Discourse and context in language teaching Students: ● Santillán Paula. ● Amaya Florencia. ● Fiordilino Milena. Subject: Written Expression IV Teacher: Saubidet Stella. College: I.S.F.D. N°41.
INTRODUCTION People during their lives make use of the four macro skills in order to communicate and express themselves and understand the different interactants in a communicative situation. The first skill is listening which is the most frequent in everyday life. Listening has both top-down and bottom-up aspects. Top-down listening processes involve activation of schematic knowledge and contextual knowledge; while the bottom-up processes involves prior knowledge of the language system. Secondly, reading allows individuals to gain information or expand their knowledge but there are particular difficulties that the nonnative speaker encounters when reading in the new language. A third skill to be acquired and developed is writing. Personal writing strategies, preferences and techniques characterize each individual writer. Many writers report that they might use different strategies for different types of writing. Producing a successful written text is a complex task that requires simultaneous control over a number of language systems and must also be shaped for a particular audience and a particular purpose. Finally, speaking a new language can be considered the most difficult skill to acquire since it requires command of both listening comprehension and speech production. The chapter of speaking will deal with the linguistic, the sociocultural, the contextual and the personal features of speaking in another language. The four macro skills are equally difficult to acquire and use them in society and much more if you are a nonnative person.
Listening (chapter 6) Processes: Top-down: A top-down way of understanding something starts with a general idea and adds details later. Bottom-up: A bottom-up way of understanding is one in which you think about details before thinking about general ideas. TOP-DOWN PROCESS Involves schematic knowledge: CONTENT: Background information of the topic. FORMAL: Knowledge about how discourse is organized.
Top-down process involves contextual knowledge that is understanding of the specific listening situation. This is filtered through pragmatic knowledge. BOTTOM-UP PROCESS Bottom-up process involves knowledge about the language system (phonological knowledge) it allows the listener to segment the acoustic signals as sounds that form words. GRAMMATICAL KNOWLEDGE: This knowledge allows for recognition of inflections on words, phrases or clauses. LEXICAL KNOWLEDGE: This knowledge allows the listener to recognize words within phrases. BOTTOM-UP PROCESS It is not automatic for L2 speakers, they use metacognition and listening strategies. METACOGNITION: PLANNING REGULATING----These allow for prediction monitoring of errors and evaluation. MONITORING MANAGEMENT
SOME ADVICE TO TEACH LISTENING STRATEGIES According to Mendelsohn: Use pre-listening activities to activate learner ‘background knowledge related to metacognition. Make clear to learners what they are going to listen and why. Provide guided listening activities designed to provide a lot of practice in using a particular strategy. Practice the strategy using real data with focus on context and meaning. Also, use what has been comprehended, take notes on a lecture and allow for self- evaluation. PRE-LISTENING ACTIVITIES: PREDICTING CONTENT Students can predict the topic and the vocabulary they are going to listen to by looking at visual material. Depending on the context, you can often predict the kind of words and style of language the speaker will use. Our knowledge of the world help us anticipate the kind of information we are likely to hear. When we predict the topic of a talk or a conversation, all the related vocabulary stored in our brains is activated to help us better understand what we are listening to. Comprehension and interpretation will take place depending on: - Listener's prior knowledge.
- Listener's memory and attention. - His/her general problem-solving ability. Successful listening depends on the ability to combine these two types of processes. Activities which work on each strategy separately should help students to combine top-down and bottom-up processes to become more effective listeners in real-life situations or longer classrooms listening. MICROPROCESSING STRATEGIES -
Attending to stress and intonation and construct a pattern to fit the utterance. Attending to stressed vowels. Segmenting the speech stream into words that correspond to the stressed vowels and their adjacent consonants. Seeking a phrase-with grammar and meaning-compatible with the first strategy and the words identified in the third. TEACHING LISTENING FROM A DISCOURSE PERSPECTIVE
An effective listener is able to use the situation context (co-text), to disambiguate or decide on the best interpretation. According to Eisenstein, learners that are exposed to this reduced speech forms enhance their listening comprehension. INTONATION: The direction of the speaker pitch at the end of an utterance can be particularly crucial.
TOP-DOWN AND INTEGRATED STRATEGIES Second language learners in English can benefit from: - Listening to a variety of lecture openings, and to predict what the lecture will cover. - Listening to language segments of authentic lectures and working at getting the gist, writing down the main point and topics. Both top-down and bottom-up processes interact. They are useful and necessary for effective listening comprehension. ACCORDING TO STUDENTS COMPETENCE AND INTERESTS WE CAN SELECT DIFFERENT ACTIVITIES -Extract detailed information from a text. - Grasp the gist of an extended text.
- Differentiation between fact and opinion. - Identify the genre and register of a text - Recognize differences in intonation. - Identify relationships between participants in aural interaction. - Identify the emotional tone of an utterance. -Comprehend the details of short conversations on unfamiliar topics. BOTTOM-UP STRATEGIES OR TOP-DOWN STRATEGIES -Before we start listening, we can already predict some words or phrases that might be used because of our knowledge of lexical sets associated with the topic. - We listen carefully to a recording a number of times so that we can find a word we can´t catch clearly. - When we don´t clearly catch some of what people say, we hypothesise what we have missed and reinstate that we think was there, based on our knowledge of similar conversations. - We know the typical pattern some interactions follow. LISTENING TO SPEECH ACTIVITIES Speech acts: A speech act is a functional unit in communication. It is an act that a speaker performs making an utterance. For example: - Making apologies. - Making requests. - Expressing gratitude. - Making refusals. WHAT ARE SOME OF THE MOST USEFUL EXERCISES AND ACTIVITIES FOR L2 LISTENERS? Pedagogical strategies and priorities. TASKS - Extract topic/gist (first listening). - Get details of new items (second listening), (who, what, when, where). - Evaluate emotional impact of new items (third listening), this can vary but the listener should give reasons for the choice. - Neutral report of the information. - Information makes me happy/sad. - Information worries/surprises me. - Information annoys me. Teachers need to design a variety of listening tasks that resemble games and at the same time focus on identification and recognition of spoken sequences.
EASIER TASK------------------------------- The identification of certain key words. MORE COMPLEX TASK-------------------- The identification of specific items. MUCH MORE COMPLEX TASK--------------------The reasons for actions.
DISCOURSE FUNCTION OF ITEMS -
Cue words and discourse markers that signal what the main points and minor points are. Lexical and structural cues including lexical routines and chunks that signal a new term and or a definition or some other motional construct. Key text segments that serve as higher order organizers. Words and phrases used to open or close a topic. Ways to ask a question or to interrupt the speaker. Ways to ask for clarification or elaboration. Native listeners and non-natives listeners must actively use a variety of schemata and contextual clues to accurately interpret oral messages, phonological signals, such as stress, lexical phrases, and word order, and higher level organizing elements that we find in conversational structures are all critical in signalling information to the listener.
Reading (chapter 7) The interactive nature of the reading process When reading a written text, the reader has to: - Decode the message.
- Interpret the message. - Understand the message. These are simultaneous tasks performed by the reader and it is a process that involves three participants: - the writer. - the text. - the reader. Two different approaches to reading - Top-down approach: continuum of changing hypothesis about the incoming information. - Bottom-up approach: a series of stages that proceeds in a fixed order from sensory input to comprehension. Both approaches occur simultaneously in the reading process.
The effective reader What do readers do when they face a new written text? They go through different mental questions related to their expectations, their knowledge about the writer or the reasons why reading the text. The last aspect is the one which influences most readers when selecting reading strategies. It also guides the intensity with which they want to read.
Features of a well-written text: coherence and cohesion Both facilitate the interpretation of the text during the reading process.
Coherence: a text needs to make sense to the reader in order to be fully coherent. It is not only text-based but also reader-centered. From the reader’s point of view, coherence is the result of the interaction between text-presented knowledge and text-user’s schemata (or stored knowledge) regarding information and text structures. Example: Credit cards are convenient, but dangerous. People often get them in order to make large purchases easily without saving up lots of money in advance. This is especially helpful for purchases like cars, kitchen appliances, etc. that you may need to get without delay. However, this convenience comes at a high price: interest rates. The more money you put on your credit card, the more the bank or credit union will charge you for that convenience. If you are not careful, credit card debt can quickly break the bank and leave you in very dire economic circumstances.
Cohesion: It provides text’s unity and connectedness. Example: There was a little
girl who had a dog and a white mouse. One day the mouse got out of its jar and ran away. The girl and the dog looked for the mouse everywhere but they couldn’t find it. Cohesion relies on grammar and lexis. It relates to the reader’s linguistic competence. Deficiencies in this area may cause difficulties in the interpretation process. Halliday and Hasan identify 5 general categories of cohesive devices that create cohesion in texts: - reference: definite article, demonstrative and personal pronouns. - ellipsis: omission of structures or words to avoid repetition of identical items that are in a preceding or following construction. - substitution: to replace words or structures. - lexical cohesion: synonymy, hyponymy, etc. - conjunction: coordinators, subordinators.
DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED BY READERS WHILE READING GLOBAL PROCESSING DIFFICULTIES
Readers often face a dilemma with respect to the plausibility of the message or the information presented in the text, when perceived from their own point of view. When, however, a mismatch occurs, it greatly interferes with comprehension and demonstrates the disadvantages of relying too heavily on top-down processing.
Language classes need to make students aware of such difficulties and encourage them to develop individual strategies as well as develop some tolerance for coping with complex or poorly written texts. Another source of difficulty might be in the interaction between old and new information. In order to be able to identify old and new information in the text and thus evaluate the writer´s position and intention and recruit his/her own relevant schema, the reader must employ linguistic knowledge that grammatically signals such distinctions. The most important grammatical signals in English include reference markers, the sequence of tenses, conjunctions, the article system, and so forth.
GRAMMATICAL FEATURES THAT CAUSE READING DIFFICULTIES In English, nominalization is a grammatical process that enables the writer to compact a great deal of information into one noun phrase. The complexity of any given English noun phrase may be due to multiple modifiers such as one finds in complex compounds, relatives clauses with deleted relative pronouns, and various other compound modifiers in prenominal position. These types of structures are extremely common in English exposition in general and in scientific writing in particular. The stringing together of multiple modifiers can make recognition of the head noun during bottom-up processing quite difficult. Since from the reader's point of view it is not all clear that the head must be in final position (other languages do not necessarily have such a feature), any of the individual nouns might be perceived as potential heads of the phrase. Readers whose linguistic proficiency enables them to make quick and accurate identification of the head noun in complex noun phrases will end up processing the text faster and more accurately. This bottom-up processing skill is facilitative when it works well, but damaging when the ESL/EFL reader misinterprets the position of the head noun. Adjectival clauses with deleted subjects potentially create a twofold difficulty. On one the one hand, they may interfere with the identification of the modifier and the head; on the other hand, the grammatical form of the participles may mislead readers into thinking that such a construction is a verb phrase.
DISCOURSE FEATURES THAT MIGHT CAUSE PROBLEMS
The reader relies on grammatical features that provide indications of reference such as the pronoun system, the article system, or demonstratives. However, English often
creates ambiguity in terms of such referential ties since redundant elements such as case and gender are not always available, or if available, still allow for multiple possible antecedents. Another important device of English discourse and grammar that creates intersentential cohesion within a written text is the use of tense and aspect markers. ESL/EFL reading course should provide activities that enable learners to locate instances of obscure reference, giving them the opportunity to practice identification and utilization of such reference.
LEXICAL ACCESSIBILITY Accordingly, textbook writers and reading specialists have often suggested that readers guess the meaning of unfamiliar words by using clues from the text, thus minimizing the use of dictionaries. This strategy is useful and generally very effective and provides readers with important short cuts and increases decoding speed. Only when readers can combine their general knowledge with information drawn from the text is there a good chance that guessing word meanings from context will be successful. For teaching purposes it is necessary to analyze reading passages carefully before they are assigned to intermediate-level students. On the other hand, the teacher or textbook writer should identify the words that have no textual support in the passage and provide easily accessible glosses for them. Students should be shown why the meaning of certain words cannot be guessed from the context.
SUGGESTIONS FOR DEVELOPING A READING COURSE Four such goals will be discussed in this section, the focus being that a reading course today should try to do the following: maximize independent reading opportunities, facilitate negotiated interaction with texts, foster metacognitive awareness and learner autonomy, and expand access to new content areas. When planning a reading course, one of the major considerations should be giving learners ample time and opportunity to engage in independent reading. Silent reading in guided situations, shared reading in groups, and individual reading inside and outside the classroom should all be carefully planned as an integral part of the reading course.
READING ACTIVITIES THAT LEAD TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF STRATEGIC READING The knowledge component necessary for reading effectively, as we have seen, consists of three subcomponents that need to be tackled in developing a reading course: language knowledge, which includes recognition of vocabulary and syntax as well as graphic representations: discourse knowledge and sociocultural knowledge, which include recognition and understanding of discourse features that are textual in nature (e.g. cohesion), discourse features that relate to writing conventions and genres and social and cultural knowledge related to writing: and general (prior) knowledge of the world. The selection of the reading passages, stories, and articles is perhaps the most important feature of a good reading course. It is the combination of intensive work on the knowledge component along with ample processing activities that makes for a successful reading course. However, in order to ensure the development of strategic reading skills the teacher must also devote attention to reader awareness and metacognition, as we have discussed. For younger learners, reading activities can focus on a) the purpose of reading; (b) the development of reading strategies; and (c) gaining information and knowledge.
Writing (chapter 8)
Introduction
WRITING
It is the responsibility of the writing teacher to help novice writers develop into experienced writers. This chapter is designed to help writing teacher meet this responsibility. Personal writing strategies, preferences, and techniques characterize each individual writer. Language teachers and writing teachers need to become aware of the individual differences that their learners exhibit and of the variety of texts that can be created.
WRITING AS COMMUNICATION THE INTERACTIVE APPROACH
Writing, when viewed as a language skill used for communication, has much in common with both reading and speaking. Writing is the production of the written word that results in a text but the text must be read and comprehended in order to take place. The relationship that holds between reading and writing is quite obvious: it is the relationship between the production and reception ends of the continuum. The relationship of writing to the speaking skill, however, is quite different: Both speaking and writing are productive language skills that enable a language user to express ideas and communicate them to others. Various rationales have been suggested for the relationship between speech and writing, with two conflicting positions: (1) that writing is different from speech and (2) that writing is similar to speech. The former view reflects the observation that speaking is related to the “here” and “now” of a given speaker and is therefore strongly “context bound”. In the first approach, writing is viewed as a much more decontextualized production process in which the writer needs to continually consider and accommodate an absent reader-audience to his or her ideas. The second school of thought takes a more social view of the writing process and therefore perceives it as similar to speech. Such an approach often compares writing to speech events (Myers, 1987) that need to adhere to specific writing conventions. Perhaps the strongest relation between speech and writing was expressed by Vygotsky (1962, 1973), who viewed writing as monologic speech based on socialized dialogic speech. Both reading and writing deal with written text. In both processing frameworks the language user begins with prior knowledge and experience with written texts, combining this with discourse knowledge of writing conventions and with assessment of the purpose and intent related either to reading or writing, as the case may be. Language knowledge is important for bottom-up processing whether we are interpreting a written text or editing our written product. Perhaps the most significant similarity between the writing process and speech production is a concern with bridging the gap between producer and receiver. It is such a reader-based approach that places special focus on the connection between reading and writing and views writing as aiming to produce a text that can be “read successfully”.
WRITING FOR A READER-MATCHING THE WRITER'S AND READER'S SCHEMATA
It is actually through schooling and personal development throughout our lifetime that we expand our use of the writing skill. The school environment is usually the first and most dominant situation in which young people are expected to partake in writing tasks, and students often perceive the teacher as their only reader audience. Being able to anticipate the reader's´ needs when they read the text we are creating is perhaps the most important characteristic of a successful writer. Experienced writers, on the other hand, are sensitive to the reader, as well as to background knowledge and potential content schemata and thus are able to use elaboration skills to create a text that is comprehensible and communicative in nature. Research in writing has found that training in elaboration skills is important not only for young writers but also for college students in freshmen courses and basic writers of any age who lack the sense of an audience and fail to generate potential reader demands for elaboration. Writing instruction needs to place special focus on developing this awareness of potential reader audiences in L1 and later on in L2. There is good reason to believe that having a good foundation in writing in one's first language can help one eventually become a good writer in a second language. The expressivist approach views writing as an act which leads to and encourages “self-discovery” and is therefore crucial in the development of an educated person. The cognitivist approach, on the other hand, places great importance on “writing as a problem-solving activity” and therefore emphasizes thinking and process in writing. According to this approach, writing requires the ability to work with higher-order thinking skills. Going back to the four components of Berlin´s model, we have viewed the writer thus far as a creator, designer, and reformulator of the text. Such a process, if it is to adjust to a reader audience, has to take into account the given audience and what that audience brings to the reading process. The writer needs to take into consideration the reality in which a text is written and the imagined reality in which the text will be read. It is Berlin's fourth component, the language of the text, which places additional responsibility on the writer to also make his/her text accessible to readers at the local level.
WRITING AS PROCESS
CREATING COHERENCE IN A TEXT
A writer who undertakes the task of creating a written text for communication purposes is faced with the need to organize his/her thoughts into a sequence which makes sense. Whatever the initial steps of writing are for the individual writer, they eventually lead to the process of organizing thoughts.
CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC
In teaching ESL/EFL we often come across the difficulty that students encounter when reading or writing expository texts if they come from a cultural background where coherence conventions are different from those in Western rhetorical tradition. Problems of this sort are dealt with systematically in the subfield of written discourse called contrastive rhetoric. Hartmann (1980) and others have emphasized the need for researchers in contrastive rhetoric to use parallel texts when carrying out any comparative analysis so that the genre, topic, and register of the texts are controlled. For example, one can compareon many levels- personal essays on the same topic or news articles on the same topic in two or more languages.
STRATEGIES AND STEPS IN CREATING COHERENCE
Although the reader, while interpreting the text, creates his/her own version of the text, this happens most easily if the text has been carefully planned by the writer. It is the responsibility of the writer to produce a text that will be coherent to the potential reader, and it is the responsibility of the writing teacher to help writers develop strategies to do so. These strategies involve considerations of extratextual features that relate to the background knowledge the reader is likely to bring to the reading of the text and intratextual features that the writer must build into the text in order to ensure coherence. Many different activities can make students aware of the importance of coherence. An important consideration in the creation of coherence in a text is the choice of genre and rhetorical format, which in turn is closely related to the purpose of writing. Obviously, coherence needs to be created somewhat differently for each of these audiences relating to the different background knowledge that each of them brings to the reading of the text. Lautamatti (1990) makes an important distinction between p ropositional coherence and interactional coherence. Propositional coherence, the semantic property of texts, creates a logical progression within the text. On the basis of this progression,
comprehension of the text can be established in the mind of the reader who perceives a connecting thread among the propositions presented in the text and relates it to his/her own knowledge of the world. Formally, this type of coherence is reflected in the cohesive features of the text such as appropriate use of referential ties, lexical chains, and conjunctions or transitional expressions. Interactional coherence, on the other hand, is more prominent in spoken discourse, yet it may also apply to more personal or intimate types of writing. Planning ahead, organizing the ideas and propositions, providing connections and support, and constantly revising the text to make it more “reader-based” are some of the ways in which a writer creates coherence in a written text.
CREATING A WELL-WRITTEN TEXT
It is possible to view coherence as a feature of a text that is related to top-down planning and organization. A well-written text, however, also has to conform to more local and specific features of the text such as choosing proper lexical items and grammatical forms, appropriate use of cohesive devices, and using proper punctuation and others details of form. These relate to bottom-up strategies in creating a text. One of the important features of a well-formed text is the unity and connectedness that make the individual sentences in the text ”hang” together and relate to each other. The overall coherence of a longer passage depends on the coherence within each paragraph or section of the text. Harris (1990) investigated the organizational functions fulfilled by opening sentences of paragraphs in scientific writing. According to Bardovi- Harlig (1990:45), a sentence within a passage has three levels: the syntactic, the semantic, and the pragmatic. In teaching writing it is important to exposure students to such different stylistic versions of the same text so that they can understand what options the English language makes available to them and how some choices can render the message in a text in a more effective or convincing manner. In order to create the thread that holds the text together and creates unity and interest, an experienced writer will use the cohesive elements in the language in order to establish a clear sequence of anaphoric reference. From what has been said thus far, it is clear that creating a well-written text is a process that requires many conscious decisions along the way, especially prior to writing. Many experienced writers need to plan the overall structure of a text in order to ensure global coherence. Within each paragraph the opening sentence should be carefully composed to serve a major purpose in the logical development of the ideas
presented. Cohesion should be properly exploited to ensure back reference and forward progression in the discourse.
WRITING INSTRUCTION
BREAKING THE INITIAL BARRIER
One of the initial steps in writing instruction must, therefore, involve breaking the barrier and alleviating the anxiety which may accompany the writing task. The teacher´s first goal in writing instruction must be to convince students that everybody can write successfully for some purpose, even if the resulting writing products are quite different. Perhaps the most important barrier to break is the feeling that “I have nothing to write about”. Preparatory work prior to writing is crucial here-brainstorming activities, discussions, and oral interactions of various types such as role-play activities through which students can discover they have a lot to say about the subject can be most helpful.
CHOOSING A TOPIC AND CHOOSING THE GENRE
Choosing a topic or a theme for writing is an important initial step for classroom writing. Once the students as a group, or individual son their own, have identified a topi con which they want to write, the next step would be to think of the reader or the audience to whom the written product would be addressed. The identification of the intended reader leads to a whole list of considerations that need to be thought out prior to the actual task of writing. Once these questions have been considered, there is often room for the choice of genre as well. Will the written product be a story? Will it be a factual description? Will it be in the form of a letter or perhaps an advertisement in a newspaper? Sometimes we are writing in a situation in which the genre is given and the audience is well defined. Other times we can make these decisions when we engage in the writing process.
TACTICS FOR PLANNING THE WRITING PROCESS
Many different ways of planning for the activity of writing have been suggested in the literature. One of the best known is that of preparing an outline for the text that one is going to write. Another common and more intricate planning technique is preparation of a flowchart.
READING AS A MODEL FOR WRITING
Many writing courses and certainly most autodidactic strategies in writing involve
using well-written passages from literature, or passages written by others, as models for one's own writing. At the least such passages serve as stimuli for writing by providing content people want to react to. Thus, many writing classes begin with reading texts, analyzing them, looking at them from both the reader's and writer's perspective, and finally using them as models for writing or using them as a piece of communication to respond to. The analysis of models has the potential of making them better writers once they start writing.
THE PORTFOLIO
The portfolio, which is usually an ongoing collection of different writing assignments kept by the student in a folder or workbook, has become an important concept in developing writing skills and in giving teachers a fairer and more perceptive way to evaluate. Each student writes and rewrites assignments, personal messages, essays, letters, summaries, and any other kind of writing done for a class. A portfolio is also used in preparing a longer writing Project that involves collecting information and a variety of data on a topic before the actual writing is done. Thus, students have an opportunity to go through various types of writing tasks within the larger Project.
WRITING AND REWRITING
One of the most important things a writing class should aim at is bringing the students to the point where they are willing to revise and feel comfortable about revising what they have written. Two major techniques are helpful in this context: peer review/feedback and self-questioning
Speaking (chapter 9) Learning to speak a new language implies the use of more than just one skill. In some way, speaking can be considered the most difficult skill to acquire since it requires command of both listening comprehension and speech production subskills. This chapter will deal with the linguistic, the sociocultural, the contextual and the personal features of speaking in another language.
Making oneself understood in a second language: message and medium in oral communication. In order to interpret any spoken message, we need to have a wealth of information beyond the linguistic elements appearing in any statement produced in the oral medium or channel. This distinction between speaking and writing is also referred to as modality. Misunderstanding in oral communication can be the result of: 1. The speaker does not have full command of the target linguistic knowledge and produces an unacceptable or even unintelligible form. 2. The necessary background knowledge is not shared by the speaker and the hearer. 3. The speaker and the hearer do not share sociocultural rules of appropriacy. The message of the speaker is to be understood and for the message to be properly interpreted by the hearer(s). The speaker’s intention needs to be communicated but a ‘faulty’ production of any of the three areas may create a piece of spoken discourse that gets misunderstood. To ensure proper interpretation: - Factors of form. - Factors of appropriacy. - Speaker’s linguistic competence. The interactive perspective of oral communication. The speaker initiates the interaction with a communicative intention that is to be realized through verbal utterances that make use of the speaker’s language knowledge and repertoire of speaking skills and communication strategies. The hearer, on the other hand, brings her/his own set of presuppositions and expectations to the interaction in order to interpret the speaker’s message, and later react to it by changing roles and becoming the speaker.
Choosing the linguistic features In producing spoken discourse, speakers use their grammatical competence in order to produce linguistically acceptable utterances in the target language. Besides, a meaningful piece of discourse is related to context and there is cohesion and coherence. Levelt (1978) identified three important contextual factors in speech production: demand, arousal and feedback. Demand refers to the amount of processing required by a task. Arousal is the speaker’s emotional and cognitive response to a task and relates to the importance that the individual attaches to the communicative interaction. Thirdly, feedback refers to what the speaker receives from the listener(s) and the wider environment and affects the performance. The linguistic features have a serious impact on successful production of spoken discourse; however, sociocultural norms may play an even more significant role in successful interaction. In English, for instance, it is not polite to express
disagreement in a direct manner. That is why the speaker needs to have reached a certain level of language knowledge. In the process of speech production, language ability needs to be combined with sociocultural considerations. Adhering to rules of appropriacy Sociocultural rules of appropriacy are viewed today as an integral part of a person’s communicative competence. The field of pragmatics includes the study of social situations and it consists of two subfields: - Pragmalinguistics: the use of language in context. - Sociopragmatics: societal rules of behaviour. Both subfields are concerned with: the characteristics of the individuals who take part in the communicative exchange (age, social status, social distance); features of the situation in which this exchange takes place; the goal of the exchange; features of the communicative medium. Sociocultural norms need to become part of the speaker’s knowledge. Furthermore, speakers will have to make choices with respect to register. A more intimate and casual register is used in immediate and familiar contexts while a more formal register is used in occupational on everyday situations. Maxims of oral interaction Grice suggests a set of four maxims that apply when natural conversation functions efficiently: A. The maxim of quantity: the provision of necessary information by the speaker, not too much and not too little. B. The maxim of quality: the speaker’s conviction that he/she is stating the truth and the hearer accepts the utterances made by the speaker. C. The maxim of relevance: relevance of what is being said. D. The maxim of manner: produce a coherent, well-presented utterance. Participating in oral interaction Maintaining the flow of speech: transferring ideas from one interactant to the other. - Turn-taking rules: change roles constantly and constructing shared meaning by maintaining the flow of talk. - Conversation analysis: it describes the sequences that are developed and the sequential constraints that are characteristic of the natural flow of conversation. A native speaker knows how to function at the transition points. Accommodating the hearer(s): the speaker needs to accommodate the hearer, facilitate the interpretation of the spoken message, maintain eye contact and pay careful attention to the hearer’s body language. Interacting as a speaker in a new lñanguage requires self-awareness and self-evaluation and a considerable amount of tolerance and accommodation.
Learners of a second/foreign language need to be exposed to a variety of situations in which such exchanges take place. But above all, nonnative speakers need to posses communication strategies that can facilitate and make adjustments in incomplete or failing interactions. Nonnative speakers’ communication strategies differed from native speakers’ strategies in terms of frequency and formulation types rather than in mental processes. Can strategy-based instruction improve speaking ability in a second or foreign language? The results indicate that an integration of strategy training with the regular language instruction taking place in the classroom can improve learners’ ability to communicate through spoken discourse. Some prerequisites for speaking in another language The linguistic, sociocultural and discourse competencies ensure better oral communication and are part of discourse knowledge: a) knowing the vocabulary relevant to the situation. b) ability to use discourse connectors (well, ok, etc.). c) ability to use suitable opening and closing phrases (excuse me). d) ability to comprehend and use reduced forms. e) knowing the syntax for producing basic clauses in the language. f) ability to use the basic intonation, patterns of the language. g) ability to use proper rhythm and stress with the proper pauses. h) awareness of how to apply Grice’s maxims. i) knowing how to use the interlocutors’ reactions and input. j) awareness of the various conversational rules that facilitate the flow of talk. Speaking in the language classroom should enable students to gain experience using all the ‘prerequisites’ for effective oral communication. What makes a classroom activity useful for speaking practice? It is the authentic opportunity to get individual meanings and utilize every area of knowledge. Students should become flexible users of their knowledge through: - role play - group discussions - using the target language outside the classroom - using the learner’s input - feedback - authentic speech
BIBLIOGRAPHY: -
Celce-Murcia, M. & Olshtain, E. (2000): Discourse and Context in Language Teaching. A Guide for Language Teachers. Chapters 6, 7, 8 &; 9. U.K.: CUP.