TOPIC 5.

La comunicació oral

LA COMUNICACIÓ ORAL

1. INTRODUCTION
Conversation is an oral activity in which language plays a decisive role. Non-verbal
ways of communication such as gestures, body language and eye contact can contradict
what is said. But the focus of this chapter will be largely on the verbal aspects of
conversation. Naturally, conversation has received a great deal of attention on the last
twenty years from scholars in such varied fields as ethnomethodology, philosophy,
sociology and linguistics. We will try here to indicate the underlying shared assumptions
that make conversation possible:
– How meaning is built up by speakers and received by hearers.
– How conversations are structures in interactional terms.
– How speakers negotiate whose turn it is to talk.
The routines of words such as now, well and you know in spoken discourse will be
discussed. Anyone who uses a language has a number of different abilities. We can
identify four major skills in language learning:

– Two Productive skills

• Involve some kind of production on the part of the language user
– Speaking
– Writing

– Two Receptive skills

• The language user is receiving
– Listening
– Reading

The participant in a conversation is involved with both speaking and listening. By

effective communication we mean that there is a desire for the communication to be
effective from the point of view of the speaker and the listener.
 TOPIC 5. La comunicació oral

2. ORAL COMMUNICATION
Oral communication is restricted in those cases in which:
– The speaker intends to use the oral language to convey certain information to the
hearer.
• The speaker wants to speak.
• He has some communicative purpose and wants something to happen as a result
of what he says.
• He selects the language he thinks is appropriate for this purpose.

– The hearer recognizes our intention, based upon what we have said.
• The hearer wants to listen to something
• He is interested in what is being said
• He has to be prepared to process a great variety of grammar and vocabulary to
understand what is being said

When we try to organize communicative activities we will try to ensure that these
activities share the above characteristics:
– students should be using language in some way to achieve an objective, and
– this objective should be the most important part of the communication.

Receptive skills: Listening Reading

The fact that comprehension can develop ahead of production is something that
shoud be recognised and exploited in language teaching.
Another point to bear in mind is that language acquisition is based on rich, varied
and intensive contact with language, and a rich exposure to language can only be
provided through reading and listening.
People usually read and listen because they have a desire to do so and some
purpose to achieve. They generally have some expectations about what they are going to
do. Both concepts will have important methodological implications in language learning.
The methodology for teaching these skills must reflect these facts about real life, and the
task the teacher asks students to perform must be realistic and motivating. The reader or
listener employs a number of special skills when reading or listening:
– Type 1 Skills
 TOPIC 5. La comunicació oral

– Type 2 Skills

Type 1 Skills
– Those operations that students perform on a text when they tackle it for the first time:

• Predictive skills
– The efficient reader or listener predicts what he is going to read or hear.

• Extracting specific information ( scanning )

– The reader or listener will disregard everything except the information he is
interested in.

• Getting the general picture ( skimming )

– The ability to pick up the main points and discard what is irrelevant or
redundant.
Type 2 Skills
• Concerned with a more detailed analysis of the text. Generally practised after type 1:

– Inferring * opinion and attitude

• Be able to work out what the speaker´s opinions and attitudes are

– Deducing meaning from context

• Guess the meaning of unknown words from the context.

– Recognising
• function and
• discourse patterns and
• markers such as ´for example` and ´in other words`

Listening comprehension
• Speech is very different from writing; spontaneous conversation is not very organised
and the listener has to discard the redundant parts of what is said and only listen to the
main message.
 TOPIC 5. La comunicació oral

• The teacher will train:

– To get them to discard redundancy
– Hesitation
– Ungrammaticallity
– Speakers changing their minds

• The major problem that teachers and students encounter is that listening to a tape
recorder is not the same as real life listening.

• Stages of development of listening comprehension.

– The student learning a foreign language has to master a number of processes:

• Identification:
– In listening comprehension we first learn to perceive that there is a systematic
rather than accidental noise in a continuous stream of sound.
– We learn to recognize a characteristic rise and fall of the voice, varying pitch
levels or the patterns of sentence stress in English... which may seem
somewhat like those of our own language, yet strangely different.
» Example: I´ve SOLD my CAR because I´ve BOUGHT a NEW ONE.

• Selection:
– We identify in what we are hearing segments with distinctive structure on
what we are hearing according to our knowledge of the grammatical system
of the language.
– For this reason we may segment incorrectly at first with a language with a
very different structure.
» Example: “ I´ve bought a new car ” versus “ I´ve bought a car new* “

• Recirculation, selective recodification for storage:

– We recirculate material we are hearing through our cognitive system to relate
earlier segments to later segments and make the final selection of what we
will retain as the message. We then recode what we have selected for
storage in long-term memory.
 TOPIC 5. La comunicació oral

– We retain the basic semantic information rather than the actual statements
with all their complications of structure.

Productive skill: speaking

• Teaching oral production
– The main goal in teaching the productive skill of speaking will be oral fluency. This
can be defined as the ability to express oneself intelligibly, reasonably, accurately
and without too much hesitation.

– To attain this goal, teachers have to bring the students from the stage where they
are mainly imitating a model or responding to cues, to the point where they can use
the language freely to express their own ideas.

– Students will therefore need to be given two complementary levels of training:

• Practice in the manipulation of the fixed elements of the language ( phonological,
grammatical patterns and vocabulary )
• Opportunities for the expression of personal meaning.

From practice to production:

Transition activities
• Language learning often stop at the practice stage.

• No real learning should be assumed to have taken place until the students are able to
use the language for themselves, even if they sometimes make mistakes.

• What is needed is a transition phase where the learners get plenty of guidance but at
the same time are given the chance to talk to one another without constant supervision.

Some activities
• Transfer
• Information gap activities
• Games
• Oral compositions
 TOPIC 5. La comunicació oral

• Mini-dialogues
– Picture sets
– Key words
– Open or gapped dialogues
– Mapped dialogues
– Picture cards

Communicative activities

• The problems of the learners

• Group work

• Activities

Teaching pronunciation
1. Oral versus written dichotomy.

• Some dichotomies:
– Oral versus written dichotomy
– Spontaneous versus planned dichotomy
Oral versus written dichotomy
• The main differences are:
– the amount of time and space available for communication.
– Oral lnteraction allows the negotiation of meaning to ensure effective communication.
Written lnteraction must rely on the text to create the context of situation where the
correct meaning can be interpreted.
– the type of demand that they make on listeners and readers.
– Grammar structure: Oral lnteraction contains more main clauses, although most of
them are chained together in an additive fashion...
– Lexical density: Written texts contain more content words ( nouns and verbs ) than
oral texts. There is a tendency to create nouns from verbs in written language.

Spontaneous versus planned dichotomy

• Oral Language – Spontaneous

– Uh, about money, uh,uh, he has a darn good job … makes good money.
 TOPIC 5. La comunicació oral

• Written Language – Planned

– As for money, we don´t have to worry because he has a good job.

• Spontaneous text analysis has revealed six features:

– Clausal or phrasal versus sentential organization.
– Topic-comment structures.
– Nextness
– Parallelism
– Repair
– Conjoined vs embedded clauses

2. Contextualized vs decontextualized language

• All language is contextualized in that it relies on shared knowledge of many types.

• Spontaneous language is usually related to oral exchanges that show interpersonal

involvement:
– Overlap showing encouragement.
– Examples demonstrating understanding.
– Collaborative completions.
– Clarifying questions
– Mimicking voices.
– Use of details
– Personal quality ( 1st & 2nd personal pronouns )

• Written texts do not often focus on interaction and so do not show features of
involvement.

• These texts show the importance of complex syntax in integration of ideas. Some
morphological and syntactic forms are considered features of detachment:
 TOPIC 5. La comunicació oral

3. THE CONTENT OF ORAL COMMUNICATION

• Pragmatics & semantics

• Speech acts

• Operational meaning

• Communication constraints

Communication constraints

• Routines and rules of speaking

• Sociolinguistic competence

• The negotiation of meaning

4. BIBLIOGRAPHY

- Harmer, J. The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman, London, 1987

- Rivers, W.M. Teaching Foreign-Language skills. The University of Chicago press,
Chicago, 1968