ORIENTA ACADEMIA Ángel Parra Escudero

Oposición 2018/19 Charo Collado Trueba

UNIT 1:
LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION: SPOKEN AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE.
FACTORS DEFINING A COMMUNICATIVE SITUATION: SENDER,
RECEIVER, FUNCTIONALITY AND CONTEXT.

1. INTRODUCTION
2. LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION
2.1 Language definitions
2.2 Language functions.
2.3 Linguistic sign.
2.4 Spoken and written language.
2.4.1. Spoken language.
2.4.2. Written language.
2.5 Differences and similarities between writing and speech.
2.5.1 Differences.
2.5.2 Similarities.
3. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE
4. FACTORS DEFINING A COMMUNICATIVE SITUATION: SENDER,
RECEIVER, FUNCTIONALITY AND CONTEXT.
4.1 Speech acts.
4.2 The context.
4.3 Negotiation of meaning.
5. THE UNIT AND THE CURRICULUM
6. CONCLUSION
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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1. INTRODUCTION
All human and animal societies function thanks to what is known as
communication. It can be stated that communication is an act whereby an
individual establishes contact with another and transmits information.
Language is clearly one form of communication, and we are going to pay
attention to this term as the specialised sound signalling system which seems to
be genetically programmed to develop in humans. A dog barking, a child crying
because he is hungry or a bird singing represent the way that a creature
communicates a desire, a warning or any information. We would not apply the
term language to these actions although undeniably they are all performing
communicative acts.
As far as human communication is concerned, we can say that it takes
place in a variety of ways ranging from speaking or writing to visual
communication (drawings, flags, gestures...) or tactile communication (a
handshake or Braille system), so it would be wrong to consider language only
oral.
Language, so that, is considered by educators as a means of
communication and learners need to know how to use it, because language is
the common mean of communication among people in our society and this why
learners should know how to transmit messages in a communicative way.
2. LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION.
2.1 Language definitions
Along the years, several definitions have emerged about language. If we
pay attention to a general one from Wikipedia, language is the human capacity
for acquiring and using complex systems of communication. But as a general
statement, language can be considered as a signalling system which uses as its
material, vocal sounds. It must be stated that language is something which is
spoken so that written language is secondary and derivative.
Among these definitions, we are going to consider the ones by Sapir and
Hall. In 1921, Sapir said that “language is a purely human and non-instinctive
method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily
produced symbols”. In other way, Hall defined it as “the institution whereby

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humans communicate and interact with each other by means of habitually used
oral-auditory arbitrary symbols”.
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 was 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.

 Specialization: the sound waves of speech have no other function than

to signal meaning.

 Semanticity: the elements of the signal convey meaning through their

stable association with real-world situations.

 Arbitrariness: There is no limitation to what can be communicated about

and there is no specific or necessary connection between the sounds
used and the message being sent.

 Discreteness: speech uses a small set of sound elements that clearly

contrast with each other.

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 Displacement: it is possible to talk about events remote in space or time

from the situation of the speaker.

 Productivity: there is an infinite capacity to express and understand

meaning, by using old sentence elements to produce new sentences.

 Traditional transmission: language is transmitted from one generation

to the next primarily by a process of teaching and learning.

 Duality of pattering: phonemes are combined to make meaningful

words, which in turn are combined again to make sentences.
Through all definitions made by authors we can observe common
features to all of them so that language is basically human, combining different
signals as words and symbols in order to express an idea, thought or meaning.

2.2 Language functions.

If we seek an answer for “Why do we use language?” automatically
people say “to communicate our ideas”. Although considering the answer as
appropriate, it is important to remember that communicating the ideas is not
only the way in which we use language. Several other functions can be defined.
 The expressive or emotional use is a mean of getting rid of our
nervous energy when we are under stress. It is also a direct expression
of the addresser’s attitude towards what is being communicated, tending
to produce an impression of certain emotion. There are many emotive
expressions of a positive way, such as expressions of fear, affection etc.
but probably, swear words and obscenities are the best-known and used
of these kind of expressions.
 Phatic communication, this use of language was defined by
Malinowski. He used it to refer to the social function of language that
means the basic human need to sign friendship.
 Poetic function. Here the focus is on the phonetic properties of the
message, although not being the sole function of the message. The

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rhythmical litanies of religious groups, the persuasive cadences of

political speechmaking have only one apparent reason: people take
delight in them. They can only be explained by a universal desire to
exploit the sonic potential of language.
 The performative function. A performative sentence is an expression
that performs an act, e.g.: "I do" in the marriage ceremony and the use of
performative verbs such as "accept," "apologize," "congratulate," and
"promise." These words denote an action which is performed by using
the verb in the first person.
 The metalingual function, when we use the language to talk about the
language, when for example we check if the addressee is using the
same code (Do you follow me?, Do you know what I mean?)
We may also find other functions such as recording facts, instrument of
thought or expression of regional, social educational, sexual or occupational
identity.
Considering all these previous functions, the British linguist Halliday
grouped all these functions into three Metafunctions, which are the
manifestations in the linguistic system of the two unique purposes which
underline all uses of language, combined with the third component (textual)
which breathes relevance into the other two:
 The ideational function is to organize the speaker’s or writer’s
experience of the real or imaginary world.
 The interpersonal function is to indicate, establish or maintain
relationships between people.
 The textual function serves to create written or spoken texts which
cohere within themselves and which fit a particular situation in which
they are used.
2.3 The linguistic sign
In order to understand each other, both the speaker (the sender) and the
listener (the receiver) need an agreement about the code used. When we
converse with someone, we code and decode messages using linguistic signs.
Through these signs messages are built, interpreted and assessed.

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The main work done about Linguistics was made by the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure. He accepted that there must be two sides to a
meaning, the content and the expression, what he defined as: signifié and
signifiant. The relation between the signified and the signifier is what he called
the Linguistic sign. Furthermore, Saussure separated speech acts (la parole)
from the system of a language (la langue). Parole was the free will of the
individual, whereas langue was regulated by the group.
Saussure also postulated that once the convention is established, it is
very difficult to change, which enables languages to remain both static, through
a set vocabulary determined by conventions, and to grow, as new terms are
needed to deal with situations and technologies not covered by the old.
Every language contains a set of signs, and also the sender and the
receiver share the code. Then the ideas can be expressed in a concrete way by
means of speech.

2.4 Spoken and written language

It is traditional in language study to distinguish between spoken and
written language. Before summarizing their main differences and similarities, we
are going to revise their main features.

2.4.1 Spoken language.

The most obvious aspect of language is speech. 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 or their reception. These activities occur at the psychological level.
The movement of the tongue, lips etc. constitute the articulatory stage of the
speech chain, which is studied by articulatory phonetics. The study of speech

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sound waves corresponds to acoustic phonetics, while the hearing process s

the domain of auditory phonetics.
Phonetics is the study of all possible speech sounds. Its aim is to study
the way in which speakers use a selection of these sounds in order to express
meaning. In this activity it is helped by Phonology, as it studies the phonemes,
the smallest phonological units that can produce a difference in meaning.
The study of speech is therefore, the field of both Phonetics and
Phonology.

2.4.2 Written language.

We can classify writing systems in two types:
 Non-phonological systems: they do not show a clear relation
between the symbols and the sounds of the language. Some
examples are the pictographic, ideographic or Egyptian
hieroglyphic.
 Phonological systems: they show a clear relation between
the symbols and the sounds of the language. We can
distinguish:
o Syllabic writing: each grapheme corresponds to a
spoken syllable, usually a consonant-vowel pair.
o Alphabetic writing: there is a direct correspondence
between graphemes and phonemes. This is the most
economic and adaptable of all writing systems. Here we
find Spanish, which has a very regular system, one
grapheme, one morpheme, or English and Gaelic with a
marked tendency to irregularity.

Historically, writing was considered superior to speech. This happened as

a result of literature, as it was considered a source of standards of linguistic
excellence. Written records provide language with permanence and authority
while the rules of grammar were illustrated exclusively from written texts.

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On the other hand, speech was ignored because of its lack of care and
organization. Speakers thought that there were not rules and in order to speak
properly, it was necessary to follow the correct form, which was based on
written standards.
At the turn of 20th century there was a reaction against this point of view
Leonard Bloomfield insisted that “writing is not language but merely a way of
recording language by means of visible marks”. The reasons for this approach
were:
 Speech is many centuries older than writing.
 It develops naturally in children.
 Writing systems are mostly derivative, as they are based on speech
sounds.
If speech was the primary medium of communication, then it should be
the main object of linguistic study. Nowadays, the functions of speech and
writing are said to complement each other, no medium of communication is
better than the other.
2.5 DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES BETWEEN WRITING AND SPEECH.
There is not a doubt that exists a great deal of differences between
written and spoken language.
2.5.1 Differences
Firstly, they contrast in physical form since speech uses phonic
substance whereas writing uses graphic one.
They also differ in structure and use. Crystal (1987) pointed out that
speech was “time-bound, dynamic and transient” as a result of n interaction in
which both participants are present. In contrast, writing is “space-bound, static
and permanent” as the producer of the message is distant from the receiver and
even may not know who is.
The permanence of writing allows repeated reading and analysis, and
reader can remove any mistakes. The speaker does not have this option; he
cannot check the meaning of words in a dictionary, change what has been said
or refresh his memory about the direction that the conversation is taking. On the

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other hand, the speaker can simply, by observing, if he is being understood,

through the body language, gestures and eye contact.
Participants in a written conversation cannot usually see each other and
they cannot rely on the context to understand the message, so that, deictic
expressions are avoided, but feedback is available in most speech interactions.
The speaker makes use of his natural rise and fall of the voice. In a
stressed-time language as English, rhythm and intonation play a vital role in
making clear if the message is received in the correct way. Although, the writer
can make use of the rhythm, intonation is impossible to reproduce in writing.
It can also be said that the majority of graphic features present a system
of contrasts that has no speech equivalent. Genres of written language as
tables, graphs and complex formulae cannot be transmitted by reading aloud.
We can also find some constructions only in writing and others only occur
in speech as slang or swearing words.
Our society also marks a difference between them since written language
tends to be formal and it is more likely to provide a valuable standard.
2.5.2 Similarities.
Like speech, written language is a two-way process which includes the
use of both productive and receptive skills. When writing we use graphic
symbols (letters) that relate to the sounds that we make when speak. At a base
level, writing can be said an act of forming these symbols, marking them in a
surface. However, writing is much more than this, in the same way that
speaking is not only producing sounds. All the sounds must be produced
according to certain conventions in order to form words. These words will form
sentences, and these sentences, either written or spoken, have to be linked to
form a coherent whole.
It is important to remark that one form may be used as a result of the
other. Think in a student taking notes from the teacher’s discourse or the other
way round the teacher reading aloud from the book.

3. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE
Noam Chomsky defined language as a set of sentences, each finite in
length and constructed out of a finite set of elements, that means that an able

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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 some important information: the rules of use.
When a native speaker speaks he does not only use grammatically correct
forms, he also knows where and when to use these sentences and to whom.
Hymes distinguished four aspects of this competence:
1. Systematic Competence: the native speaker has the potential to create
a lot of language through a system.
2. Appropriacy: the native speaker knows what language is appropriate in
a given situation.
3. Occurrence: the native speaker knows how often something is said in
the language, and grades its use accordingly.
4. Feasibility: the native speaker knows when something is possible in the
language, even if there are no grammatical rules.
The approach pioneered by Hymes is now known as the Ethnography of
communication
These four categories were adapted for teaching purposes, seeing
communicative competence as a group of five subcompetences. Firstly, Canale
and Swain (1980) defined communicative competence in terms of three
components (grammatical, sociolinguistic-cultural and strategic competence)
but Canale (1983) refined the model, adding discourse
competence: cohesion and coherence.
 Grammatical Competence

The mastery of the code itself. It includes phonetics, phonology,

morphology, syntax, semantics.

 Discourse Competence

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The ability to produce unified written or spoken discourses that show

coherence and cohesion. It deals with organizing words, phrases,
sentences in order to create conversations, speeches, poetry, email
messages...

 Sociolinguistic competence

The ability to produce an appropriate discourse in a given situation. It

appropriateness depends on the setting of the communication, the topic,
relationships among the people communicating, taboos, politeness etc...

 Strategic competence

The ability of speakers to use verbal and non-verbal communication

strategies to compensate for breakdowns in communication or to improve
it.

 Sociocultural competence

The ability of how a native speaker would react in a given linguistic

situation, taking into account the tone of voice he would use, the register
non-verbal communication and so on.

A more recent survey of communicative competence by Bachman (1990)

divides it into the broad headings of "organizational competence," which
includes both grammatical and discourse competence, and "pragmatic
competence," which includes both sociolinguistic and "illocutionary"
competence. Strategic Competence is associated with the interlocutors' ability
in using communication strategies preventing us from ‘getting the wrong end
of the stick’ when people talk to us.

Through the influence of communicative language teaching, it has become

widely accepted that communicative competence should be the goal of
language education, central to good classroom practice. This is in contrast to
previous views in which grammatical competence was commonly given top

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priority. The understanding of communicative competence has been influenced

by the field of pragmatics and the philosophy of language concerning speech
acts as described in large part by John Searle and J.L. Austin.

4. FACTORS DEFINING A COMMUNICATIVE SITUATION: SENDER,

RECIEVER, FUNCTIONALITY AND CONTEXT.
Every communicative act necessarily takes place between one or more
people who act as a sender and one or several people who act as a receiver.
Shannon and Weaver’s model of communication is one of the most
productive schematic models of communication system, containing five
fundamental elements: an information source, a transmitter, a channel of
transmission, a receiver and a destination. This model could follow this diagram:

CODE
SOURCE DESTINATION

SPEAKER CHANNEL LISTENER

WRITER MESSAGE READER
(transmitter) UTTERANCE (receiver)
ENCODES DECODES

Noise source

The information source selects a desired message from a set of them.

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.
Every communicative act begins in the concept of code, which is the
system of communication employed. We can find different types of code as
linguistic, traffic lights, hand movements, Morse.... The main aim of code is to
send messages that mean the piece of information transmitted. In order to be
understood, the message must be sent in a familiar code from the sender to the
receiver. The concept of channel refers to the manner in which the message is

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sent (speaking, writing, video transmission, audio transmission, email...).For

Shannon, the destination is the person (or thing) for whom the message is
intended. Another element to pay attention is noise. It is a dysfunctional factor:
any interference with the message travelling along the channel (such as 'static'
on the telephone or radio) which may lead to the signal received being different
from that sent.
In language teaching, this is a basic idea because what the teacher
teaches is the code, the second language. If this is achieved, the learner can
both encode (speak/write) and decode (listen/read) messages in the target
language.
When the learner comes to communicate with someone about events or
topics related to his surroundings, we can identify three types of communication
in which he participates:
 One-way Communication, where the message is only receptive. The
listener or reader receives the message but he does not respond
(watching DVDs, listening to CDs, reading books or magazines…).
 Restricted Two-Way Communication, the learner responds orally to
someone, but he does not use the target language, he answers using his
native tongue or non-verbal responses as nodding the head.
 Full Two-Way Communication, the learner encodes and decodes
messages, acting as sender and receiver.
We must be patient with the oral and written productions of the learners;
they will produce them when they feel sure, not before.

4.1 Speech acts.

In this point we are going to analyze the desired effects of our
communicative interactions.
The British philosopher J.L. Austin distinguished two main types of
functional potential:
 A performative utterance is an expression that performs an act.
Examples “I accept this offer”, “I deny this accusation” or “I promise to be
there”.

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 Constatives are expressions which assert something that is either true

or false. They are used only in descritions and assertions for example
“The door is open”.
We must also mention the effect of expressions on the behaviour of
speaker and hearer, following a threefold distinction:
 A locutionary act is a simple speech act, something which is meaningful
and can be understood.
 An illocutionary act is when using a sentence to perform a function.
“Shut up” may be intended as an order or a piece of advice.
 A perlocutionary act is any speech act that amounts to persuading,
convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise getting someone
to do or realize something. For example, stop talking would be a
perlocutionary act.
Another speech classification was developed by Searle. He divided
speech into five acts:
 Representative acts: the speaker describes states or events such as an
assertion, a claim or a report “It is raining”.
 Directives acts: the speaker tries to get to the hearer to do something
such as request or command “Please come here”.
 Commisive acts: the speaker is committed to do something in the future
such as a promise or a threat “I’ll come tomorrow”.
 Expressive acts: the speaker expresses feelings and attitudes about
something such as an apology or a complaint “The meal was delicious”.
 Declaration acts: the speaker changes the state of events in the world,
in a wedding with the sentence “I now pronounce you man and wife”.
4.2 The context.
As a general definition we can state that the context is the situation
which the sender and the receiver are in which allows the same message to be
understood in different ways.
From the Collins English Dictionary we refer to:
1) The parts of a piece of writing, speech etc. that precede and follow
a word or passage and contribute to its full meaning.

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2) The conditions and circumstances which are relevant to an event,

fact…
The first definition covers what we may call linguistic context; we will not
understand an isolated sentence from a message unless we can relate it to
what the speaker has already said. From the second definition, linguistic
elements in a text may not only refer to other parts of the text, but also to the
outside world, to the context of situation.
The concept context of situation was firstly formulated by Malinowski in
1923, but it was highly developed specially by Hymes and Halliday.
Hymes categorized the communicative situation in terms of eight
components:
1. Form and content of the text. 5. Key.
2. Setting. 6. Medium.
3. Participants. 7. Genre.
4. Ends. 8. Interactional forms.
On the other hand Halliday offered three headings for the analysis:
1. Field, it is the total event in which the text is working and the purpose
activity of the speaker or writer.
2. Mode, it is the function of the text. Here it is included the channel and
the genre (narrative, didactic…).
3. Tenor, it refers to the participants in the communicative act.
It is generally accepted that Halliday’s interpretation subsumed Hymes´.
The terms field, mode and tenor describe how the context of situation
determines the kinds of meaning that are expressed.
In a second language teaching class, the field would be the language
study, e.g., animals. The tenor, clearly, would be the teacher and the pupils.
The mode, referring to the language used, would be instruction and discussion
language.
5.3 The negotiation of meaning.
In an interaction between native and non-native speaker often occurs
difficulties in making themselves understood. In this situation the sender and the
receiver have a series of non-verbal signs, gestures and sounds to understand
and be understood.

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The different forms of behaviour include speech acts that negotiate

meaning or maintain conversation by reacting to the proceeding discourse. This
can take these forms:
 Clarifying, so what you mean to say is… let me see…
 Modifying, I’ll put that in another way…
 Repeating, I’ll repeat it; I’ll say that again…
 Asking for clarification, Sorry, Could you repeat?; Could you say that
again?
Facial gestures, hand gestures and sounds, like “erm” or “um”, help the
addresser to get his point across or to help the addressee to show he has not
followed the message.
These can take an important role in our teaching lessons in order to
negotiate meaning avoiding other negative strategies such as message
abandonment leaving to a communication failure.

5. THE UNIT AND THE CURRICULUM

The relationship between the unit and the curriculum is clearly seen as
one of the key Competences set by the Common European Framework of
Reference for Languages that appear in our curriculum is Communication in
foreign languages. We can also find its importance in the introductions of RD
126/2014 that establishes the basic curriculum in Primary Education and
Decree 54/2014 establishing the curriculum in our region, as well as in Law of
Education 7/2010 from CLM, promoting content and language integrated
learning in foreign language in order to develop multilinguism and values like
coexistence and interculturality as it is also reflected in Decree 47/2017,25 th
July, regulating the FL teaching integral plan.
Living in a globalized and an interconnected world creates the necessity
of learning languages and languages are the basic instrument in learning and
communication.
Our goal as teachers must not only be teaching linguistic items but also
to communicate in the target language providing students with a wide range of

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communicative situations, being the English classroom a place that offers

activities linked to experiences that our students may find in their real life.
We can teach a lot of vocabulary, we can pay attention to intonation,
rhythm and stress, we can show how the grammar works in the foreign
language but without communication, our job will be not fulfilled.
6. CONCLUSION
Communication is a complex and rich phenomenon and all its
components must be defined and explored in order to become our students
competent English speakers.
A soon as our students are involved in communicative processes will be
positive for them, here the role of the teacher will be essential ensuring their
main exposure as possible to the role of sender and receiver, with a wide range
of communicative activities and situations. 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.
Their involvement in communicative processes from early ages will result
in the achievement of our main teaching objective “to make our pupils
communicative competent”.
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY
 Halliday, M.A, K. “Spoken and written language”. Oxford
University Press. 1985.
 Harmer, J. “The practice of English Language Teaching”.
Longman. London. 1989.
 Halliwell, Susan. "Teaching English in the Primary
Classroom". Longman 1992.
 Brumfit, Moon and Tongue. “Teaching English to children”.
Longman 1992.
 Chomsky, Noam. “Aspects of the theory of Syntax” MITT
Press. 1965.

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 http://www.appling.ucla.edu/faculty/bachman/
 http://anthropology.virginia.edu/

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