1.

INTRODUCTION

Under the LOGSE 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:

-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 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
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 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- POST-

LISTENING LISTENING
 
 
To arouse our pupils interest in what they are There are a lot of Follow-up work.
going to listen, they will create expectation different tasks to do
-chart completion,
-looking at pictures related to the listening -marking items in
activity and guess, talk about them, describe, pictures, -extending lists,

-reading a text, -matching pictures I -sequencing,

heard,
-predicting, speculating, -summarising,
-putting pictures in
-give students the topic and make a list of order. -dictation,
vocabulary that could appear.
-picture drawing, -role-playing and
simulation,
-carrying out
actions, -change the order
of pictures,
-following a route,
-write another end.
-completing grids,

-true/false,

- multiple choice
questions,

-labelling,

-gap filling,

-spotting mistakes,

-predicting,

-seeking specific
information

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 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, 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

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 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

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)

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