UNIT 5

ORAL COMMUNICATION. ELEMENTS AND RULES GOVERNING

ORAL DISCOURSE. EVERYDAY ROUTINES AND FORMULAIC
SPEECH. SPECIFIC STRATEGIES IN ORAL COMMUNICATION.
OUTLINE
1. 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. Grices 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.
8. BIBLIOGRAPHY.

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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
communication, we distinguish mainly two, thus verbal and non-verbal codes. Firstly, verbal

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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 Jakobsons 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.

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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
slammers 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 languages 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
performances.

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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
Homers 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 peoples 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 Hitas 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 midnineteenth 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 Franois Gouin
in his work L'art d'enseigner et d'tudier 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. Chomskys 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.
Chomskys 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 Hymess
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 & Stenstrm 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
meanings, language use, and extralinguistic functions.

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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 Austins 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. Grices cooperative principle and conversational maxims.

The English language philosopher H. Paul Grice (1969) was not the first to recognize that nonliteral 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 hearers
or readers 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 Grices terminology,
maxims.
So far, this section will be divided into two sections, first, linguistic elements at work and nonlinguistic 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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3.1.2.

Non-linguistic elements.

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 speakers 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 speakers internal state, such as hesitation or interjections. Changes in a speakers
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 usersability 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 studentss 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 languages 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 nonunderstandable 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

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a specific language. Students are intended to be able to carry out several communication tasks with
specif ic communicative goals within specific contexts by means of linguistic and discursive skills.
Regarding rules of use in order to get a proficiency level in a foreign language, students are
concerned with the language usersability to use his knowledge of linguistic rules, that is, discourse,
sociolinguistic and strategic competences.
Students, then, are intended to apply their linguistic knowledge to how to construct discourse within
the textual competence according to three main rules of appropriateness, coherence and cohesion,
as main discourse devices. Considerations on this sort require a distinction be drawn between the
semantic or literal meaning of an utterance and its intended meaning.
Concerning appropriateness, any language presents variations within a linguistic community. Each
member speaks or writes in a different way and their acts of speaking are imbedded in a discourse,
both conversation and narrative type, made up of a coherently related sequence of acts and
appropriateness in context. Besid es, these types of discourse have a formal structure that constrains
participants acts of speaking and each person chooses the language variety and the appropriate
register according to the situation, thus the issue, channel of communication, purpose, and degree of
formality.
Another discourse device is coherence which deals with the use of information in a speech act
regarding the selection of relevant or irrelevant information, and the organization of the
communicative structure in a certain way, such as introduction, development and conclusion. The
amount of information may be necessary and relevant, or on the contrary, redundant and irrelevant.
Unnecessary repetition of what is already known or already mentioned stops communication from
being successful at comprehending the important unknown parts of the speech act. Speakers are
intended to select not only the structure of the content of messages but also to organize information
in a logical and comprehensible way in order to avoid break downs in communication. Besides,
phonology and syntactic fields play an important role when emphasizing important information by
means of stressing the relevant information through different tones and accents, and word
sequencing, when new information is emphasized at the beginning or the end of an utterance in
order to focus the attention of the addressee on new items.
Regarding cohesion, there is a wide range of semantic and syntactic relations within a sentence in
order to relate our speech act forming a cohesive unit by means of reference, ellipsis, conjunction,
and lexical organization. We will develop these concepts following Halliday (1985) and his work
An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Firstly, according to Halliday, reference relates to a
participant or circumstantial element introduced at one place in the text that can be taken as a
reference point for something that follows, such as the definite article (the) and personal pronouns
(he, she, we, they). Ellipsis is defined as a clause, or a part of a clause, or a part of a verbal or
nominal group, that may be presupposed at a subsequent place in the text by the device of positive
omission, like in short answers (Yes, I can; No, I dont). Since conjunction is a clause or clause
complex, or some longer stretch of text, it may be related to what follows it by one or other of a
specific set of semantic relations . According to Halliday, the most general categories are those of
opposition and clarification, addition and variation, and the temporal and causal-conditional. The
continuity in a text is established by means of lexical cohesion through the choice of words. This
may take the form of word repetition; or the choice of a word that is related in some way to a
previous one either semantically or collocationally. Many researchers, among them, Widdowson
(1978) claimed that, in a speech act, cohesion and coherence must be described in terms of rules of
use and depicted as procedures concerning grammatical devices. He envisages cohesion as a rule of
use, and coherence to be a rules of usage.

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3.2.3.

Conversational Studies.

Conversational studies demonstrate how spoken English adapts to incorporate many functions and
accommodates a vast variety of registers and contexts in a speech act. Cultural influence on speech
and the implications of this for the second language speaker are two main tenets within current
speech and communication theories. Conversation is the main means by which humans
communicate, and is thus vital for full and rich social interaction. An obvious definition of
conversation is a process of talking where at least two participants freely alternate in speaking as
they interact with their social environment.. However, the analysis of conversation is not a simple
matter. It has been taken up by pioneering sociologists known as ethnomethodologists.
Ethnomethodology was a sociological and pragmatic type of quantitative methods looking at the
dynamics of conversation used by agents.
There is potentially a close interrelation between discourse and conversational analysis and
pragmatics (Searle 1969), taking into account social and cognitive structures. They are interrelated
with language in use, and in particular, with communicative events and communicative functions,
the role of speech acts where language is an instrument of action. In fact, conversational analysis
with its sociological origins and its emphasis on social interaction, regards all its work as concerned
with social action.
This tradition on cultural studies was first introduced in a language teaching theory in the early
1920s and improved in the 1970s by the notion of the ethnography of communication, a concept
coined by Dell Hymes. It refers to a methodology based in anthropology and linguistics allowing
people to study human interaction in context. Ethnographers adhering to Hymes' methodology
attempt to analyze patterns of communication as part of cultural knowledge and behavior. Besides,
cultural relativity sees communicative practices as an important part of what members of a
particular culture know and do (Hymes 1972). They acknowledge speech situations, speech events,
and speech acts as units of communicative practice and attempt to situate these events in context in
order to analyze them.
Hymes' (1972) well-known SPEAKING heuristic where capital le tters acknowledge for different
aspects in communicative competence, serves as a framework within which the ethnographer
examines several components of speech events as follows. S stands for setting and scene (physical
circumstances); P refers to participants including speaker, sender and addresser; E means end
(purposes and goals); A stands for act sequence (message form and content); K deals with key
(tone and manner); I stands for instrumentalities (verbal, non-verbal and physical channel); N refers
to norms of interaction (specific proprieties attached to speaking), and interpretation (interpretation
of norms within cultural belief system); and finally, genre referring to textual categories.
This interpretation of communicative competence can serve as a useful guide to help second
language learners to distinguish important elements of cultural communication as they learn to
observe and analyze discourse practices of the target culture in context. As for actual ethnographers,
second language learners must have the opportunity to access the viewpoints of natives of the
culture being studied in order to interpret culturally defined behaviors. The issue of culture under
study will be discussed in our next section where different interpretations of communicative
competence are examined from early approaches to present-day studies.
Within a conversational analysis, we find mainly two features of conversations. First, what we
understand under the convention of turn taking. Simply, this is where one person waits for the other
to finish his/her utterance before contributing their own. The potential for one to reply can be
missed, deliberately or not, so that the first person may contribute once more. Sacks (1978) suggests
that, historically speaking, there is an underlying rule in conversation, as Greek and Roman
societies had within an oratory discipline where at least and not more thatn one party talks at a

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time. For him, there are three main levels in turn-taking. The first level refers to the highest degree
of control he can select the next speaker either by naming or alluding to him or her. In a second
degree of control, the next utterance may be constrained by the speaker but without being selected
by a particular speaker. Finally, the third degree of control is to select neither the next speaker nor
utterance and leave it to one of the other participants.
Another fundamental feature of conversation is the idea of adjacency pairs, proposed by Goffman
(1976) and later developed by Sacks (1978). By this concept, a conversation is described as a string
of at least two turns. An example would be found in a question-answer session where exchanges in
which the first part of the pair predicts the occurrence of the second, thus How are you? and Fine,
thanks. And you? Both conversing parties are aware that a response is required to a question.
Moreover, a particular response to a given question is expressed by means of greetings, challenges,
offers, complaints, invitations, warnings, announcements, farewells and phone conversations.
Furthermore, another contribution to conversational analysis, as we have previously mentioned, was
Grices (1967) Cooperative Principle . He proposed a set of norms expected in conversation, and
formulated them as a universal to help account for the high degree of implicitness in conversation
and the required relation between rule -governed meaning and force. Therefore, Grice analyzes
cooperation as involving four categories of maxims expected in conversation. Thus, the first maxim
is quantity which involves speakers to give enough and not too much information. Secondly, within
quality, they are genuine and sincere, speaking truth or facts. The third maxim, relation, makes
reference to utterances which are relative to the context of the speech. Finally, manner represents
speakers who try to present meaning clearly and concisely, avoiding ambiguity. They are direct and
straightforward.
Within conversational structure, another distinction is identified by Brown and Yule (1994), and it
is the one between short turns and long turns. They define them as follows: A short turn consists
of only one or two utterances, a long turn consists of a string of utterances which may last as long
as an hours lecturewhat is required of a speaker in a long turn is considerably more demanding
than what is required of a speaker in a short turn. As soon as a speaker takes the floor for a long
turn, tells an anecdote, tells a joke, explains how something works, justifies a position, describes an
individual, and so on, he takes responsibility for creating a structured sequence of utterances which
must help the listener to create a coherent mental representation of what he is trying to say. Besides,
what the speaker says must be coherently structured. Possible examples of everyday situations
which might require longer turns from the speakers are such things as narrating personal
experiences, participating in job interviews, arguing points of view, describing processes or
locations and so on.
4.

EVERYDAY ROUTINES AND FORMULAIC SPEECH.

Everyday routines and formulaic speech follow a tradition on cultural studies, called an
ethnography of communication. Also, they deal with the terms coined in the 1960s by the
philosopher J. L. Austin, in How to Do Things with Words (1962), to refer to acts performed by
utterances which conveyed information, in particular to those which require questions and answers
as a formulaic speech. Within a speech act theory, we may distinguish a conventional semantic
theory by studying the effects of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutory acts. They mean
respectively, performative utterances on speakers and hearers that result through or as a result of
speech, secondly, acts that occur in speech, and thirdly, responses which hearers called
perlocutionary acts.

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There are a wide range of kinds of speech act. Among the most relevant surveys on speech act
theories, we shall mention John R. Searle, who in his work Speech Acts in 1979, recognizes five
types. Firstly, representative speech act, where speakers are committed in varying degrees to the
truth of the propositions they have uttered, by means of swearing, believing, and reporting.
Secondly, directives, where speakers try to get hearers to do something by commanding, requesting,
or urging. Thirdly, commissives, which commit speakers in varying degrees to courses of action by
means of promising, vowing, and undertaking. Fourthly, declarations, whereby speakers alter states
of affairs by performing such speech acts as I now pronounce you man and wife. Fifth, expressives,
where speakers express attitudes, such as congratulating and apologizing.
According to Austin (1962), in order to be successful, speech acts have to meet certain conditions.
Thus, a marriage ceremony can only be performed by someone with the authority to do so, and with
the consent of the parties agreeing to the marriage. Speech acts may be direct or indirect. For
instance, compare Shut the door, please and Hey, it's cold in here, both of which are directives.
Also, according to Seaville and Troike (1982) in his work The Ethnography of Communication,
linguistic routines are fixed utterances or sequences of utterances which must be considered as
single units, because meaning cannot be derived from consideration of any segment apart from the
whole . The routine itself, they add, fulfils the communicative function, and in this respect is
performative in nature. In order to make effective discourse productions, learners need to approach
their speeches from a conscious sociolinguistic perspective, in order to get considerable cultural
information about communicative settings and roles. Routines are also analysed in terms of length,
from single syllables to whole sentences, such as See you! and I am looking forward to seeing
you again! A sequence of sentences may be memorized as fixed phrases, and consequently, some
of them are learnt earlier and others, later. For instance, the first routines a student learns in class
are commands, such as Sit down or stand up, requests, such as May I come in, please? or Can I
have a rubber, please?. Routines structure is mainly given by a sociolinguistic and cultural
approach to language.
Non-native speakers may not grasp the nuances regarding a certain type of utterance patterns, such
as greeting routines or phone conversation patterns, which have no meaning apart from a phatic
function and introductory sentences. Within an educational context, main researches on the field of
cross-cultural rethorical considerations, such as Holmes and Brown (1987) and Wolfson (1981),
point out that it is not the responsibility of the language teacher qua linguist to enforce foreign
language standards of behavior, linguistic or otherwise. Rather, it is the teachers job to equip
students to express themselves in exactly the ways they choose to do so-rudely, tactfully, or in an
elaborately polite manner.
Understanding routines require a cultural knowledge because they are generally abstract in meaning
and must be interpreted at a non literal level. What we want to prevent them being unintentionally
rude or subservient. Without overstressing the constraints on participants, it is clear that space-time
loci, organisational context, conventional forms of messages, and preceding communications, in
fact all components of communicative events, serve to increasingly restrict the range of available
choices.
Thus, Holmes and Brown (1987) address three types of failure. Firstly, a pragmatic failure which
involves the inability to understand what is meant by what is said. Secondly, the pragmalinguistic
failure which is caused by mistaken beliefs about pragmatic force of utterance. Finally, the
sociopragmatic failure which is given by different beliefs about rights and mentionables. People
usually reject consciously routines and rituals when they are meaningless and empty of meaning,
thus condolences, funeral rituals, weddings, masses and invitations among others.

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Another instance is brought about by Wolfson (1981) in developing sociocultural awareness.

According to this model, this type of awareness will lead to a discussion of the differences between
the cultural and social values of a first language learner and the foreign language community. He
goes further on studying cross-cultural miscommunication in the field of compliments, when
learners from a different cultural background do not understand certain behavior rules from the
foreign language target culture. Hence, ritual contexts involve formulaic language with great
cultural significance. The meaning of symbols cannot be interpreted in isolation but in context. For
instance, a funeral ritual is different in Europe and in America. Both routines and formulaic speech
meaning depend on shared beliefs and values within the speech community coded into a sensitivity
to cultural communication patterns.
The literature on cross-cultural communication breakdown is vast, as it is related to a number of
aspects such as size of imposition; taboos; different judgement of power and social distance
between different cultures; and different cultural values and priorities. Therefore, important
pedagogic advantages may be expected from further developing this approach. These include more
realistic learning activities, improved motivation, new types of achievable objectives, , and the
potential to transform a passive attitude to authentic texts into an active engagement in developing
the effectiveness of communication practices in a classroom setting.
5.

SPECIFIC STRATEGIES IN ORAL COMMUNICATION.

In this section we address the fourth area of Communicative Competence. In the words of Canale
(1983), strategic competence is the verbal and nonverbal communication strategies that may be
called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or
due to insufficient competence.This is quite a complex area but in a simplified way we can describe
it as the type of knowledge which we need to sustain communication with someone. This may be
achieved by paraphrase, circumlocution, repetition, hesistation, avoidance, guessing as well as
shifts in register and style. According to Canale and Swain (1980), strategic competence is useful in
various circumstances as for instance, the early stages of second language learning where
communicative competence can be present with just strategic and socio-linguistic competence.
This approach has been supported by other researchers, such as Savignon and Tarone. Thus,
Savignon (1983) notes that one can communicate non-verbally in the absence of grammatical or
discourse competence provided there is a cooperative interlocutor. Besides, she points out the
necessity and the sufficiency for the inclusion of strategic competence as a component of
communicative competence at all levels as it demonstrates that regardless of experience and level of
proficiency one never knows all a language. This also illustrates the negotiation of meaning
involved in the use of strategic competence as noted in Tarone (1981).
Another criterion on strategic competence proposed by Tarone (1981) for the speaker to recognize a
meta-linguistic problem is the use of the strategies to help getting the meaning across. Tarone
includes a requierement for the use of strategic competence by which the speaker has to be aware
that the linguistic structure needed to convey his meaning is not available to him or to the hearer. As
will be seen later, strategic competence is essential in conversation and we argue for the necessity
and sufficiency of this competence.

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6. PRESENT-DAY DIRECTIONS REGARDING ORAL COMMUNICATION.

6.1 New directions in language teaching.
According to Hedge (2000), since the introduction of communicative approaches, the ability to
communicate effectively in English has become one of the main goals in European Language
Teaching. The Council of Europe (1998), in response to the need for international co-operation and
professional mobility among European countries, has recently published a document, Modern
languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. A Common European Framework of reference, in
which the acquisition of communicative and pragmatic competence in a second language is
emphasised. Both contributed strongly to the development of the communicative classroom,
increasing the emphasis on teaching the spoken language.
Although students recognize the importance of developing communicative skills in the target
language, they often have a passive attitude towards speaking in the classroom. Students generally
have fewer problems in taking short turns, since they are required to give minimal responses to
participate in a conversation with the teacher or classmates based on simple exchanges. They tend
to be reluctant, however, to expose themselves in the classroom, making it very difficult to get them
to speak at any length. My concern derives from the problem of how to actually get learners
speaking in a meaningful way in the classroom.
Moreover, one of the proposed models for school-leaving examination, is to get the
studentscompetence in the foreign language to be assessed by means of an oral interview. During
the interview, students will be expected to report on and discuss topics related specifically to the
syllabus. They will be therefore required to produce an extended piece of spoken English. Thus, the
particular need to develop students competence in using spoken language for informative purposes
is of crucial importance. This model makes particular reference to the development of the skills
involved in producing long turns of transactional speech.
Similarly, the Spanish Educational System states (B.O.E. 2002) that there is a need for learning a
foreign language in order to communicate with other European countries, and a need for
emphasizing the role of a foreign language which gets relevance as a multilingual and multicultural
identity. Within this context, getting a proficiency level in a foreign language implies educational
and professional reasons which justify the presence of foreign languages in the curricula at different
educational levels. It means to have access to other cultures and customs as well as to foster
interpersonal relationships which help individuals develop a due respect towards other countries,
their native speakers and their culture. This sociocultural framework allows learners to better
understand their own language, and therefore, their own culture.
The European Council (1998) and, in particular, the Spanish Educational System 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. 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. Thus, foreign
language activities are provided within the framework of social interaction, personal, professional
or educational fields.
Therefore, in order to develop the above mentioned communication tasks in our present educational
system, a communicative competence theory includes the following subcompetences. Firstly, the
linguistic competence (semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological). Secondly, the discourse
competence (language functions, speech acts, and conversations). Thirdly, the sociolinguistic

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competence (social conventions, routines and formulaic speech, communicative intentions, and
registers among others). Fourthly, the strategic competence will be included as a subcompetence of
communicative competence within this educational framework. So far, students will make use of
this competence in a natural and systematic way in order to achieve the effectiveness of
communication through the different communication skills, thus, productive (oral and written
communication), receptive (oral and written comprehension within verbal and non-verbal codes),
and interactional.
6.2. Implications into language teaching.
In recent years, this has started to change, partly because of better technical aids for the collection,
storage and analysis of spoken language data, but also because of a growing awareness among
researchers of the importance of spoken language studies for a deeper understanding of the human
linguistic faculty and human linguistic communication. Today, the area of spoken language studies
is a rapidly growing research field, but it is still true that, for most languages in the world, detailed
and comprehensive studies of spoken language are lacking. There is a great need for better general
theories of the structure of spoken language and its function in human communication in different
social activities.
Today, pronunciation teaching is experiencing a new resurgence, fuelled largely by the increasing
awareness of the communicative function of suprasegmental features in spoken discourse (Brown
and Yule 1983). In the late 80s, researchers called for a more top-down approach to pronunciation
teaching (Pennington 1989) emphasizing the broader, more meaningful aspects of phonology in
connected speech rather than practice with isolated sounds, thus ushering pronunciation back into
the communicative fold. Materials writers responded with a wealth of courses and recipe books
focusing on suprasegmental pronunciation (Bradford 1988, Gilbert 1984, Rogerson & Gilbert
1990). A closer look at such materials, however, reveals that, with notable exceptions (Cunningham
1991), most commercially produced course books on pronunciation today present activities
remarkably similar to the audiolingual texts of the 50s, relying heavily on mechanical drilling of
decontextualized words and sentences. While professing to teach the more communicative aspects
of pronunciation, many such texts go about it in a decidedly uncommunicative way. The more
pronunciation teaching materials have changed, it seems, the more they have stayed the same.

7. CONCLUSION.
Speaking is a language skill that uses complex and intricate forms to convey meaning. In many
ways, through its nature, itis the most difficult of all the language skills to study. Speech is where
language is most instantly adaptable; it is where culture impinges on form and where second
language speakers find their confidence threatened through the diversity of registers, genres and
styles that make up the first language speakers day to day interaction. Language represents the
deepest manifestation of a culture, and peoples values systems, including those taken over from the
group of which they are part, play a substantial role in the way they use not only their first language
but also subsequently acquired ones. This section, then, will be focusing on the discourse level, that
is, the level of language beyond that of the sentence, considered in its context.
Students should be encouraged to talk from a very early stage since, from a linguistic point of view,
as spoken language is relatively less demanding than written language. However, Brown and Yule
(1983) state that the problems in the spoken language are going to be much more concerned with

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on-line production, and with the question of how to find meaningful opportunities for individual
students to practise using a rather minimal knowledge of the foreign language in a flexible and
inventive manner, than with linguistic complexity . Furthermore, according to the acquisitionist
view, learners should not be put under undue pressure to produce spoken language at the earliest
possible stage, since they may well require a silent period in which to absorb and process
linguistic input.
A review of the literature in this survey revealed that although recent developments in foreign
language education have indicated a trend towards approaching the acquisition of a second
language in terms of communicative competence, there is a growing interest in traditional resources
have proven inadequate. Students are expected to learn to function properly in the target language
and culture, both interpreting and producing meaning with members of the target culture. However,
providing experiences for contact with language in context has been problematic. Limited access to
the target culture has forced teachers to rely on textbooks and other classroom materials in teaching
language, and these materials may not necessarily furnish a sufficiently rich environment for the
acquisition of communicative competence, including many aspects of discourse activity, such as
paralinguistic and extralinguistic behavior. Hypermedia and multimedia environments may provide
a more appropriate setting for students to experience the target language in its cultural context.
Also, pronunciation teaching materials are envisaged to be used in the future. Contemporary
materials for the teaching of pronunciation, while still retaining many of the characteristics of
traditional audiolingual texts, have begun to incorporate more meaningful and communicative
practice, an increased emphasis on suprasegmentals, and other features such as consciousness
raising and self-monitoring which reflect current research into the acquisition of second language
phonology.
To conclude this section we may say that conversational analysis gives a fascinating insight into the
implicit communicative rules which guide our social interactions. It is interesting to speculate how
conversation may evolve in the future, with vir tual meetings and chatting in cyberspace destroying
many of the implicit rules of traditional communication. Yet, conversational analysts may have
much to write about in the future.
8. BIBLIOGRAPHY.
On the origins of language and oral communication
Crystal, D. (1985) Linguistics.
Juan Goytisolo (2001), Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible heritage of
Humanity 18 May 2001. Speech delivered at the opening of the meeting of the Jury (15 May 2001)
On communication process and language teaching
Brown, G. & G. Yule (1983) Teaching the Spoken Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Canale, M., and M. Swain, 1980. Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second
language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics 1 (1).
Halliday, M. A. K. 1973. Explorations in the Functions of Language.
Hedge, Tricia (2000).Teaching and learning in the Language Classroom. OUP.

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On a theory of communicative competence

Brown, G. and G. Yule. 1983. Discourse Analysis. CUP.
Canale, M. 1983. From Communicative Competence to Communicative Language Pedagogy, in J.
Richards and R. Schmidt (eds.). Language and Communication. London, Longman.
Hymes, D. 1972. On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride and J. Holmes (eds.),
Sociolinguistics, pp. 269-93. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Press.
On Discourse Analysis and Conversational studies
Austin, J. L. (1962) How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brown, G. and G. Yule (1983) Discourse Analysis. CUP.
van Dijk, T. 1977. Text and Context: Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse.
London: Longman.
Goffman, E. (1981) Forms of Talk . Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Krauss, R. M., & Chiu, C. (1993). Language, cognition and communication. Unpublished Paper
presented in the symposium Language, Cognition and Communication at the meetings of the
Society for Experimental Social Psychology, October 16, CA: Santa Barbara.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Searle, J. R. (1985). Indirect speech acts. In J. P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics:
Speech acts. Academic Press: Academic Press.
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
On future directions and implications on language teaching
B.O.E. (2002)
Council of Europe (1998) Modern Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. A Common
European Framework of reference.
Hedge Tricia (2000) Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom (OUP)

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