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UNIT 5
ORAL COMMUNICATION. ELEMENTS AND RULES GOVERNING
ORAL DISCOURSE. EVERYDAY ROUTINES AND FORMULAIC
SPEECH. SPECIFIC STRATEGIES IN ORAL COMMUNICATION.
OUTLINE1. INTRODUCTION. 1.1. Aims of the unit. 1.2. Notes on bibliography.
2. A HISTORICAL APPROACH TO ORAL COMMUNICATION: ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT.
2.1. On the nature of communication: origins and general features. 2.2. Language and communication.
2.3. Language, communication and social behavior.
2.4. Oral communication and language learning: from an oral tradition to a communicative approach.
2.4.1. Earlier times: religious sources and oral tradition. Up to XVIth century.
2.4.2. First approaches to the oral component in language teaching. XVIIth and XVIIIth century.
2.4.3. Approaches to the oral component in the XIXth century. 2.4.4. Current trends in XXth century: a communicative approach.
2.5. An assessment model of communicative competence: a basis for oral discourse analysis. 2.6. Theoretical approaches to oral discourse analysis.
2.6.1. A Speech Act Theory.
2.6.2. Grice’s cooperative principle and conversational maxims. 2.6.3. Conversational Analysis and Turn-Taking.
2.6.4. Conversational Analysis and Adjacency Pairs. 3. ELEMENTS AND RULES GOVERNING ORAL DISCOURSE.
3.1. Elements governing oral discourse. 3.1.1. Linguistic elements. 3.1.2. Non-linguistic elements. 3.2. Rules governing oral discourse.
3.2.1. Rules of usage. 3.2.2. Rules of use.
3.2.3. Conversational studies.
4. EVERYDAY ROUTINES AND FORMULAIC SPEECH. 5. SPECIFIC STRATEGIES IN ORAL COMMUNICATION.
6. PRESENT-DAY DIRECTIONS REGARDING ORAL COMMUNICATION. 6.1. New directions from an educational approach.
6.2. Implications into language teaching. 7. CONCLUSION.
2/28 1. INTRODUCTION.
1.1. Aims of the unit.
In this study, we shall approach the notion of oral communication and its general features in relation to the field of language teaching. This survey will be developed into three main sections. The first part is an attempt to introduce the reader to the historical development of the notion of oral communication from its anthropological origins to a vast literature on a theory of language
learning , providing the reader with the most relevant present-day approaches in language learning
research on this issue. The aim of this analysis is to examine briefly the components of communicative competence and to explore the nature and the different functions of spoken language, with particular reference to components governing oral discourse. We shall examine the notion of communication from a diachronic perspective, analysing its development from its origins to the prominent role it plays nowadays in language and language learning theories.
In the second part, a revision of the literature shall lead us, first, towards the treatment of oral
discourse within the framework of a communicative approach, and secondly, towards a revision of
the main oral components in different subsections. Among those components to be considered in the third section of our study, we include elements and rules governing oral discourse; everyday routines and formulaic speech, and specific strategies in oral communication.
The third section deals with general patterns of discourse regarding elements and rules. Hence, our study starts first with an analysis of the linguistic and non-linguistic elements taking part in oral discourse. In next sections, it then turns to routines and formulaic language, regarding rules of usage and rules of use within the prominent role of conversational studies. To finish with, and in conjunction to our goal, discourse strategies will be examined.
Furthermore in the sixth section, we shall consider new directions in language learning research, and current implications on language teaching, regarding the treatment of speaking and listening skills as part of the oral component. Finally, a conclusion will provide again a brief historical overview of the treatment given to the oral component by a language le arning theory. Bibliography will be fully listed at the end of this survey for readers to check further references.
1.2. Notes on bibliography.
Numerous sources have contributed to provide an overall basis for the development of the unit. A valuable introduction to the anthropological origins of language is given by Juan Goytisolo, Chairman of the International Jury Speech (UNESCO), and David Crystal, Linguistics (1985). For a historical overview of the development of the notion of oral communication regarding language
teaching, see Halliday, Explorations in the Functions of Language (1973); Tricia Hedge, Teaching
and learning in the Language Classroom (2000); Brown and Yule, Teaching the Spoken Language (1983); and Canale and Swain, Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing (1980). Among the many general works that incorporate the studies on
communicative competence, see Hymes, On Communicative Competence (1972); Brown and Yule,
Discourse Analysis (1983); and Canale, From Communicative Competence to Communicative Language Pedagogy (1983). The most complete record of current publications on discourse analysis and conversational studies is published by van Dijk, Text and Context: Explorations in the Semantics and Pragma tics of Discourse (1977); Goffman, Forms of Talk (1981); Krauss, Language, cognition and communication (1993); Sperber and Wilson, Relevance: Communication and cognition (1986); Austin , How to do things with words (1962); Searle , Speech Acts: An essay in the philosophy of language (1969); and Searle, Indirect speech acts (1985). For further references to
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future directions and implications on language teaching, see B.O.E. (2002), B.O.E. (2002); Council of Europe Modern Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. A Common European Framework of reference. (1998); and Tricia Hedge, Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom (2000).
2. A HISTORICAL APPROACH TO ORAL COMMUNICATION: ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT.
We shall provide in this section a linguistic background for the notion of oral communication, concerning human communication systems and its main features, in order to establish a link between the notion of communication and the concept of language concerning human social behavior. All these terms are interrelated as they serve as a basis for communicative event processes and their description.
Once the link between language, communication and social behavior is established, we will give a broad account of how the oral component has been approached through history, from an oral tradition to a communicative approach, since language is handed down from one generation to another by a process of teaching and learning. This historical and educational approach will progressively lead us to the main current theories and theorists on the issue of oral discourse and communicative event processes.
Upon this basis, we will move on towards a description of a linguistic theory on oral discourse in terms of a speech act theory and conversational analysis, where we will approach this concepts within the framework of discourse analysis and the most relevant figures in this field.
As a result, the third section will examine mainly elements, rules, routines and strategies in a speaking act, in order to understand the notion of oral communication and the nature of its social behavior implications.
2.1. On the nature of communication: origins and general features.
Research in cultural anthropology has shown quite clearly that the origins of communication are to be found in the very early stages of life when there was a need for animals and humans to communicate so as to carry out basic activities of everyday life, such as hunting, eating, or breeding among others. However, even the most primitive cultures had a constant need to express their feelings and ideas by other means than gutural sounds and body movements as animals did. Human beings constant preoccupation was how to turn thoughts into words.
It is worth, at this point, establishing a distinction between human and animal systems of communication whose features differ in the way they produce and express their intentions. So far, the most important feature of human language is the auditory-vocal channel which, in ancient times, allowed human beings to produce messages and, therefore to help language develop. Among other main features, we may mention the possibility of exchanging messages among individuals; a sense of displacement in an oral interaction in space and time which animals do not have; the arbitrariness of signs where words and meanings have no a priori connection; and finally, the possibility of a traditional transmission as language is handed down from one generation to another by a process of teaching and learning.
From a theory of language, we shall define the notion of communication in terms of its main features regarding the oral component, thus types and elements. First, in relation to types of
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communication is related to those acts in which the code is the language , both oral and written. Thus, giving a speech and writing a letter are both instances of verbal communication. Secondly, when dealing with non-verbal devices, we refer to communicative uses involving visual and tactile modes, such as kinesics, body movements, and also paralinguistic devices drawn from sounds (whistling), sight (morse) or touch (Braille). According to Goytisolo (2001), the oral tradition in public performances is involves the participation of the five senses as the public sees, listens, smells, tastes, and touches.
Thirdly, regarding elements in the communication process, we will follow the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson and his productive model on language theory which explains how all acts of communication, be they written or oral, are based on six constituent elements (1960).It is worth noting at this point that, within the aim of this unit, we shall relate Jakobson’s elements to their respective components in oral communication.
Briefly, according to Jakobson, the Addresser/encoder (speaker) sends a Message (oral utterance) to the Addressee/ decoder (listener). Messages are embedded in or refer to Contexts which the Addressee must be able to grasp and perhaps even verbalize. The Addresser and Addressee need to partially share a Code (language as verbal, and symbols as non-verbal devices) between them, that is, the rules governing the relationship between the Message and its context; and the Message is sent through a physical channel (air) and Contact, a psychological connection, is established between Addresser and Addressee so that they may enter and stay in communication (1960).
2.2. Language and communication.
Linguists often say that language and communication are not the same thing, and certainly this is true. People can and do communicate without language, and species that do not use language, which include all except Homo Sapiens, seem able to communicate adequately for their purposes, with and without language. If language were nothing more than a tool for communication, it would warrant social psychologists’ interest (Krauss & Chiu 1993). However, there are common features to the notions of language and communication, such as purposes and elements (participants). Main contributions on describ ing communication purposes are given by the anthropologist Malinowsky who claimed in the early twentieth century for two main purposes, thus a pragmatic purpose related to the practical use of language both oral and written, and also, a ritual purpose associated to ceremonies and ancient chants. More recently, another definition comes from Halliday (1973) who defines language as an instrument of social interaction with a clear communicative purpose. Moreover, Brown and Yule (1973) established a useful distinction between two basic language functions, thus transactional and interactional, whose communication purpose was mainly to maintain social relationships through speech.
Regarding participants, according to Johnson (1981), oral communication is depicted as an activity involving two (or more) people in which the participants are both hearers and speakers having to react to what they hear and making their contributions at high speed. In the interaction process, he adds, each participant has to be able to interpret what is said to him and reply to what has just been said reflecting their own intentions. We are talking, then, about an interactive situation directly related and dependent on the communicative function and the speech situation involving speaker and hearer. As we shall see in next section, the way participants interact in a communicative event has much to do with social psychology as social life constitute an intrinsic part of the way language is used.
5/28 2.3. Language and social behavior.
As we may perceive, language pervades social life. It is the principal vehicle for the transmission of cultural knowledge, and the primary means by which we gain access to the contents of others’ minds. Language is involved in most of the phenomena that lie at the core of social psychology, thus attitude change, social perception, personal identity, social interaction, and stereotyping among others. Moreover, for social psychologists, language typically is the medium by which subjects’ responses are elicited, and in which they respond. For instance, in social psychological research, more often than not, language plays a role in both stimulus and response (Krauss & Chiu 1993). Just as language use is present in social life, the elements of social life constitute an intrinsic part or the way language is used. Linguists regard language as an abstract structure that exists independently of specific instances of usage. However, any communicative exchange is situated in a social context that constrains the linguistic forms participants use. How these participants define the social situation, their perceptions of what others know, think and believe, and the claims they make about their own and others’ identities will affect the form and content or their acts of speaking.
The ways la nguages are used are constrained by the way they are constructed, particularly the linguistic rules that govern the permissible usage forms, for instance, grammatical rules. Language has been defined as an abstract set of principles that specify the relations between a sequence of sounds and a sequence of meanings. Thus, the sound of a door slamming may express the slammer’s exasperation eloquently, but language conveys meaning in an importantly different way. For present purposes, we will think about language as a set of complex, organized systems that operate in concert when any particular act of speaking is under revision with respect to levels of
analysis that have significance for social behavior (Miller 1975).
In the first level of analysis, we find that languages are made up of four systems, the phonological, the morphological, the syntactic , and the semantic which, taken together, constitute its grammar. Firstly, the phonological system is concerned with the analysis of an acoustic signal into a sequence of speech sounds, thus consonants, vowels, and syllables, that are distinctive for a particular language or dialect. Out of the variety of sounds the human vocal tract is capable of producing, each language selects a small subset that constitute that language’s phonemes, or elementary units of sound. Secondly, the morphological system is concerned with the way words and meaningful subwords are constructed out of these phonological elements. Thirdly, the syntactic system is concerned with the organization of these morphological elements into higher level units, such as phrases and sentences. Finally, the semantic system is concerned with the meanings of these higher level units.
At another level of analysis, acts of speaking can be regarded as actions intended to accomplish a specific purposes by verbal means. Looked at this way, according to Austin (1962) and Searle (1969, 1985), utterances can be thought of as speech acts that can be identified in terms of their
intended purposes, thus assertions, questions, requests among others. However, we must bear in
mind that the grammatical form does not determine the speech act an utterance represents. For instance, two similar utterances like “How can I get to Central Park?” and “Could you tell me how I can get to Central Park?” are both in the interrogative mode, but they constitute quite different speech acts. Considerations on this sort require a distinction be drawn between the semantic or literal meaning of an utterance and its intended meaning. Acts of speaking are imbedded in a
discourse made up of a coherently related sequence of such acts. Thus, conversation and narratives
are two types of discourse, and each has a formal structure that constrains participants’ acts of speaking.
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The sections that follow review how oral communication has been approached from a language learning theory in four periods in history, thus earlier times up to the sixteenth century; first approaches during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; approaches in the nineteenth century, and finally, current approaches in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We believe that this literature review will help the reader understand the role of religion, oral tradition, and language teaching approaches in the development of oral commun ication studies and research. We also believe that a clearer understanding of the social nature of the situations in which language is used will deepen our general understanding of the principles and mechanisms that underlie language use, and in particular, oral discourse. Later sections will draw upon linguistic concepts introduced above.
2.4. Oral communication and language learning: from an oral tradition to a communicative approach.
2.4.1. Earlier times: religious sources and oral tradition. Up to XVIth century.
As Juan Goytisolo (2001) stated in his speech on defending threaten cultures at the Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible heritage of Humanity, we must first examine our historical knowledge of both oral and written cultures so as to provide ourselves a cultural identity in society. The fact that the existence of homo sapiens and appearance of language can be traced back some forty or fifty thousand years whereas the first evidence of writing is from 3500 B.C., reveals the antiquity or the oral patrimony of humanity. Therefore, the period which encompasses primary
orality is consequently ten times the length of the era of writing. Since ancient times, tribal chiefs,
chamans, bards and story-tellers have been in charge of preserving and memorising for the future the narratives of the past. Goytisolo also says that nowadays, it is difficult to find continuers of an oral tradition entirely unpolluted by writing and its technological and visual extensions in our present society, governed by mass communication. He mentions a growing disequilibrium when observing that only seventy-eight of the three thousand languages now spoken in the world possess a living literature based on one of the hundred and six alphabets created throughout history. In other words, hundreds and hundreds of languages used today on our planet have no written form and their communication is exclusively oral.
Goytisolo further points out that acquiring knowledge of this primary orality is an anthropological task in the field of literature and oral narrative. If all cultures are based on language, that is, a combination of spoken and heard sounds, this oral communication which involves numerous
kinetic and corporal elements, has undergone over the centuries a series of changes as the existence
of writing and awareness of the latter have gradually changed the mentality of bards, chamans, tribal chiefs and narrators.The usual forms of popular and traditional expression were oral literature, music, dance , games, mythology, rituals, and even architecture. Besides, cultural places were also important to provide a framework for cultural activities to take place in a concentrated manner. Thus, sites for story-telling, rituals,marketplaces, and festivals. The time for a regularly occurring event was also a part of oral tradition, for instance, daily rituals, annual processions, and regular performances.
Anthropological studies account for non-verbal codes used by humans as improved systems of communication before language was developed. Thus, an art that sprang from the tangible, were probably grimaces, gestures, pauses, and laughter as bodily paralinguistic movements that belong to a situation which is not exclusively oral but it is part of an extraordinary heritage linked to public
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To perform in public is to be linked to a considerable body of religious tradition and myth in many cultures concerning the nature and origins of language (Crystal 1985). That transitional period between sounds and speech was to be characterized by a connection between divinity and language. Therefore, words were regarded as having a separate existence in reality, and as to have embodied the nature of things to be used deliberately to control and influence events. According to the anthropologist Malinowsky, it was believed that if words controlled things, then their power could be intensified by saying them over and over again. Therefore, magic formulae, incantations, rhythmical listing of proper names, and many other rites exemplify the intensifying power of words. Many primitive tribes thought that evils, or people, could be controlled by language in these traditions. There are many examples in folklore of forbidden names which, when discovered, were thought to break the evil spell or their owners. Thus, names such as Tom-tit-tot, Vargaluska, or the famous Rumpelstiltzkin. In a tribal community, to utter the name of a dead person would bring the evil of death upon themselves. In Homeric Verses , we find a conclusive demonstration that Homer’s hexameters were a result of the requirements of public recital in the agora, a specific situation that imposed recourse to easily remembered epithets, sayings, phrases and formulas. Also, in the Roman levies, too, the authorities took good care to enrol first men with auspicious names, such as Felix or Victor, and the like so as not to bother people’s death spirit. Examples of this kind abound in the history of cultures and they simply indicate how deeply ideas about language can come to be ingrained within the individual psyche, and testify to the existence of a language awareness which exercised considerable influence in the development of language as a system of signs. Yet, it was the language of worship which first put an end to the oral traditions in an attempt to preserve in texts their early stages of orality, secondly, the invention of typography in 1440, and nowadays, the modern revolution in computing. Also, in recent decades there has been a fertile investigation of the origin and evolution of Vedic hymns, Biblical narrative and the European literatures of the early Middle Ages. Within Spanish literature prior to the invention of the printing press, in the fourteenth century, we may mention the bardic literature of the various popular Songbooks and the masterpiece that is the Archpriest of Hita’s Book of Good Love.
2.4.2. First approaches to the oral component in language teaching. XVIIth and XVIIIth century. Historically speaking, it is not too difficult to find evidence of the main themes and issues which indicate the respectable ancestry and variegated history of language study. Language has always been so closely tied in with such fields as philosophy, logic, rhetoric, literary criticism, language teaching, and religion that it is rare to find great thinkers of any period who do not at some point in their work comment on the role of language in relation to their ideas (Crystal 1985).
We have found mainly two references to the oral component as a link to language teaching in the seventeenth century with a strong religious component. For instance, the theologian Jan Amos Komensky (1592-1670), Comenius, already stated the reasons for learning a foreign language claiming that through language, we come to a closer understanding of the world. He states indirectly the role of the oral component to the religious issue when saying that modern languages are degenerate forms of an original tongue that was taken from us at the Tower of Babel.
This religious concern towards language is also present in other contemporary works. Thus, in The Leviathan (1660), the philosopher Thomas Hobbes devoted chapter IV “Of Speech” to oral discourse with a strong religious component. In his account of the nature of mankind, he states that the first author of speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as He presented to this sight. Moreover, in this extract, he makes a religious reference to the wide variety of languages worldwide and also, he addresses language teaching as one of the main purposes of
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learning languages when saying that at the tower of Babel, man was forced to disperse themselves and the variety of tongues taught into several parts of the world.
It is worh pointing out that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the status of Latin changed from a living language that learners needed to be able to read, write in, and speak to a dead language which was studied just as an intellectual exercise. During this period, language teaching crystallized in Europe, and the analysis of the grammar and rhetoric of Classical Latin were the current models for language teaching. It was not until the eighteenth century that modern
languages began to enter the curriculum of European schools and progressively developed from
grammatical to more communicative approaches focusing on oral skills, thus listening and speaking. A progressive account of the development in the treatment of the oral component from the eighteenth century on is the aim of our next section.
2.4.3. Approaches to the oral component in the XIXth century.
As we have mentioned above, a grammar translation method was the dominant foreign language teaching method in Europe from the 1840s to the 1940s. However, even as early as the
mid-nineteenth century, there was a greater demand for ability to speak foreign languages, and various
reformers began to reconsider the nature of language and of learning. Among them, we may mention an Englishman, T. Pendergast, and two Frenchmen, C. Marcel and F. Gouin. However, their ideas did not become widespread because they were outside of the established educational circles.
One of the most relevant early contributions to a communicative approach concerning the oral component with no religious links emerged from an empirical study carried out by François Gouin in his work L'art d'enseigner et d'étudier les langue (1880). In his work, he gave an account of the relevance of the oral component when learning languages. He describes his own efforts to learn German by learning grammar with no success at all. Then, during a visit to France, he observed how his nephew, who six months before did not utter a word in German, could hold on in a conversation with logical sequences just by watching German workers in his village. This convinced him of the inefficiency of his own methods as the child became active by conversing with adults with no grammar lessons. What he had done, according to Gouin, was to continually ask questions, climb all over the place, and watch what the workers were doing. Back at home, the child reflected on his experience, and then recited it to his listeners, ten times over, with variations, attempting to produce a logical sequence of activities. To Gouin, the learner then progresses from experience, to ordering that experience, and then to acting it out. This conception of teaching presents language in concrete, active situations, as communicative approches account for nowadays. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was an increasing emphasis on the oral component as linguists such as Henry Sweet of England, Wilhelm Vietor of Germany, and Paul Passy of France became interested in the problem of the best way to teach languages. They believed that language teaching should be based on scientific knowledge about language, and that it should begin with speaking and expand to other skills. Also, that words and sentences should be presented in context, that grammar should be taught inductively, and that translation should, for the most part, be avoided. These ideas spread, they were known as the Direct Method, the first of the natural methods.
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2.4.4. Current trends in XXth century: a communicative approach.
In the field of psychology, in the early to mid-1900s, behaviorism has had a great effect on language teaching studying animal behaviour first, and moving towards human behavior later. One of the most famous of these scientists was Skinner who worked on oral skills in language learning. He theorized that a child repeats words and combinations of words that are praised and thus learns language. Behaviorist theorists believed that languages were made up of a series of habits, and that if learners could develop all these habits, they would speak the language well. From these theories arose the audio-lingual method, which is based on using drills for the formation of good language habits by means of oral skills such as listening and speaking.
During the mid to late twentieth century, great changes took place after World War II, with particular influence on language teaching and learning. Since language diversity greatly increased, there were more opportunities for international travel and business, and international social and
cultural exchanges. As a result, renewed attempts were made in the 1950s and 1960s which
constituted the starting point for more communicative approaches in language teaching. Several factors influences this further development. First, the use of new technology in language teaching at
the level of oral skills, such as tape recorders, radios, TV, and computers. Secondly, research
studies on bilingualism and thirdly, the establishment of methodological innovations, such as the already mentioned audio-lingual method.
It is in this context that the linguist Noam Chomsky challenged the behaviorist model of language learning and proposed a theory called Transformational Generative Grammar. Chomsky’s theory claims for an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions [...] in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance (1965). He also established a distinction between the notions of competence and performance, being competence the implicit or explicit knowledge of the system of the language whereas performance addresses to the actual production and comprehension of language in specific instances of language use. However, Chomsky states that linguistic knowledge is separated from sociocultural features.
Chomsky’s distinction served as basis for work of many other researchers such as the American anthropologist Dell Hymes, who claimed that native speakers know more than just grammatical competence . In his work On communicative competence (1972), he included not only grammatical competence, but also sociolinguistic and contextual competences. Following a tradition on sociolinguistics, Hymes had a broader view of the notion of communicative competence as the underlying knowledge a speaker has of the rules of grammar including phonology, orthography, syntax, lexicon, and semantics, and the rules for their use in socially appropriate circumstances. Therefore, we understand competence as the knowledge of rules of grammar, and performance, the way the rules are used. As we may observe, the oral component is directly addressed in this approach.
In the following sections, the communicative approach will provide the framework for a model assessment with a communicative competence theory where the four competences at work in a communicative event will be examined in order to state the different sections which constitute the development of this study. Thus, elements and rules, everyday routines and formulaic speech, and strategies governing the oral discourse.
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2.5. An assessment model of communicative competence: a basis for oral discourse analysis. In the 1970s and 1980s, an approach to emerged both in Europe and North America focusing on the work of anthropologists, sociologists, and sociolinguists on foreign and second language teaching. In the 1980s, the rapid application of a teaching tasks system broken down into units gave prominence to more interactive views of language teaching, which became to be known as the
Communicative Approach or simply Communicative Language Teaching. Besides, language was
considered as social behaviour, seeing the primary goal of language teaching as the development of the learner's communicative competence.
Learners were considered to need both rules of use to produce language appropriate to particular situations, and strategies for effective communication. Scholars such as Hymes (1972), Halliday (1970), Canale and Swain (1980) or Chomsky (1957) levelled their contributions and criticisms at structural linguistic theories claiming for more communicative approaches on language teaching, where interactive processes of communication received priority. Upon this basis, the introduction
of cultural studies is an important aspect of communicative competence as communicating with
people from other cultures involves not only linguistic appropriateness but also pragmatic appropriateness in the use of verbal and non-verbal behavior. This issue is the aim of an
ethnography of communication theory in order to approach a foreign language from a pragmatic
and linguistic point of view.
One of the principles of Communicative Language Teaching is the concept of communicative competence. The term, introduced by Hymes (1972), implies the knowledge of language rules, and of how these rules are used to understand and produce appropriate language in a variety of sociocultural settings . We must point out that this concept demonstrated a shift of emphasis among linguists away from a narrow focus on language as a formal system. Hymes was concerned with the social and cultural knowledge which a speaker needs in order to understand and use linguistic forms. His view, therefore, encompasses not only knowledge but also the ability to put that knowledge into use in communication.
The verbal part of communicative competence comprises all the so-called four skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing. It is important to highlight this, since there is a very common misunderstanding that communicative competence only refers to the ability to speak. It is both productive and receptive. Hymes stated that native speakers know more than just grammatical competence. So far, he expands the Chomskyan notions of grammaticality (competence) and acceptability (performance) into four parameters subsumed under the heading of communicative
competence. The four competences at work regarding the elements and rules of oral discourse are
as follows: linguistic competence, pragmatic competence, discourse competence, strategic competence, and fluency (Hedge 2000).
First, the linguistic competence, as it deals with linguistic and non-linguistic devices in the oral interaction.This heading subsumes, according to Canale and Swain (1980) all knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics and phonology . It therefore refers to having control over the purely linguistic aspects of the language code itself, regarding verbal and non-verbal codes. This corresponds to Hymes’ grammatical aspect and includes knowledge of the lexicon, syntax, phonology and semantics. Besides, it involves rules of
formulations and constraints for students to match sound and meaning; to form words and
sentences using vocabulary; to use language through spelling and pronunciation; and to handle linguistic semantics.
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Secondly, the pragmatic competence as it also deals with the knowledge the learner has to acquire the sociocultural rules of language. Regarding the rules of discourse, it is defined in terms of the mastery of how to combine grammatical forms and meanings (Canale and Swain 1980). When we deal with appropriateness of form, we refer to the extent to which a given meaning is represented in both verbal and non-verbal form that is proper in a given sociolinguistic context. Moreover, according to Hedge (2000), in order to achieve successful communication, the spoken or written message must also be appropriate to the social context in which it is produced. This is the role of sociolinguistic competence , which is concerned with the social knowledge necessary to select the language forms that are appropriate in different settings, and with people in different roles and with different status. This competence enables a speaker to be contextually appropriate or in Hymes’s words (1972), to know when to speak, when not, what to talk about with whom, when, where and in what manner.
Thirdly, the rules of use and usage, proposed by Widdowson (1978) have to do with the discourse
competence. Here, usage refers to the manifestation of the knowledge of a language system and use
means the realization of the language system as meaningful communicative behavior. Discourse analysis is primarily concerned with the ways in which individual sentences connect together to form a communicative message.
This competence addresses directly to the mastery of how to combine grammatical forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text in different genres (Canale and Swain 1980) by means of cohesion in form and coherence in meaning. Cohesion deals with how utterances are linked structurally and facilitates interpretation of a text by means of cohesion devices, such as pronouns, synonyms, ellipsis, conjunctions and parallel structures to relate individual utterances and to indicate how a group of utterances is to be understood as a text. Yet, coherence refers to the relatioships among the different meanings in a text, where these meanings may be literal meanings, communicative functions, and attitudes.
Finally, we come to the fourth competence at work, the strategic competence. (Canale 1983) where verbal and nonverbal communication strategies may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or due to insufficient competence. This may be achieved by paraphrase, circumlocution, repetition, hesistation, avoidance, guessing as well as shifts in register and style. Hedge (2000) points out that strategic competence consists of using communication strategies which are used by learners to compensate for their limited linguistic competence in expressing what they want to say.
The term fluency relates to language production, and it is normally associated with speech. It is the ability to link units of speech together with facility and without inappropriate slowness, or undue hesitation.
2.6. Theoretical approaches to oral discourse. The role of pragmatics on discourse analysis and conversational studies.
Within the framework of communicative competences, in this section we shall describe the research that is relevant to this area, in order to provide a theoretical possible to distinguish several different traditions as regards methodology and theoretical orientations. Among the most relevant figures in this field, we may mention Austin, Searle, Grice and Goffman whose contributions are still at work.. First of all, there is a tradition of statistical studies of linguistic material, but often without any clear distinction between spoken and written material (Johansson & Stenström 1991), and therefore not reviewed in our study.
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Secondly, another approach is the discourse analytic tradition based on speech act theory. According to Brown (1994), discourse analysis, a branch of linguistics and, in fact, an extension of the linguistics model, deals with language in context beyond the level of the sentence, enabling us to follow the implications of a given utterance. It contributes towards an understanding of cognitive processes. These analysis are conceived both as a grammar of discourse as it is socially oriented, and also, as a linguist application concerning cohesion and coherence. The Prague School linguists had introduced discourse into the agenda of mainstream linguistics through the functional linguistic study.
Also, many studies of spoken language have been carried out from a mainly sociological or
sociolinguistic perspective. This is true, for instance, of the influential tradition called Conversation Analysis which is the sociological counterpart of discourse analysis whose practisers give an
autonomous status. It is a branch of ethnomethodology where talk , which is rule governed, becomes the object of an investigation of social structures and relations, and the structure of a conversation is identified, focusing on the devices for managing the interaction and constructing joint meaning. Conversational mechanisms are, thus turn-taking and the notion of adjacency pairs, examined in next subsections. Besides, conversational analysis is used as a means of understanding second language acquisition of communication strategies (Faerch and Kasper 1983), including the negotiation of meaning and the compensatory strategies non-native speakers use when they have an incomplete knowledge of a foreign language.
In the study of interaction phenomena, the following phenomena have been described recently as follows: turn taking and different types of sequences such as sequences of topics, speech acts, and subactivities (Brown & Yule 1983). In the area of feedback, the most extensive studies have been studied before under different headings, such as interjections, back-channelling, return words (Sigurd 1984), reactives, and response words. There is potentially a close interrelation between discourse and conversational analysis and pragmatics (Searle 1969), taking into account social and cognitive structures.
It is worth noting, then, that communicative intentions cannot be maped onto word strings. Rathe r, speakers must select from a variety of potential alternative formulations the ones that most successfully express the meanings they want to convey. As a result, for the addressee, decoding the literal meaning of a message is only a first step in the process of comprehension; an addtional step of inference is required to derive the communicative intention that underlies it. Approaches that focus on the role of communicative intentions in communication reflect what will be called the
Intentionalist paradig m (Krauss & Chiu 1993). Fundamental to the intentionalis paradigm are two
sets of ideas that are basic to pragmatic theory: speech act theory and the cooperative principle. Both concepts are to be reviewed respectively within the framework of discourse analysis and conversational analysis.
2.6.1. A Speech Act Theory.
Speech act theory was inspired by the work of the British philosopher J.L. Austin whose
postumously published lectures How to do things with words (1962, 1975) influenced a number of students of la nguage including the philosopher John Searle (1969, 1985), who established speech act theory as a major framework for the study of human communication. In contrast to the assumptions of structuralism where langue is seen as a system, over parole concerning the speech act, speech act theory holds that the investigation of structure always presupposes something about
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In How to Do Things with Words, Austin (1962) starts by enunciating a distinction between constative and performative utterances. According to him, an utterance, which originally is a spoken word or string of spoken words with no particular forethought or intention to communicate a meaning, becomes constative if it describes some state of affairs whose correspondence with the facts is either true or false. Performatives, on the other hand, do not describe or report or constate anything as true or false. It is worth mentioning here that the attitude of the person performing the linguistic act, his thoughts, feelings, or intentions is of great relevance at this distinction.
Furthermore, Austin (1962) and Searle (1969)conceptualized speech acts as comprising three
components. First, the locutionary act, the act of saying something as the actual form of an
utterance. Second, the illocutionary act, as the communicative force of the utterance. Third, the
perlocutionary act, depicted as the communicative effect of the utterance upon the feelings,
thoughts, or actions of the audience, of the speaker, or of other persons. In other words, a locutionary act has meaning; it produces an understandable utterance. An illocutionary act has force; it is informed with a certain tone, attitude, feeling, motive, or intention, and a perlocutionary act has consequence; it has an effect upon the addressee.
Searle (1969) summarizes Austin’s speech acts, divided into verdictives, commissives, exercitives,
behabitives, and expositives, under five categories. Thus, firstly, assertives to tell people how things are by stating; secondly, directives to try to get people to do things by means of commanding and requesting; thirdly, expressives, to express our feelings and attitudes by thinking, forgiving, or blaming; fourthly, declaratives to bring about changes through our utterances by means of bringing about correspondence between the propositional content and reality, through baptizing, naming, appointing or sacking; and finally, commissives to commit ourselves to some future actions by promising and offering. It is also possible to do more than one of these things at the same time. Although these speech acts are abstract notions and do not necessarily or uniquely correspond to particular English verbs, Searle (like Austin before him) lists a number of English verbs as examples of the different types of speech acts .
In examining what people say to one another, we can use Searle's classification in trying to understand what people are doing with language. In a speech act we may find greetings, questions or requests for information, assertions or responses and assessments. Once we start to look at actual interaction, for instance, a conversation, we realize that we need a unit of analysis wider than Speech Act. What people say to one another partly acquires its meaning from the sequence within which it occurs, for example, an answer to a question. For this reason, conversation analysts introduced the notions of Cooperative Principle, Turn- Taking and Adjacency Pair, by Grice and Goffman respectively.
2.6.2. Grice’s cooperative principle and conversational maxims.
The English language philosopher H. Paul Grice (1969) was not the first to recognize that non-literal meanings posed a problem for theories of language use, but he was among the first to explain the processes that allow speakers to convey, and addressees to identify, communicative intentions that are expressed non-literally, as for him, meaning is seen as a kind of intending, and the hearer’s or reader’s recognition that the speaker or writer means something by x is part of the meaning of x. His insight that the communicative use of language rests on a set of implicit understandings among language users has had an important influence in both linguistics and social psychology. In a set of influential papers, Grice (1957, 1969, 1975) argued that conversation is an intrinsically cooperative endeavor. To communicate participants will implicitly adherre to a set of conventions, collectively
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termed the Cooperative Principle, by making their messages conform to four general rule s or
maxims where speakers shape their utterances to be understood by hearers. Thus, the maxims are
quality, quantity, relation and manner.
First, quality envisages messages to be truthful; quantity, by means of which messages should be as informative as is required, but not more informative; relation, for messages to be relevant; and manner, where messages should be clear, brief and orderly.
2.6.3. Conversational Analysis and Turn-Taking.
A main feature of conversations is that they tend to follow the convention of turn taking . Simply, this is where one person waits for the other to finish his/her utterance before contributing their own. This is as much a utilitarian convention as mere manners - a conversation, given the aforementioned definition, would logically cease to take place if the agents involved insisted on speaking even when it was plain that the other was trying to contribute.
It is, additionally, comforting to know that the other person respects your opinions enough not to continually interrupt you. The best example of this occurs in the Houses of Parliament - a supposed debating chamber which is often anything but, due to the failure of the members to observe the turn-taking code. Note, however, that a person rarely explicitly states that they have finished their utterance and are now awaiting yours. Intriguing exceptions to this are in two-way radios, where many social and psychological cues are lacking, and thus it is more difficult for speakers to follow turn-taking.
The potential for one to reply can be missed, deliberately or not, so that the first person may contribute once more. Failure to realise this can result in an awkward pause or a cacophany of competing voices in a large crowd.
2.6.4. Conversational Analysis and Adjacency Pairs.
Another fundamental feature of conversation is the idea of adjacency pairs. Posited by Goffman (1976), an example would be found in a question-answer session. Both conversing parties are aware that a response is required to a question; moreover, a partic ular response to a given question. I might invite a friend into my house and ask: “Would you like a biscuit?” To which the adjacency pair response is expected to be either “Yes” or “No”. My friend may be allergic to chocolate, however, and place an insertion sequence into the response: “Do you have any ginger snaps?” the reply to which would cause him to modify his answer accordingly.
In the above consideration of turn-taking, such observations may be used in our social interactions when the second agent did not take their opportunity to respond to the first, and the implication is that they have nothing to say about the topic. But perhaps the transition relevance place was one in which the second agent was in fact selected, but failed to respond, or responded in an inappropriate manner.
This infinity of responses is what makes language so entertaining, and in the above cases the speakers might make inferences about the reasons for incorrect responses . These may be not to have responded because he did not understand the question, or not to agree with the interlocutor. As Goffman notes, a silence often reveals an unwillingness to answer. Dispreferred responses tend to be preceded by a pause, and feature a declination component which is the non-acceptance of the
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first part of the adjacency pair. Not responding at all to the above question is one such - and has been dubbed an attributable silence, thus, a silence which in fact communicates certain information about the non-speaker.
It has been noted that various physical cues, such as gestures or expressions, are in play during orthodox face-to-face exchanges, and these are obviously lacking in a telephone conversation. Since humans are so adept at speaking over the phone, it is easy to conclude that the cues are not as important as once imagined - we manage without them so well, after all. However, this argument does not take into account the cues one picks up from the voice - it is quite easy to detect if somebody is confident, or nervous on the phone, from the words they use, the pauses, the tone and pronunciations of the words. In short, we may be able to substitute these auditory cues for more conventional physical cues , and then empathise with the other person. This way, we could be visualising, or at least imagining with a fair degree of accuracy, how the person is feeling, and gaining cues that way.
Once we have introduced a theoretical framework on the various theories and research on oral discourse, we shall examine the components of spoken discourse unde r different headings in order to provide a relevant account of the communicative event. In our next section, the first heading appears under the name of elements and rules governing oral discourse, where the notions of a speech theory, cooperative principles and their implicatures will be under revision.
3. ELEMENTS AND RULES GOVERNING ORAL DISCOURSE.
Given that it is possible to separate a text from the communicative event in which it occurs, we may go on to explore the relatioship between text features and components of events. These can be described in terms of rules governing oral discourse, norms or, following Grice’s terminology, maxims.
So far, this section will be divided into two sections, first, linguistic elements at work and non-linguistic ele ments.Secondly, rules of oral discourse focussing on rules of use, rules of usage and conversational studies.
3.1. Elements governing oral discourse.
Elements governing oral discourse are approached in terms of a communicative event, which is described as a sociocultural unit where the components of which serve to define salient elements of context within which the text becomes significant. Also, communicative behavior is not limited to the creation of oral texts, and correspondences are likely to be found concerning paralinguistics, kinesics and proxemics in oral interaction.
3.1.1. Linguistic elements.
Regarding the linguistic level in oral discourse, the phonological system is involved and is concerned with the analysis of acoustic signals into a sequence of speech sounds, thus consonants, vowels, and syllables. At this level, we find certain prosodic elements which provide us with
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information about the oral interaction. Thus, stress, rhythm and intonation. Also, routines are to be dealt with, but in a further section (Halliday 1985).
Regarding stress, it is present in an oral interaction when we give more emphasis to some parts of the utterance than to other segments. It is a signalling to make a syllable stand out with respect to its neighbouring syllables in a word or to the rest of words in a longer utterance. We may establish a distinction between two types of stress markers, thus primary stress and secondary stress within the same word. Primary stress is the main marker within the word and secondary stress is a less important marker.
Foreign language learners must be concerned with the relevant role of primary stress, as a change of stress within a word may change the whole meaning of it. For instance, a word like record may change its meaning from verb to noun if a student does not apply the righ primary stress on it.The concept of emphasis is closely related, then, to stress. Emphasis is essential in an oral exchange of information as it gives the message a non-literal meaning, providing foreign language students with a choice to highlight the information they may consider important at the speaking act.
Another important element which characterizes oral interaction is rhythm, which is determined by the succession of prominent and non-prominent syllables in an utterance. We will observe a quick and monotonous rhythm if prominent and non prominent syllables take place in short equal units of time, though not easy to find in authentic speech. On the contrary, rhythm will be inexistent and chaotic if longer and irregular units of time take place in an utterance or speech act.
Then, we may observe that the term establishes a relationship between accents and pauses, which, used properly, contribute to keeping attention by allowing voice inflection, change of intonation and change of meaning. Pauses may be characterized by being predictable or not with a rhythm group. Thus, they coincide the boundaries of the rhythm groups by fitting in naturally, or break them as it happens in spontaneous speech. Predictable pauses are, then, those required for the speakers to take breath between sentences or to separate grammatical units, and unpredictable pauses are those brought about by false starts or hesitation.
The third prosodic element is intonation which is characterized in general terms by the rising and falling of voice during speech, depending on the type of utterance we may produce. In case of statements, we will use falling intonation whereas in questions we use rising intonation. As we will see, intonation and rhythm play an important role when expressing attitudes and emotions.
As a general rule, speakers use a normal intonation when taking part in an oral interaction, but depending on the meaning the speakers may convey, they will use a different tone within the utterance. The tone is responsible for changes of meaning or for expressing special attitudes in the speaker, such as enthusiasm, sadness, anger, or exasperation. Three types of intonation are involved in a real situation. Thus, falling and rising tones, upper and lower range tones, and wide and narrow range of tones. Respectively, they refer first, to certainty, determination or confidence when we use falling tones in order to be conclusive whereas indecision, doubt and uncertainty is expressed by means of rising tones to be inconclusive. Secondly, excitement and animation on the part of the speaker is expressed by upper range tones whereas an unanimated attitude corresponds to lower ranges. Finally, in order to express emotional attitudes, we use a wide range of tone whereas in order to be unemotive, we rather use a narrow range tone.
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As they speak, people often gesture, nod their heads, change their postures and facial expressions, and redirect the focus of their gaze. Although these behaviors are not linguistic by a strict definition of that term, their close coordination with the speech they accompany suggests that they are relevant to an account of language use, and also, can occur apart from the context of speech, spontaneous or voluntarily.
Conversational speech is often accompanied by gesture , and the relation of these hand movements to the speech are usually regarded as communicative devices whose function is to amplify or underscore information conveyed in the accompanying speech. According to one of the icons of American linguists, Edward Sapir, people respond to gesture with extreme alertness, in accordance with an elaborate and secret code that is written nowhere, known to none, and understood by all (Sapir 1921). Gestures are then, to be classified in different types, such as emblems or symbolic gestures as essentially hand signs with well established meanings (thumbs -up and V for victory, pointing, denial, and refusing). In contrast, we may find simple and repetitive rhythmic hand movements coordinated with sentence prosody, called batons, as using head and shoulders. Also, unplanned gestures that accompany spontaneour speech, called gesticulations, representational gestures, or lexical movements, related to semantic content of speech in order to describe things like size, strength or speed.
Concerning facial expression, it deals with an automatic response to an internal state although they can be controlled voluntarily to a considerable extent, and are used in social situations to convey a variety of kinds of information (smiling and happiness). Changes in addressees’ facial expressions allows the addressee to express understanding concern, agreement, or confirmation where expressions such as smiles and head nods as considered as back-channels.
In relation to gaze direction, a variety of kinds of significance has been attributed to both the amount of time participants spend looking at each other, and to the points in the speech stream at which those glances occur, such as staring, watching, peering or looking among others. As proximity, body-orientation or touching, gazing may express the communicators’ social distance, by means of looking up to or looking down to.
The primary medium by which language is expressed, speech, also contains a good deal of information that can be considered nonverbal. A speaker’s voice transmits individuating information concerning his or her age, gender, region of origin, social class, and so on. In addition to this relatively static information, transient changes in vocal quality provide information about changes in the speaker’s internal state, such as hesitation or interjections. Changes in a speaker’s affective states usually are accompanied by changes in the acoustic properties of his or her voice (Krauss and Chiu 1993), and listeners seem capable of interpreting these changes, even when the quality of the speech is badly degraded, or the language is one the listener does not understand.
3.2. Rules governing oral discourse.
According to the Ministry of Education, since Spain entered the European Community, there is a need for learning a foreign language in order to communicate with other European countries. Within this context, the Spanish Educational System (B.O.E.), within the framework of the Educational Reform, establishes a common reference framework for the teaching of foreign languages, and claims for a progressive development of communicative competence in a specific language.
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Educational and professional reasons justify the presence of foreign languages in the curricula at different educational levels. Students, then, are intended to be able to carry out several communication tasks with specific communicative goals within specific contexts. In order to get these goals, several strategies as well as linguistic and discursive skills come into force in a given context. Therefore, a communicative competence theory accounts for rules of usage and rules of use in order to get a proficiency level in a foreign language within the framework of social interaction, personal, professional or educational fields.
Then, rules of usage are concerned with the language users’ knowledge of linguistic or grammatical rules (linguistic or grammatical competence) whereas rules of use are concerned with the language users’ability to use his knowledge of linguistic rules in order to achieve effectiveness of communication, that is, discourse, sociolinguistic and strategic competences. As the main aim for students is to improve their educational and professional life from a global perspective, rules involve two different implications, thus, the achievement of communication effectiveness, and their appropriateness in specific social and cultural contexts.
To sum up, the learning of a foreign language is intended to broaden the students’s intellectual knowledge as well as to broaden their knowledge on other ways of life and social organization different to their own. Furthermore, the aim is to get information on international issues, to broaden their professional interests and consolidate social values to promote the development of international communication.
3.2.1. Rules of usage.
As we have previously seen, language is the principal vehicle for the transmission of cultural knowledge, and the primary means by which we gain access to the contents of others’ minds. It is also considered as the ability to speak and be understood by others. This involves an ability to produce and therefore, understand the same sounds produced by others. The ways languages are used are constrained by the way they are constructed, particularly the linguistic rules that govern the permissible usage forms, for instance, grammatical rules. Language is defined as an abstract set of principles that specify the relations between a sequence of sounds and a sequence of meanings, and is analysed in terms of four levels of organization. Thus, the phonological, the morphological, the syntactic, and the semantic levels which, taken together, constitute its grammar.
Firstly, the phonological system is concerned with the phonological knowledge a speaker has in order to produce sounds which form meaningful sentences. For instance, an analysis of an acoustic signal into a sequence of speech sounds, thus consonants, vowels, and syllables, will allow the speaker to distinguish plural, past, and adverb endings, as well as to recognize foreign accents that are distinctive for a particular language or dialect or produce voiced or voiceless stops, fricatives or plosives sounds in their appropriate contexts.
Besides, when learning a foreign language, speakers may be aware of the variety of sounds the human vocal tract is capable of producing selecting language’s phonemes, or elementary units of sound according to how speech sounds occur and how to follow regular rules in the target language. Secondly, the morphological system is concerned with the way words and meaningful subwords are constructed out of these phonological elements. Morphology involves internal structures by means of which the speakers are able to recognize whether a word belongs to the target language or not. This is achieved by means of morphological rules that follow a regular pattern, such as suffixes and prefixes. These rules that determine the phonetic form of certain patterns, such as plural, regular
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simple past or gerunds, are named morphophonemic rules, as they are applied by both morphology and phonoloby.
Therefore, when a non-native word is added to the target language, they do it by means of morphological rules which belong to that vernacular language, such as derivation, compounding, blending or back-formation. Then, we may easily distinguish a Spanglish word or a loan from another country, as siesta and paella, entering the dictionary of the target language as part of their language and culture.
Thirdly, the syntactic system is concerned with that part of grammar which stands for speakers’ knowledge of how to structure phrases and sentences in an appropriate and accurate way. As mentioned above, knowing a language not only implies linguistic knowledge but also the ability to arrange the appropriate organization of morphological elements into higher level units, such as phrases and sentences.
Special attention is paid to the sequence of wording, as we may find grammatical and ungrammatical sentences as the rules of syntax do not always account for the grammaticality of sentences. We may find ambiguity or double meaning in expressions which may lead the speaker to wrong assumptions on the meaning of the utterance. Also, by means of word seque ncing , syntactic rules reveal the relations between the words in a sentence as they are orderly governed, for instance, subject, verb, and adverbs. To sum up, this ability to produce utterances in an appropriate and coherent way has to do with the creative aspect of language as the speaker may produce an unlimited number of sentences, as a main feature of language usage.
Finally, the semantic system is concerned with the meanings of these higher level units. Semantics is concerned with the linguistic competence in terms of a capacity to produce meaning within an utterance. The arbitrariness of language implies to comprehend sentences because we know the meaning of individual words. Nevertheless, speaking a language not only involves knowing the meaning of words but also knowing how to combine language rules to convey meaning within an utterance. Thus, we may find rules involved in the semantics of the sentence, such as subject-verb concord in terms of third person singular; rules to interpret phrasal verbs within prepositional phrases; different nuances brought about semantic fields in verbs, such as the degree of loudness when speaking (shouting and whispering), the time nuance when looking (watching, staring, or gazing), or the degree of touch (stroking or hitting) among others.
However, linguistic rules do not follow a strict pattern in everyday use. We may distinguish mainly three types of semantic rule violation. Thus, anomaly when a speaker may create a non-understandable word or utterance because of a non appropriate use of a semantic rule; a poetic use of malformations is metaphors, with no literal meaning but connected to abstract meaning; and finally, idioms, in which the meaning of an expression may not be related to the individual meaning of its parts as it makes no sense as they are culturally embedded. For instance, phrasal verbs.
3.2.2. Rules of use.
From a discourse-based approach, the notion of use means the realization of the language system as meaningful communication linked to the aspects of performance. This notion is based on the effectiveness for communication, by means of which an utterance with a well-formed grammatical structure may or may not have a sufficient value for communication in a given context.
As we have previously mentioned, within the context of a communicative competence theory, our current educational system claims for a progressive development of communicative competence in
