Communicating in EnglishTalking in English

Chapter 1Dr. Tasneem

Introduction:How do you keep in touch with friends and family? How

do you express yourself and your feelings and organise your life? If you think about the many ways in which you communicate, you are likely to focus first on speech and writing.

This chapter focuses on the formal features and structure of spoken exchanges in English and the way in which people use talk in everyday interactions, in different contexts, in order to achieve specific purposes.

People convey meaning in spoken English not only by words but also by non-verbal or paralinguistic features such as gesture and facial expression or volume and tone of voice.

In order to understand the function and meaning of any spoken language, we need to know the values held by the speakers and their expectations about language use.

Pure linguistics involves studying the structure of the English language itself. Applied linguistics involves studying the ways that people use the English language to communicate and interact. In this book, we focused on the latter than the former.

Main learning points include:How both formal and informal talk is structured by rules

of interaction.How spoken exchanges are differently shaped by social,

cultural and institutional contexts and their associated practices.

How talk usually has a range of functions to do with relationships and the expression of personal or group identity.

How conversational conventions and style can vary between different cultures and social groups.

How people tell stories to share experiences and evaluations, and how these stories tend to follow a basic structure and incorporate other people’s voices.

Look out for the following points and make some notes when answering the questions bellow:

What different kinds of interactions do human beings engage in, and how do they differ in terms of language and structure?

How do people organise and control their conversations cooperatively in order to maintain flow and coherence?

What are some of the ways in which people seek to preserve their own and other people’s face during conversation?

What do you understand by the term of appropriateness in the context of language use, and how is it different from the notion of correctness?

What are some of the differences in conversational conventions style between cultures and groups, and what can be the consequences?

How do people switch between languages?In what ways do storytellers project their own sense of identity

and cultural membership and convey their own attitude towards the events and people in their stories?

There are many approaches to the study of talk and text. We view communication in terms of language practices. A language practice approach focuses on how language is part of daily routines and how it functions to help us get things done.

Discourse analysis focuses -in detail- on the surface form of what people have said or written, looking carefully at the way they use language.

One of the most important concepts in dealing with spoken language is context. Context refers to the physical location and social circumstances in which a particular example of language use occurs. It may include the following elements (physical surroundings, relationship between the speakers, current goals…….).

There is a difference between talk and conversation. Talk means any kind of spoken interaction between people. Conversation means the specific kind of talk that people engage in when their spoken interaction is not organised by institutional rules.

Informal talk is of course largely unplanned because it arises out of changing everyday activities and relationships, and to be produced and comprehend in real time.

People who have studied the structure of conversation have demonstrated that everyday talk is far from being disorganised.

A key point about everyday talk is that it is dialogic. It means that each person’s contributions are oriented towards other speakers.

Any speech event fulfils both a referential function (dealing with information) and a phatic function (dealing with social relationships). These are now called the ideational and interpersonal functions of language.

In fact, talk can fulfil a wide range of functions. In saying something, a speaker is also doing something, and that’s what we called speech acts. It means the actions that are carried out through speaking. The linguists argue that more attention should be paid to the social conditions that make particular speech acts possible.

In an attempt to reach an understanding of how people actually use spoken language to communicate, the linguists developed the discipline of conversation analysis, which examines naturally occurring talk in an extremely detailed and methodical way.

Conversation analysts not only transcribe the words that are spoken but also note such interactional features as the length of pauses between turns, overlapping, the loudness of speech delivery, and non-verbal actions such as direction of gaze.

The main purpose of such detailed transcription is to enable the conversation analyst to examine exactly how people use language to perform certain social actions.

Sacks argues that spoken exchanges are composed of single units, which tend to function together in pairs. They are called adjacency pairs, which are composed of particular kinds of speech act that tend to follow one another.

Turn taking happened when one person spoke at a time and that overlap (simultaneous speech) was generally kept to a minimum.

Forms of turn taking happened when speakers have been argued to use their grammatical knowledge of English, coupled with their knowledge of paralinguistic cues (intonation and eye contact) in order to respond to interlocutors at the end of the speech rather than in the middle.

Transition relevance place (TRP) happened when the speaker will pause very briefly for a response, but it is equally likely that other speakers will come in with their next turn, perhaps leading to a slight overlap. Overlap that occurs before a transition relevance place may be considered as an interruption.

Effort to maintain one’s own or others’ face is known as face work; an aspect of the interpersonal function of language use. Thus, we may speak of speech acts as face threatening (possibly causing someone to lose face) or face saving (enabling a speaker to escape from potential loss of face).

Politeness also involves using strategies such as appropriate terms of address and degrees of formality. These vary according to people’s relative status, the degree of social distance between them and the extent of their solidarity with one another.

Generally speaking, people in a lower status position pay more attention to the face needs of those in a higher status position than the other way round.

Being linguistically polite also involves sensitivity to the social and cultural context and to sociolinguistic rules about behaviour.

Terms of address are a part of politeness conventions, and will depend on difference in status between the speakers and how well know each other.

Communicative strategies and conversational style:In the broadest definition, conversational style refers to a

combination of features relating to the meaning and management of conversation. Conversational style is the way we use stories, or how much personal information we tend to reveal, or how we express politeness. However, aspects of our conversational style can also be traced to social variables (place of origin, social class………)

How do conversational styles vary?1. Cultural differences:There can be a remarkable diversity of styles even

among speakers of standard varieties of English. There are differences in communication strategies in different cultural groups and of gender and talk.

Aboriginal ways of using English are closely related to their lifestyle and culture, and to their beliefs about how people should relate to one another. Indirectness is not unique to aboriginal speakers, but is a common feature of the speech of many groups who lack social power.

2. Gender differences:Another way of identifying significant aspects of

style is to compare the conversational behaviours of men and women.

It is often argued that in conversation, women are less competitive and more cooperative than men, and work harder to make the interaction run smoothly, this is because women are brought up to occupy a less powerful position in society, and to display deference towards men, which they do through being more hesitant and indirect.

The two approaches towards men’s and women’s talk have been referred to as the dominance and the difference approach: the former suggests that men dominate women in spoken interaction, the latter suggests that men and women simply communicate differently.

The performance of gender involves what is said as well as how it is said.

To summarise, while both the dominance and difference arguments provide useful explanations for certain language behaviour patterns between men and women, more recent studies show how style, function and meaning vary across different context.

3. Style, identity and performativityIt is particular patterns of language features

that communicate social messages and serve to index a particular social identity on the speaker. Style and performance are part both of the formation and of the expression of identity: each of us has a toolbox of communicative resources, and uses that toolbox to produce a communicative style.

In a multilingual context, speakers are able to draw on linguistic resources from more than one language, performing complex identities which is called codeswitching.

In some communities, a mixed code may be used routinely; this practice has been termed plurilanguaging.

Style shifting when speakers adopt different accents or dialects or use a more or less formal register, in order to serve particular purposes, or to achieve particular effects.

Informal spoken narratives (stories) are composed of up to six kinds of narrative clause:

1. Abstract: a brief preview of what the narrative is about.2. Orientation: where and when the story took place.3. Complicating action: events are told in the order.4. Resolution: the way in which the complicating action came

to an end.5. Coda: the end of the telling.6. Evaluation: the point of the story.

Conclusion:Talk is a central part of most of our lives. Through it

we carry out activities, try to construct understandings about the world around us and develop our own sense of identity.

In this chapter, we have looked at the structure of informal talk, particularly at the level of conversational management.

We have seen how people and groups may vary in their conversational style, but these differences are cross- cut by contextual factors. Not only the people speak differently according to the context, but the language forms they use may have different significance and meaning depending on where and when they are used.

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