UNIT 5 ORAL COMMUNICATION.

THE ELEMENTS AND

NORMS OF SPOKEN DISCOURSE. ROUTINES AND
STANDARD EXPRESSIONS.
ORAL COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES

1. INTRODUCTION

Under the LOMLOE students are now expected to be able to

communicate in the foreign language. The focus on fluency has tended to
give priority to listening and speaking skills. But there seems to be no
general consensus as to the order in which the four skills should be taught
as can be seen in a review of the literature on language teaching
methodology. Currently the trend is to integrate all four skills since, as we
shall see differences which should be taken into account. This UNIT
concerns oral communication and explain all its implications, so first of all
the concept of communication is going to be briefly reviewed

2. ORAL COMMUNICATION

COMMUNICATION

Communication is defined as the exchange of meanings between

individuals through a common system of symbols. It is very complex, but it
fulfils some characteristics which seem to apply to every situation.
According to Harmer, communicative teaching fulfils these characteristics:
• A person speaks because he wants, it’s his decision
• He has a communicative purpose, he wants to get a result
• He selects from a store, choosing appropriate language for a purpose
These factors enter in the classroom with the arrival of the Communicative
Language teaching.

ORAL VS WRITTEN COMMUNICATION

Anyone who uses a language properly has a number of different

abilities. In the most general way we can identify 4 major skills: listening,
speaking, reading and writing. These major skills can be classified in 2 main
ways:
• In relation to the MEDIUM:
- Speaking and listening: related to the oral medium.
- Reading and writing: related to the visual/written medium
• In relation to the ACTIVITY of the PARTICIPANTS:

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 -Listening and reading: are receptive skills as the user is receiving
oral/written language
-Speaking and writing: are said to be productive skills as they involve
some kind of production of the part of the user.

Very often the language user is involved in using a combination of skills

since, for example, on oral communication the participants are involved with
both listening and speaking (flow of conversation), or a person in a lecture
can read something and then speak about it. So it's very important to
integrate these skills in our lessons but in order to achieve a proper
learning, it's necessary to follow an order:
listening > speaking > reading > writing

ORAL COMMUNICATION

I’m going to concentrate now in oral communication and some features,

described by Tannen and Chafe, that distinguish it from written texts
• Spontaneous language is usually related to oral exchanges that show
interpersonal involvement. Some features of interpersonal
involvement are: collaborative completitions, clarifications, examples
demonstrating understanding, overlap showing encouragement and
mimicking voices (Tannen)
• However written texts show features of detachment, that is
morphological and syntactic forms, which are: relative / complement
clauses, passive voice, nominalizations, attributive adjectives,
complex morphosyntax, sequences of prepositional phrases and
subordinate conjunctions (Chafe)

3. CONTENT OF ORAL COMMUNICATION

It is important to make a distinction between two sciences:

Pragmatics and semantics

PRAGMATICS
The discipline of pragmatics deals with language use, it pays great
attention to the interpretation of the intended meaning conveyed in a
speech act. Pragmatics seeks to examine how linguistics structures
combine with contextual information to convey the speaker’s thoughts. So
not only language itself, propositional meaning, is important to derive
meaning but this is combined with: mime, body language, stress; silence,
hesitations, i.e., lack of linguistic competence; and ability to participate in

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social exchanges, which also influence meaning. So, pragmatics makes a
distinction between sentence meaning ( propositional or literal meaning) and
speaker meaning (the concept the speaker tries to convey). So pragmatics
studies: speech acts and their implications as part of larger units;
conversational and discourse analysis; and deictic elements.
The so called SPEECH ACTS study the relation between form and
function, according to this theory language is seeing as a form of acting, it
focuses on the question of what people is doing when they use language. It
is AUSTIN who outlines this theory and he distinguishes between three
types of acts:
• Locution: this is the actual form of the message. E.g. “could you pass
me the salt?” , the form is a question
• Illocution: it refers to the function that this form expresses, the
real intention behind the message. E.g. “Could you pass me the salt?”,
it is a question is form, but the function is a request
• Perlocution: it is a reaction, what the person does as a reaction to
the illocution, it is not linguistic. E.g.: “he catches the recipient of
the salt and gives it to the person who asked for it”
The speech act theory privileges parole over language. Sentence meaning
and the speakers meaning are joined within the context of a particular
speech act

SEMANTICS
On the other hand, semantics studies literal meaning, that is, the
propositional content of an utterance. The speaker’s intended meaning,
which is called OPERATIONAL MEANING depends on three factors: first,
determining which of the semantic interpretations was the intended one;
second , determining the referential function (the objects of the real
world that language refers to) and third, interpreting a literal from a
figurative use of language such as: sarcasm, metaphor, hyperbole,
metonymy…

4. LISTENING AND SPEAKING

LISTENING

Listening can be understood as the ability to understand and respond

to spoken language. It's a very important activity in our English classroom
as in the early stages of our students' learning, they will normally spend
much of their time listening to the teacher or to tape- recorded material
with songs, thymes, games and so on. Moreover, they need to be able to

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understand much more than they can produce, so they need to develop this
skill before any other.
In our daily life, we listen to a great deal of language and, generally,
we do so because we want to, we have a purpose to do it. We can listen to
something either for its interest (for enjoyment, pleasure, intellectual
stimulation) or for its usefulness.
In language teaching we must take into account this, that is a person
listens for something it is because he finds it interesting or useful so we
must move away from the typical listening exercises which says nothing to
the students and which concentrates just on language without having any
purpose.
RECEPTIVE SUBSKILLS: A listener employs a number of specific skills
when listening and his success at understanding the content depends on the
expertise in these subskills.
• Predicting: The efficient listener predicts what he is going to listen.
At first, his predictions will be the result of the expectations he
has. As he continues to listen, his predictions will change as he
receives more information from the text, mainly by means of
discourse markers such as: for instance, therefore, however, and so
many other which are connectives used to link ideas.
• Extracting specific information (scanning): The listener will
disregard everything except the information he's interested in.
• Getting the general idea (skimming): It's the ability to pick up the
main points and discard what is irrelevant, redundant or only detail.
This skill is widely practiced since speakers often include language
which is not relevant to the main point so this ability is a vital one
for our students to get.
• Inferring opinion and attitude: A listener has to be able to work out
the speaker's opinions and attitudes since these are not always
directly stated. The listener will know whether the speaker approves
of the topic being discussed or if his opinion about a person he is
describing is favourable or not
• Deducting the meaning from the context: The language users (even
the native ones) may come across words they don't know and this
must not cause any problem as we must train our students to guess
the meaning of the unknown word from the context, as a native
speaker does. For example: in a sentence like: "the asteroid smashed
against the earth", the word "smashed" may be unknown for the
learner, so he must be able to deduce its meaning by asking to

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 himself: "what can an asteroid do against the earth? It can crash,
collide... so something like this must be the meaning of this word".
• Recognising function and discourse markers and patterns:
Recognising discourse markers is an important part of understanding
the text what is going on. Markers such as "and, but, well, I mean"; if
the speaker says"I mean", the listener knows that what followed is a
repetition of the same idea from a different point of view.

PLANNING LlSTENING ACTIVITIES IN THE ENGLISH FOREIGN

CLASSROOM.
Obviously, all listening activities must be previously chosen and planned. To
do so there are a number of steps to take (UNDERWOOD):
1. Choose the listening text and check if it's suitable for the level of
our students.
2. Adjust the level of difficulty of the activities, if it's necessary.
3. Consider whether the activities suit the time available.
4. Think about visual aids.
5. Practice reading the text if you are to read it aloud.
6. One important step is to decide what activity we want our students
to do. We can distinguish 3 types according to the moment:

LISTENING ACTIVITIES

PRE-LISTENING WHILE-LISTENING POST-LISTENING

To arouse our pupils interest in There are a lot of Follow-up work.

what they are going to listen, different tasks to do
they will create expectation -chart completion,
-marking items in pictures, -extending lists,
-looking at pictures related to -matching pictures I -sequencing,
the listening activity and guess, heard, -summarising,
talk about them, describe, -putting pictures in order. -dictation,
-reading a text, -picture drawing, -role-playing and
-predicting, speculating, simulation,
-carrying out actions,
-give students the topic and -change the order of
-following a route,
make a list of vocabulary that pictures,
-completing grids,
could appear.
-true/false, -write another end.
- multiple choice questions,
-labelling,
-gap filling,
-spotting mistakes,
-predicting,
-seeking specific
information

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CHARACTERISTICS OF LISTENING ACTIVITIES
To finish off with the listening skill, I would like to deal with some points to
consider when practising listening in the classroom.
1. Make sure the students know they don't need to understand everything,
not every single word: they only need to understand the information asked
in the task.
2. Students must listen for a purpose so that they see the functionality of
language, the underlying principle will be problem solving.
3. Other language skills should be integrated with listening. 4. Whenever
possible, the recording should be authentic
5. The task asked to carry out after the language, must be based on
grasped visual materials: pictures, diagrams, grids, maps. This makes the
language more interesting and funny.
6. The presence of pictures, objects, headlines gives a context to the
listening, bringing to life the situation and helping with the vocabulary.
7.Finally, the value of language activities is increased it there is immediate
feedback on students performance.

SPEAKING

Speaking should be defined as the ability to communicate in speech

and as speech is the main way of communication, teachers of foreign
language must focus their attention on helping their pupils to communicate
by means of many activities.
When speaking started to become part of the teaching of a foreign
language, little else was done apart from mechanic oral drillings (of
formulaic nature): which consists in the repetition of patterns by the
students without taking into account the context They were very
controlled and they offer little if any practice in real situation.
Nowadays, teachers help their students to communicate using real
language which is contextualised and embedded in a communicative situation
students develop their potential through communicative activities.

WHAT IS A COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITY?

ORAL LESSON STAGES. & PLANNING ACTIVITIES.
The Communicative competence is normally developed in 5 stages in
each oral lesson.
1. Warm-up: it is usually an informal chat about the topic. Its aim is to
awake in our students the necessity of learning, of knowing more about the

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UNIT we are going to deal with, to motivate them, to create a positive
atmosphere towards language learning. Another function of the warm-up is
to know the previous knowledge of the topic. Warm- up activities are not
too long, maybe just 5 minutes and they must be funny and attractive for
our students: prepositions of place = "I've left my bag somewhere in the
classroom. Where is it?"; future = "Where will you go on holidays?".

2. Presentation: Its purpose is to introduce the new vocabulary and

linguistic structures of the unit. The main aims of this stage are: to give
the students the opportunity to realize the usefulness/relevance of the
new language; to concentrate on the meaning, pronunciation and spelling; to
focus on the grammar of the new language. In order to do so, we must try
to provide a clear, motivating, natural, relevant context for the students.
So the new language must be introduce within 2 contexts: a situational
context (the language used must be embedded in a real and meaningful
context) and a linguistic one (which is the language itself, it must be
meaningful and clear). The teacher's role is informant and it's important to
correct because students should grasp the meaning correctly. So, we must
bear in mind what information to give, when and how. In order to introduce
the language, the teacher can use the blackboard, drawings, flashcards,
pictures. Another technique is to elicit it form the pupils, that involves
trying to encourage our students to produce language they have never been
taught, so if they are not able to produce it correctly, they will feel the
need to learn it. The procedure in this stage will follow the following order:
1. Build up the situational context "in a supermarket...".

2. Introduce the new language, or elicit it: "we are going to buy... How do you ask
for the -price, the food?".

3. Focus OUT pupils' attention on the linguistic exponent the students use it as a
model for producing similar sentences. "I’d like... How much is it?"
4. Check OUT pupils' understanding of the concepts: at this stage the correction
is very important so as to the students grasp the new language correctly (role of
the teacher as an informer), the degree of control is very high.
3. Practice or accuracy practice: The students are given the opportunity
to practice the new, language by themselves in a semicontrolled framework.
They are given a very limited choice. A successful oral practice stage
should provide our students with graded oral practice which is meaningful
and extensive. These points can be achieved by means of activities such as:
drills (substitution, transformation, conversation drills..); games which
involve watching, guessing, repetition; short dialogues (realistic and
motivating); information and opinion gap activities; reading aloud, open-
ended responses... The role of the teacher is as a conductor, so he must be
able to elicit response from the students, answer their doubts, handle aids,

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provide a model for students to imitate, gives cues in drills, give
instructions, monitor whether students are doing the activity in the proper
way. However, if showing incorrectness is not enough we will have to use
correction techniques such as: pupil corrects pupil, and teacher corrects
pupils A typical practice stage must follow this pattern: 1) 1 or 2 brief
drills/games to allow practice with the language; 2) 1 or 2 controlled
communicative activities to consolidate the meaning and to provide
opportunities for real language use.
4. Free-production: It is also called "production stage". The students use
the language learnt in freer, more creative ways, in a communicative
situation. This stage gives also the opportunity to integrate new language
with previous one, giving place to creative language use, spontaneity,
experimentation and motivation. This production stage is normally
developed by activities such as: role-plays, simulations, group games,
discussions always in a real context. The role of the teacher is in this stage
corrector. One of the biggest problems of correction is that is can change
a free activity into a controlled one if we correct too much, so we must be
very careful about how and when to correct WHEN?: He should not
interfere unless the communication breaks down so a good moment to
comment the mistakes would be at the end of the activity. HOW?: The
teacher must make correction productive, that means, not only criticize
students but also praise and encourage them. Moreover, correction should
be handled with tact and consideration, it should be seen as positive act, as
a way towards communicative competence. There are several techniques of
showing incorrectness: asking the pupil to repeat, echo what the student
has just said with a questioning intonation, telling the student he was wrong
and ask him to repeat it, asking "is that correct?", using some gestures or
expressions. And, if showing incorrectness is not enough we will have to use
correction techniques such as: pupil corrects pupil, and teacher corrects
pupils
5. Feed-back: The last but not the least important stage of the procedure
it is the feedback by which we check that students have achieved
objectives. If not we should do so me remedial work and follow-up
activities.
The fulfilment of all these methodological criteria rests on the
adaptability of the teacher, on his possibility of adopting more than one
role

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5. ROUTINES AND STANDARD EXPRESSIONS

Conversational interaction involves the ability to understand and

produce routines (sometimes known as formulas, that is, idiomatic,
conventional, standard expressions). Face-to-face conversations involving
dialogue are often characterised as being spontaneous and freely
structured in comparison to the more cohesive nature of written discourse.
Nevertheless, they are not as chaotic as they may initially appear speakers
structure conversations by using routines and observing the rules for
conversational interaction such as Grice's conversational maxims.
Conversations are said to have three main phases: an opening phase in
which the contact is started, a central phase in which the main business is
transacted and normally involves turn taking and topic change, and a closing
phase, in which the encounter is brought to an end. We shall examine each
of these phases bearing in mind that the informality or formality of
conversations is influenced by the status and the role of the participants

5.1. OPENING PHASE

The opening phase consists of exchanges in which the interlocutors
acknowledge one another's presence through greetings and decide whether
they want to enter into a longer conversation. Non-verbal communication
may also be established. Standard routines, and their use is determined by
the tenor relationships (the status and roles of the participants). So we can
use greetings such as "Hello!" or "Hi!" informally and "Good morning!" in
more formal situations. Alternatively, we can also use other expressions
such as attention getters like "Excuse me" and "Sorry to bother you" or
"I've been longing to meet you".

5.2. CENTRAL PHASE

We often find small talk prior to the main topic. Speakers have to know
how to turn-take and topic- change. It is within the central phase that a
lot of routines occur, such as:
• Turn-taking is negotiated by the participants. Speakers use both
verbal and non-verbal signals to indicate changes in the turn to speak.
Verbal signals include expressions used to get the turn like: “I'd just
like to point out that”. “I'd just like to say”. BACK CHANNEL SIGNALS:
Question tags are another way of indicating to someone that it is their
turn to speak. We may use for example, with a rising intonation: It was a
very good film, wasn't it? TURN OVER SIGNALS: it is also possible for
a speaker to maintain his turn. Some expressions that can be used in
with this purpose are: Let me just finish. NON-PARTICIPANT
CONSTRAINTS: we may give back the right to speak to the speaker by

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 asking him to repeat something: "Excuse me, what did you say?" by
seeking clarification
Non-verbal signals are also used to indicate that one wishes to speak for
example in the classroom we may raise our hand to seek permission to
speak. NON-PARTICIPANT CONSTRAINT can also be made through
eye contact or hand-waving. We can also use extra-linguistic signals
such as "aha", "yeah-yeah", "mmm", "erm", etc. these are PREEMPT
SIGNALS
• Environmental conditions play also an important role in negotiation,
influencing that the messages are ACOUSTICALLY ADEQUATE AND
INTERPRETABLE
• For topic change speakers use a variety of expressions to introduce
topics or to change the topic of conversation. Certain discourse markers
may be used to introduce a topic, for example "By the way” “ did I tell
you about?”, those are called BRACKET SIGNALS

5.3. CLOSING PHASE

The interlocutors may indicate that thee conversation is drawing to
an end by using both verbal and non-verbal signals. Prior to closing
expressions speakers may indicate that the conversation is drawing to an
end by not making any further comments about the topic or using
expressions like: "Well, there you are", "That's life", etc. Then comes the
final good-bye with expressions such as "good-bye", "bye- bye", etc. Non-
verbal signals are when a speaker stands up or increases the distance with
the interlocutor taking a step backwards.

5.4. GRICE’S MAXIMS

They also influence oral communication. First of all, I shall explain
the cooperative principle which assumes that the people involved in a
conversation makes the contributions that requires the purpose of the talk
in which they are engaged. So they follow a series of conversational
conventions called MAXIMS which GRICE classified. The flouting of one of
this maxims leads the other person to IMPLICATURE forming, i.e. to
convey an additional meaning to the literal meaning. To be able to arrive to
the implicature they must be some shared knowledge, i.e. knowledge of the
world

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Grice's Maxims
• The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one
possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no
more.
• The maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not
give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence.
• The maxim of relevance, where one tries to be relevant, and says
things that are pertinent to the discussion.
• The maxim of manner, when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as
orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity
and ambiguity.
As the maxims stand, there may be an overlap, as regards the length of
what one says, between the maxims of quantity and manner; this overlap
can be explained (partially if not entirely) by thinking of the maxim of
quantity (artificial though this approach may be) in terms of units of
information. In other words, if the listener needs, jet us say, five units of
information from the speaker, but gets less, or more than the expected
number, then the speaker is breaking the maxim of quantity. However, if
the speaker gives the five required units of information, but is either too
curt or long-winded in conveying them to the listener, then the maxim of
manner is broken. The dividing line however, may be rather thin or unclear,
and there are times when we may say that both the maxims of quantity and
quality are broken by the same factors.

6. ORAL COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES

Strategic competence refers to verbal and non-verbal communication

strategies that enable speakers to handle with breakdowns in conversations
and to promote effective communication. So, talking about oral
communication it’s necessary to talk about oral communication strategies
Formal reduction strategies in which learners used a reduced
system in order to avoid producing incorrect on non-fluent utterances.
Secondly, functional reduction strategies in which the learner reduces his
goal totally ( global reduction) or partially (local reduction) in order to
avoid a problem in the execution of a phase. Lastly, achievement strategies
in which the learner tries to solve communicative problems through
compensating strategies (such as code switching, intra and inter lingual
transfer, cooperative strategies and non linguistic strategies) or retrieval
strategies (such as waiting for the term to appear, appealing to formal
similarity, retrieval via semantic fields, searching via other languages,
retrieval from learning situations and sensory procedures)

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7. CONCLUSION

In conclusion, our aim as teacher is to help our students to become

communicatively competent in the foreign language. In order to achieve
that, we should make them aware of the different formula and strategies
used in oral communication, so that they can understand and produce oral
texts. We should also promote listening and speaking activities for them to
get in touch with oral language. Apart from that, integrating the skills
mentioned in this UNIT with reading and writing will help them to use and
understand language better

8. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Some of the books I have checked to elaborate this UNIT, all of

them published in the 2nd half of the 20th century, are the following:

• HALLIDAY,M. 1987. Spoken and written modes of meaning

• HYMES,D. 1972. On Communicative Competence
• TANNEN,D. 1982. Spoken and Written Language
• CRYSTAL,D. 1987. The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language
• Collins English Dictionary,1992

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