts. It could be said that people learnt about the language but could not use
it in a real context, since the focus was not on communication, but on a piece of language. However,
in the last decades, the movement towards a Communicative Approach has been a remarkable
tendency in the teaching of English as a Foreign Language. The Communicative Approach in
language teaching starts from a theory of language as communication. As we have already
mentioned, the goal of language teaching is to develop what Hymes referred to as “communicative
competence”. Hymes coined this term in order to contrast a communicative view of language with

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Chomsky’s theory of competence. For Chomsky, the focus of linguistic theory was to characterize
the abstract abilities speakers possess that enable them to produce grammatically correct sentences

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in a language. For him, linguistic competence simply means “knowledge of the language system”
grammatical knowledge in other words. However, Hymes maintained that Chomsky´s theory was
incomplete, and that a communicative and cultural dimension should be incorporated. His theory of
communicative competence was a definition of what a speaker needs to know in order to be
communicatively competent in a speech community. He distinguished four aspects within his
conception of communicative competence:
- Systematic potential: A native speaker possesses a potential for creating language.
- Appropriateness: A native speaker knows what language is appropriate in a given situation, in a
particular context.
- Occurrence: A native speaker knows how often something is said in the language and acts
accordingly.
- Feasibility: A native speaker knows whether something is possible in the language, although
some structures are grammatically correct, they are not possible in the language.

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Hymes held that communicative competence requires both knowledge and ability for language use.
Therefore, the Communicative Approach is based on providing the student with enough
communicative activities to develop the oral and written skills needed to use the language with
accuracy and appropriateness.
Linguists Canale and Swain established the five subcompetences of the Communicative
Competence. As a result of this, the RD 126/2014, February 28th establishes the teaching
requirements nationwide and sets up that Communicative Competence for Foreign Language
Learners comprises five subcompetences:

- Grammar competence: It refers to the ability to put into practice the linguistic units according to
the rules of use established in the linguistic system, for instance, the mastery of grammatical
structures and vocabulary.
- Discourse competence: The ability to us different types of discourse and organise them
according to the communicative situation and the speakers involved in it, using cohesion and
coherence.
- Sociolinguistic competence: The ability to adequate the utterances to the specific context
according to the accepted usage of a particular linguistic community.

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- Strategic competence: The ability to define or make adjustments in the course of the
communicative situation, and the capacity to use verbal and non-verbal strategies in order to

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make communication effective.
- Sociocultural competence: A certain knowledge of the social and cultural context in which the
Foreign Language is used.

By taking these subcompetences into account, students become competent from a communicative
point of view. That is, given a communicative situation they must be able to carry it out
successfully so that there is an exchange of communication.

B). ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE.

Traditionally, written language was considered as prestigious compared to oral language, which was
considered careless and less perfect. The supremacy of written language over oral language
remained until the 19th century. In the 20th century a new approach appeared. This new approach
pointed out that speech was more important than writing for three reasons: speech is more ancient

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than writing, it develops naturally in children, and, because writing is a transcription of the sounds
of speech. Nowadays, speech and writing are considered as different systems of communication,
with their own characteristics and uses.
Oral language is made up of three components: the phonological, semantic, and syntactic. The
phonological component involves the rules for combining sounds. We are not aware of our
knowledge of these rules, but our ability to understand and pronounce English words demonstrates
that we do know a vast number of rules. The semantic component is made up of morphemes, the
smallest units of meaning that may be combined with each other to make up words and sentences.
The syntactic component consists of the rules that enable us to combine morphemes into sentences.
Like the rules making up the other components, syntactic rules become increasingly complex as the
child develops. From combining two morphemes, the child goes on to combine words with suffixes
or inflections and eventually creates questions, statements, commands, etc.

Of course speakers of a language constantly use these three components of language together,
usually in social situations. Some language experts would add a fourth component: pragmatics,
which deals with rules of language use. Pragmatic rules are part of our communicative competence,
our ability to speak appropriately in different situations,

Oral language is a very important link in the process of students' learning and thinking

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development. Oral language provides a foundation for the development of other language skills. As
children talk about themselves and their experiences, they are learning to organise their thinking
and to focus their ideas. It is important to provide opportunities for oral language to continue to

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grow in the classroom from those foundations. Before students achieve proficiency in reading and
writing, oral language is one of the important means of learning and of acquiring knowledge.

In fact throughout life, oral language skills remain essential for communication of ideas and
intelligent conversation.

The characteristics of oral language are: the expressive possibilities: when speaking we can vary the
tone, the accent and the speed of our words to underline something; we can also make use of
gestures and our body language, which reinforce the transmission of the message. This is known as
non-verbal communication. Other characteristics are that when speaking we build simpler sentences
than when writing, pauses, repetitions and rephrasing are frequent; and, also, when we speak it is
normal to make errors.

Regarding the characteristics of written language, we find that it is more precise than oral language.
The fact that writing is permanent allows more time for its preparation, more careful organization

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and more structured expression than in oral language. Also, writing is clearer than speaking, as
there is no immediate feedback for possible explanations of the message. Other characteristics are
that writing displays several unique graphic features such as punctuation, capitalization, spelling
etc, and also that written language tends to be more formal than oral language.
Referring to the differences between oral and written language, the most obvious is the physical
form: speech uses the form of air-pressure movements and the written language uses graphs that are
marks on a surface. A great consequence follows this physical difference: listening is different to
reading. Speech is immediate, dynamic transitory and interactive, while writing is static and
permanent, and there is no interaction between addresser and addressee.
The nature of oral communication makes oral discourse contain redundant information. This comes
about as a result of the complexity of a process that forces both the speaker and the listener to
perform highly complex processes under time pressure. Through this we can see:

1. Syntactic Alterations:

Repetitions.
Overlappings.
Incomplete/ ungrammatical utterances.

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Tags to negotiate intended meaning (er, um, etc.).

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2. The Need for Extra Linguistic Elements:

Gestures.
Body posture.
Eye contact.
Facial expression.

In written communication, the writer has the distinct advantage of being able to read over that
which he has written, and so can remove any mistakes. The speaker does not have this option. The
speaker cannot check the meaning of words in a dictionary, nor can he change what he has already
said. He cannot read over earlier utterances in the conversation in order to refresh his memory about
the direction that the conversation is taking, and, most importantly, he has to keep talking.

The writer does not, however, have all the advantages. The speaker can tell, simply by observing his

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listener, if he is being understood. Eye contact and gestures to emphasize a point are unavailable to
the writer.

The speaker also has recourse to the natural rise and fall of his voice. In a stress-timed language
such as English, rhythm and intonation play a vital role in ensuring that the message is received in
the correct way. Although the writer can make use of rhythm, the all-important intonation is
impossible to reproduce in writing. However the written word gives the reader time to assimilate the
information at his own pace.

C). PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

The knowledge of the characteristics and differences between oral and written language has
pedagogical implications. We can draw several conclusions:
- Oral language is easier to acquire than written language, so it should be introduced earlier
- Written language is characterized by a bigger demand in the correction of its structure than
oral language
- Spelling exercises are important.
- The understanding of oral expressions should be encouraged

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- The graphic features of writing make the learning of this skill the slowest to acquire
- To be able to write it is necessary to learn how to organize ideas in a written text.

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At this point, we need to ask ourselves: what oral language skills do students need to develop?
Students should:

- Be able to talk clearly about experiences and ideas;

- Be able to engage with and enjoy oral language in all its varieties;
- Be able to understand, respond to, and use oral language effectively in a range of contexts;
- Develop skills that enable them to develop their thoughts, ideas and feelings clearly and
appropriately and respond to the thoughts, ideas and feelings of others with purpose and
courtesy.

In order to develop these skills and strategies students will need:

- Structured, planned, meaningful tasks and experiences within the classroom environment to
acquire effective listening and speaking skills.
- Opportunities to learn how to 'think critically about what they hear...' and to 'use oral
language to gather, process and present information'.

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The principles of Communicative Language teaching, or Communicative approach, can be

summarized in the following:
- Communication-centered: The primary principle of CLT is that all activities managed and carried
in classrooms are supposed to be communication-centered and serve for the goal of communication.
- Reflecting real communicating process: An important sign to distinguish CLT and other
approaches/methods is the former tries to reflect the process of language using for communication
during classrooms.
- Avoiding constant error-correcting: Another remarkable characteristic that makes CLT different
with other approaches/methods is the tolerant attitude towards students’ errors, especially
grammatical errors. It puts stress on transmitting meaning, free choice of language form and
achievement of communicative goal.
Now foreign language educators generally agree that the tolerance of spoken or written errors will
benefit students on confidently using the language to communicate.
- Grammar in the Communicative approach: Communication cannot take place in the absence of
structure, or grammar. In their carefully researched and widely cited paper proposing components
of communicative competence, Canale and Swain (1980) did not suggest that grammar was
unimportant. They sought rather to situate grammatical competence within a more broadly defined
communicative competence.

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Grammar is important; and learners seem to focus best on grammar when it relates to their
communicative needs and experiences (Ellis, 1994).

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We must take into account that when non-native speakers interact with native speakers of any
language, they often experience a certain amount of difficulty in making themselves understood. In
order that both the addresser and the addressee are able to understand and be understood, they have
to develop a series of non-verbal signs, gestures and sounds.

The different forms of behaviour include speech acts that in some way involve the negotiation of
meaning. This can take the following forms

Clarifying: So what you mean to say is...

Modifying: Let me put that another way...
Repeating: I’ll say that again.
Asking for Clarification: I’m sorry, could you say that again?

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II. FACTORS THAT DEFINE A COMUNICATIVE SITUATION: SENDER, RECEIVER,

CONTEXT AND FUNCTIONALITY

A). A COMMUNICATIVE SITUATION.

There are several types of communication depending on the objective:

1. Verbal, written, and electronic communication;

2. Formal and informal communication;

3. Intrapersonal communication or communication within oneself;

4. Interpersonal communication or communication between two persons;

5. Small-group communication;

Reasons for a failure in a linguistic situation can be.

- Language differences. Some people use English as their native language; others learned

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some of it from various sources. In any case, whatever you say will be interpreted in a
myriad of ways, whether you use idiomatic English or not.
- Cultural differences. Whatever you assume about the recipients of your message, the wider

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the audience, the more of them will fail to meet your assumptions.
- Personal differences. Any assumption about the prior knowledge on the subject matter fails
- Lost data. The listener does not pay attention at a critical moment, and he misses something
indispensable. In the worst, and usual, cases he does not know he missed it.

One of the first things that we have to take into account is that there are many factors that come into
play when we participate in a linguistic situation.
Let us now move on to look at some of the factors of a speech act and how they will have an
influence on how successful that exchange turns out to be.

We will begin by looking at the roles of the sender and the receiver.

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B). THE ROLES OF THE SENDER AND RECEIVER IN A COMMUNICATIVE ACT

For communication to take place, a message must be transmitted by a communicator and correctly
received by a receiver. The components of a communicative situation are:
- The speaker/writer (sender): who is the person who codifies and produces the message.
- The listener/reader (receiver): the person who receives and decodes the message.
- The code: which is the system of signs that is assumed and known by both the speaker and
the listener.
- The message: is codified and decoded information.
- The channel: physical means by which the message is transmitted. According to the channel,
we can have oral or written messages.
- The referent: is the reality, either specific or abstract, to which the message refers.

When we are learning a language however, either as a native speaker or a non native; there are three
types of communication that we have to take into account:

- One-Way Communication: here, the message is only receptive. The listener or the reader will
receive the message, but not respond. Listening to tapes, watching videos, reading books or

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magazines are all examples of one-way communication.
- Restricted Two-Way Communication: this involves the learner responding orally to someone,

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but he does not use the target language. The response may be in the learner’s native tongue, or it
may involve some kind of non-verbal response such as nodding the head or shrugging the
shoulders.
- Full Two-Way Communication: this is when the learner both encodes and decodes messages,
acting as sender and receiver.

Research has suggested that delaying oral and written production can have a beneficial effect on the
second language learner, as he will not feel pressured to speak before he is ready to do so.

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C). THE CONTEXT

All the elements we have mentioned that appear in a communicative situation are present within a
context. But the context is subdivided into linguistic and non-linguistic context.
The linguistic context refers to the context provided by the linguistic system itself. However, the
non-linguistic context is the framework in which a communication act is placed. Within this non-
linguistic context, we can distinguish the physical context, where communication takes place, the
historical context, both personal and of the place, and socio-cultural context, which refers to shared
values, beliefs, traditions and knowledge of the world. All the data that belongs to the context but
isn’t shared by speaker and listener usually hinders communication, or prevents it from being totally
effective. If this happens, language isn’t useful for its purpose, or carrying out its function, which is,
exchanging information.

D). THE COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTION

Language, as a system of communication, has a wide variety of functions. As speakers we must
have the competence to not only produce utterances, but to know when is the most opportune
moment to use them, according to the different situations that we may find ourselves in socially.
Within this communicative function, Roman Jakobson distinguished six functions of language
according to the most relevant communication element.

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- Expressive or emotive function: centred on the speaker, who uses language mainly to convey
his/her feelings and attitudes.

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- Directive or conative function: used to draw the listener’s attention and influence him/her.
- Representative or referential function: when the message refers to the external reality, either
if it specific or abstract, that is, the referent. Language is used to communicate facts or ideas.
- Poetic function: it appears when the linguistic message tries to focus the attention on the
message itself, taking care of the more formal elements.
- Phatic function: the objective is to keep communication open. It doesn’t communicate
contents, but it is useful to check if communication is still going on.
- Metalinguistic function: it is the function in which language is used to talk about language. It
is centered on the code.

However, the British linguist Michael Halliday believes language exists to fulfil certain human
needs, such as the need to make sense of the world or to relate to others. His model of language is
called functional or systematic grammar.
Halliday identifies three principal functions of language:

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- The ideational function: language as an instrument of thought with which we represent

ourselves to other people.
- The interpersonal function: language as an instrument of transaction by which we represent
ourselves to other people.
- The textual function: language as an instrument of communication with which we construct
sentences cohesively and coherently.

Today, FLT has incorporated the functional and communicative potential of language into teaching.
Language teaching now focuses on communicative proficiency rather than mastery of structures.
Several pedagogical implications can be derived from this view of language;
1. Language presented to students must be contextualized in realistic and natural situations;
2. Students are expected to interact with one another through pair and group work in order
to experience communication.

As teachers, it is very useful for us to know these functions, among other reasons, because they can
be used to work on language, not only in different contexts, but also with different intentions.

REPERCUSSIONS IN THE CURRICULUM

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The Spanish Educational system has embraced the importance of acquiring communicative
competence in English, as we can see in the LOMCE, 8/2013, from 9th December, which establishes

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in its article 17 that one of the objectives of primary education is that it contributes to develop in
children the abilities that allow them to acquire basic communicative competence in a foreign
language for them to express and understand simple messages.
Also, in Andalucía, the order of the 17th of March 2015 that develops the curriculum for Primary
Education emphasizes the importance of acquiring both oral and written skills by dividing the
contents of the subject in four blocks: 1-comprehension of oral texts, 2- production of oral texts,
expression and interaction, 3- understanding of written texts, 4- production of written texts:
expression and interaction; and also by establishing the assessment criteria according to these
blocks of contents.
Besides, the order ECD 65/2015 which describes the relationship between the key competences,
contents and assessment criteria in Primary Education, states that the acquisition of the key
competences is one of our main objectives. It highlights that competence in linguistic
communication is the result of communicative action within specific social practices, in which the

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individual interacts with others through texts of multiple types and formats. The different activities
that teachers carry out will contribute to develop the rest of the key competences.

CONCLUSION

Having developed the topic of communication, let’s remember that our main purpose as teachers is
for our students to develop communicative competence with all it entails, and it doesn’t only refer
to linguistic competence. If we want students to be able to communicate, we will have to teach them
the tools, that is, the skills required. We should keep in mind that the structures we teach are
transmitted within a certain context, through a channel, and orientated to an addressee who will
interpret them. In short, the function of the message and the factors that intervene in a
communication act are aspects which must be included in the methodology of the foreign language
class. Both oral and written language take place in daily communication and thus, we must pay
attention to them at school. This way, in primary education we will offer varied occasions for
students to face both types of language, either planned or more spontaneous. Certainly, we will
focus our attention on the division oral/written language, giving priority to oral language at lower
levels.

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In summary, to be effective communicators students need to be able to adapt and adopt their oral
language techniques and content to whatever social context they find themselves in. To ensure
students develop these strategies, the skills and processes of listening and speaking must be

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understood, modeled, taught and practised within the classroom.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brewster, J. The Primary English Teacher’s Guide. 2002
Harmer, J. The Practice of English Language Teaching. 2001
Varela, R. et al. All About Teaching English. 2003
Halliday M.A.K. Spoken and written language. 1976.
Larsen-Freeman, D. Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. 2003
www.englishunitecnology.ac.nz

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