Topic 3

COMMUNICATION PROCESS.
LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS

LANGUAGE IN USE
NEGOCIACIÓN DEL SIGNIFICADO.

INTRODUCT
ION
1. THE
COMMUNICATI
ON PROCESS:
2.
LANGUAGE
FUNCTIONS:
Classifications
by:
Karl Bühler
R. Jacobson
Michael
Halliday
James Britton
Desmond
Morris
Malinowski
2.1 Function
as fundamental
principle of
language
3.
LANGUAGE IN
USE
D. Crystal
INTRODUCTION
Bygate
Widdowson
4. THE
 Communication is simply the act of transferring information from one place to another.
Although this is a simple definition, when we think about how we may communicate the
subject becomes a lot more complex. There are various categories of communication and more
than one may occur at any time.
The different categories of communication include:
Spoken or Verbal Communication: face-to-face, telephone, radio or television and other
media.
Non-Verbal Communication: body language, gestures, how we dress or act - even our scent.
Written Communication: letters, e-mails, books, magazines, the Internet or via other media.
Visualizations: graphs and charts, maps, logos and other visualizations can communicate
messages.
The desired outcome or goal of any communication process is understanding.
The process of interpersonal communication cannot be regarded as a phenomena which
simply 'happens', but should be seen as a process which involves participants negotiating their role
in this process, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Senders and receivers are of course vital in communication. In face-to-face communication
the roles of the sender and receiver are not distinct as both parties communicate with each other,
even if in very subtle ways such as through eye-contact (or lack of) and general body language.
There are many other subtle ways that we communicate (perhaps even unintentionally) with
others, for example the tone of our voice can give clues to our mood or emotional state, whilst
hand signals or gestures can add to a spoken message.
In written communication the sender and receiver are more distinct. Until recent times,
relatively few writers and publishers were very powerful when it came to communicating the
written word. Today we can all write and publish our ideas online, which has led to an explosion of
information and communication possibilities.

1. THE COMMUNICATION PROCESS

Communication, the exchange of meanings between individuals through a common system of

symbols, has been of concern to countless scholars since the time of ancient Greece. Until recently,
however, the topic was usually subsumed under other disciplines and taken for granted as a natural
process inherent to each. The English literary critic and author I.A. RICHARDS offered one of the first
- and in some ways still the best - definitions of communication as a discrete aspect of human
enterprise:

Communication takes place when one mind so acts upon its environment that another mind
is influenced, and in that other mind an experience occurs which is like the experience in the first
mind, and is caused in part by that experience.

Richard's definition is both general and rough, but its application to nearly all kinds of
communications - including those between men and animals (but excluding machines) - separated
the contents of messages from the processes in human affairs by which these messages are
transmitted.

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 One of the most productive schematic models of a communication system emerged from the
speculations of the linguist ROMAN JACOBSON (who developed the traditional model of language as
elucidated particularly by the Austrian psychologist KARL BÜHLER). As originally conceived, the
model contained the following elements:

CONTACT
Jacobson says that in any act of verbal
communication, the six constituents of the revised model
are:
1. The source or ADDRESSER, who sends is an
individual, group, or organization who initiates the
communication. This source is initially responsible for the
success of the message. The sender's experiences,
attitudes, knowledge, skill, perceptions, and culture
influence the message. "The written words, spoken words,
and nonverbal language selected are paramount in
ensuring the receiver interprets the message as intended by the sender" (Burnett & Dollar, 1989).
All communication begins with the sender.

2. MESSAGE. The first step the sender is faced with

involves the encoding process. In order to convey meaning, the
sender must begin encoding, which means translating
information into a message in the form of symbols that
represent ideas or concepts. This process translates the ideas
or concepts into the coded message that will be
communicated. The symbols can take on numerous forms such

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as, languages, words, or gestures. These symbols are used to encode ideas into messages that
others can understand.
3. CODE. When encoding a message, the sender has to begin by deciding what he/she wants to
transmit. This decision by the sender is based on what he/she believes about the receiver’s
knowledge and assumptions, along with what additional information he/she wants the receiver to
have. It is important for the sender to use symbols that are familiar to the intended receiver.
4. CONTACT. To begin transmitting the message, the sender uses some kind of channel (also
called a medium). The channel is the means used to convey the message. Most channels are either
oral or written, but currently visual channels are becoming more common as technology expands.
Common channels include the telephone and a variety of written forms such as memos, letters, and
reports. The effectiveness of the various channels fluctuates depending on the characteristics of the
communication. For example, when immediate feedback is necessary, oral communication channels
are more effective because any uncertainties can be cleared up on the spot.
5. Receiver or ADDRESSEE. After the appropriate channel or channels are selected, the message
enters the decoding stage of the communication process. Decoding is conducted by the receiver.
Once the message is received and examined, the stimulus is sent to the brain for interpreting, in
order to assign some type of meaning to it. It is this processing stage that constitutes decoding. The
receiver begins to interpret the symbols sent by the sender, translating the message to their own
set of experiences in order to make the symbols meaningful. Successful communication takes place
when the receiver correctly interprets the sender's message.
6. To be operative, the message requires a CONTEXT ('referent' in another nomenclature),
shared by the addressee, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized. The extent to which the
receiver comprehends the message will depend on a number of factors, which include the
following: how much the individual or individuals know about the topic, their receptivity to the
message, and the relationship and trust that exists between sender and receiver. All interpretations
by the receiver are influenced by their experiences, attitudes, knowledge, skills, perceptions, and
culture. It is similar to the sender's relationship with encoding.
Feedback is the final link in the chain of the communication process. After receiving a message,
the receiver responds in some way and signals that response to the sender. The signal may take the
form of a spoken comment, a long sigh, a written message, a smile, or some other action. "Even a
lack of response, is in a sense, a form of response" (Bovee & Thill, 1992). Without feedback, the
sender cannot confirm that the receiver has interpreted the message correctly.
Feedback is a key component in the communication process because it allows the sender to
evaluate the effectiveness of the message. Feedback ultimately provides an opportunity for the
sender to take corrective action to clarify a misunderstood message. "Feedback plays an important
role by indicating significant communication barriers: differences in background, different
interpretations of words, and differing emotional reactions" (Bovee & Thill, 1992).

2. LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS
The culmination of language learning is not simply in the mastery of the forms of language
but the mastery of forms in order to accomplish the communicative functions of language. While
forms are the manifestation of language, functions are the realization of those for the pragmatic
(practical) purpose of language.

Communication may be regarded as a combination of acts, a series of elements with purpose

and intention. Communication is not merely an event, something that happens; it is functional,
purposive and designed to bring about some effect —some change on the environment of hearers

4
and speakers. Communication is a series of communicative acts or speech acts which are used
systematically to accomplish particular purposes. We could attempt to list and classify them in some
way or other, and a number of scholars have attempted to do this, hoping to find some fairly
general framework or scheme for classifying the purposes for which people use language.

There are a number of familiar classifications of linguistic functions; for example, that put
forward by MALINOWSKI (1923), who classified the functions of language into the broad categories
of 'pragmatic' and 'magical'. As an anthropologist, he was interested in practical or pragmatic uses
of language, which he further subdivided into ritual or magical uses of language that were
associated with ceremonial or religious activities in the culture.

A quite different classification is that associated with the name of KARL BÜHLER (1934), who
was concerned with the functions of language from the standpoint not so much of the culture but
of the individual. Bühler made the distinction into cognitive (representational) function (refers to its
employment for the transmission of factual information) , conative (or instrumental) function ( is
used for influencing the person one is addressing or for bringing about some practical effect, and
expressive function (refers to the mood or attitude of the speaker or writer): the expressive being
language that is oriented towards the self, the speaker; the conative being language that is oriented
towards the addressee; and the representational being language that is oriented towards the rest of
reality - that is, anything other than speaker or addressee.

His scheme was adopted by the Prague School and later extended by R. JACOBSON (1960),
who on the basis of the six factors of his own model of communication distinguished six different
functions of language:

5
 Jakobson's emotive, referential, and conative functions were like Bühler's expressive,
representational, and conative functions, but he added three more functions to Bühler's scheme:
the poetic function, oriented towards the message; the phatic (or transactional) function, oriented
towards the channel (or in Jakobson's terms 'contact'); and the metalingual (or metalinguistic)
function oriented towards the code.

The British linguist MICHAEL HALLIDAY, who also belonged to the Prague School used the
term function to mean the purposive nature of communication and outlined seven similar functions
of language:

1. The instrumental function serves to manipulate the environment, to cause certain events
to happen, e.g. Don‘t touch the stove

2. The regulatory function is the control of events. Approval, disapproval, behaviour control,
setting laws and rules, are all regulatory features of language, e.g. Upon good behaviour you will be
eligible for parole in 10 months

3. The representational function is the use of language to make statements, it convey acts
and knowledge, explain or report, i.e. to represent reality as one sees it, e.g. The sun is hot, The
President gave a speech last night.

4. The interactional function of language serves to ensure social maintenance.

5. The personal function allows a speaker to express feelings, emotions personality, gut-level
reactions. A person’s individuality is usually characterized by his or her use of the personal function
of communications.

6. The heuristic function involves language used to acquire knowledge to learn about the
environment. Heuristic functions are often conveyed in the form of questions that will lead to
answers. Children typically make good use of the heuristic function in their incessant “why-
questions” about the world around them.

7. The imaginative function serves to create imaginary systems or ideas. Telling fairy tales,
joking, or writing a novel are all uses of the imaginative function. Using language as in poetry are
also instances of imaginative functions.

These seven different functions of language are neither discrete nor exclusive. A single
sentence or conversation might incorporate many different functions simultaneously. Yet it is the
understanding of how to use linguistic forms to achieve these functions of language that comprises
the crux of L2 learning. HaIliday’s seven functions of language tend to mask the almost infinite
variety and complexity of functions that we accomplish through language. The forms of language
used to accomplish the functions must become part of the total linguistic repertoire of the L2
learner, if learners are attempting to acquire written and spoken competence in the language they
must also discern differences in forms and functions between spoken and written discourse.

Buhler's scheme was adapted and developed in a different direction by the English educator
JAMES BRITON (1970), who proposed a framework of transactional, expressive, and poetic

6
language functions. Britton was concerned with the development of writing abilities by children in
school, and held the view that writing developed first in an expressive context, and the ability was
then extended 'outward' to transactional writing on the one hand, to poetic writing on the other.
Transactional language was that which emphasised the participant role, whereas in poetic language
the writer's role was more that of spectator.
DESMOND MORRIS (1967), in his entertaining study of the human species from an animal
behaviourist's point of view, came up with yet another classification of the functions of language,
which he called 'information talking', 'mood talking', 'exploratory talking' and 'grooming talking'.
The first was the co-operative exchange of information; Morris seemed to imply that that came
first, although in the life history of a human child it arises last of all. The second was like Buhler's
and Britton's 'expressive' function. The third was defined as 'talking for talking's sake'; 'aesthetic,
play functions'; while the fourth was 'the meaningless, polite chatter of social occasions' - what
Malinowski had referred to forty years earlier as 'phatic communion', meaning communion through
talk when people use expressions like 'nice day, isn't it?' as a way of oiling the social process and
avoiding friction.

What such scholars were doing was essentially constructing some kind of a conceptual
framework in non-linguistic terms, looking at language from the outside, and using this as a grid for
interpreting the different ways in which people use language. In all these interpretations of the
functions of language, we can say that function equals use: the concept of function is synonymous
with that of use. But we have to take a further step: function will be interpreted not just as the use of
language but as a fundamental property of language itself, something that is basic to the evolution of
the semantic system. This amounts to saying that the organisation of every natural language is to be
explained in terms of a functional theory.

3. LANGUAGE IN USE
On the one hand, communication and language are very closely related but they are not the
same phenomenon. On the other hand language does not only enable us to communicate with
other people, it also has important mental functions and affects how we understand and reflect on
the world around us.

Our experience of language in social settings leads us to categorize the world in similar ways to
people around us and to manipulate these categories in our thinking.

When the L2 learner encounters a new language, he is required to cope with the new
categories of experience and new ways of manipulating them. But language is not the only means
by which we communicate. In a noisy situation, for example, we often resort to gestures to convey
simple messages and in everyday conversation non-verbal signals such as posture and eye contact
play an important part in regulating turn taking between speakers.

The most important function of language is to facilitate communication with others. From the
moment communication moves beyond the “here-and-now” it relies for its success on the success
on the resources that the language system puts at its disposal. Today most foreign language
teaching is oriented towards the development of communication skills.

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 According to the linguist David Crystal, language is the
most frequently used and most highly developed form of
human communication we possess. An act of
communication is basically the transmission of information
of some kind of a 'message' from a source to a receiver. In
the case of language, both source and receiver are human
and the message is transmitted, either vocally, through the
air, or graphically, by marks on a surface, usually paper.
Language is one form of communication.

Someone knowing a language knows more than how

to understand, speak, read, and write sentences. He also knows how
sentences are used to communicative effect; according to Bygate, when
someone acquires knowledge of language he also acquires competence as to
when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when,
where, in what manner: in short he becomes able to accomplish a
repertoire of speech acts, to take part in speech events and to value their
accomplishment by others. This competence, moreover, is integral with
attitudes, values, and motivations concerning language, its features and uses, and integral with
competence for, and attitudes toward, the interrelation of language with the other code of
communicative conduct.

The acquisition of such competence is of course fed by social experience, needs, motives, and
issues in action that is itself a renewed source of motives, needs and experience. A model of
language must design it with a face toward communicative conduct and social life.

Attention to the social dimension is thus not restricted to occasions on which social factors
seem to interfere with or restrict the grammatical factors. The engagement of language in social life
has a positive, productive aspect. There are rules of use without which the rules of grammar
would be useless (Dell Hymes). Just as rules of syntax can control aspects of phonology, and just as
semantic rules perhaps control aspects of syntax, so rules of speech acts enter as a controlling
factor for linguistic form as a whole.

For our purposes in teaching and learning a second or foreign language, once we accept the
need to use language as communication, we can no longer think of it in terms only of sentences. We
must consider the nature of discourse, and how best to teach it and to transfer from grammatical
competence, a knowledge of sentences, to what has been called communicative competence.

According to Widdowson language does not occur in stray words or sentences but in
connected discourse. He distinguishes two ways of looking at language beyond the limit of the
sentence. One way sees it as 'text', a collection of formal objects held together by cohesive
devices. The other way sees language as 'discourse', a use of sentences to perform acts of
communication which cohere into larger communicative units.

This linguist uses the label 'discourse analysis' to refer to the investigation into the way
sentences are put to communicative use in the performing of social actions, discourse being roughly
defined, therefore, as the use of sentences. If we are to teach language in use, we have to shift our
attention from sentences in isolation to the manner in which they combine in text on the one hand,

8
and to the manner in which they are used to perform communicative acts in discourse on the other.
Text discourse and discourse analysis are different but complementary ways of looking at language
in use.

When learners of a Foreign or Second Language interact with native speakers or other
learners, they often experience considerable difficulty in communicating. This leads to substantial
interactional efforts by the conversational partners to secure mutual understanding. This work is
often called the 'negotiation of meaning'. It contributes to Second Language Acquisition in a number
of ways. On the part of the native speaker, according to LONG, uses strategies and tactics.
Strategies are conversational devices used to avoid trouble; examples are relinquishing topic
control, selecting salient topics, and checking comprehension. Tactics are devices for repairing
trouble; examples are topic switching and requests for clarification. Other devices such as using a
slow pace, repeating utterances, or stressing key words can serve as both tactics and strategies. The
learner also needs to contribute to the negotiation of meaning, however, as it is a joint enterprise.
He can do so by giving clear signals when he has understood or not understood and, most
important, by refusing to give up. The result of the negotiation of meanings is that particular types
of input and interaction result. In particular it has been hypothesized that negotiation makes input
comprehensible and in this way promotes SLA.

4.
NEGOTIATION
OF MEANING Ellis (1999: 3) defines negotiated interaction as "the
conversational exchanges that arise when interlocutors seek to
prevent a communicative impasse occurring or to remedy an actual impasse that has arisen".
More precisely, exchanges of this kind involve "the modification and restructuring of interaction
that occurs when learners and their interlocutors anticipate, perceive, or experience difficulties in
message comprehensibility.

Widdowson divides competence into two parts: linguistic competence, consisting of the systemic
levels of grammatical and phonological knowledge; and communicative competence, which is
made up of schematic knowledge. This includes knowledge of the world, and knowledge of speech
acts and of acceptable sequences of social interaction. Schematic knowledge also presumably
includes knowledge of collocational probability, range and register, although this is not always clear.
Widdowson's point is that language use has to operate over both levels.

4.1 Sentence
meaning and According to Widdowson, the first thing to consider is how
utterance meaning context acts upon grammar so that the specific meanings of
particular expressions are realized and communicative outcomes
brought about so we move from semantics to pragmatics, from virtual to actual meanings. So we
need to consider how meanings are realized in context.

We can begin with the crucial point that understanding what people mean by what they say is
not the same as understanding the linguistic expressions they use in saying it. Let’s consider an
expression in English such as The little letter is in the drawer. Considered as a sentence this has no

9
problem for understanding. But as use of language, as an utterance presented like this in isolation it
is quite incomprehensible because we cannot attach any meaning to it. We attach meanings to
linguistic expressions and we do this by invoking some pre-existing knowledge or other or some co-
existing feature of the situation or utterance. Anybody actually producing this expression with the
intention of being meaningful would suppose that the addressee can make an attachment, can
relate the language to some shared conception or perception of the world and so achieve the
intended meaning. The letter (the one we have just been talking about or the one that arrived by
post this morning) is in the drawer (the one in the desk...)

Every linguistic expression contains the potential for a multiplicity of meanings and which
one is realized on a particular occasion is determined by non-linguistic factors of text.

A sentence has only one invariant meaning or if it has more than one as in the
case of structural or lexical ambiguity, its meanings can be exactly specified.

Utterance meanings, on the other hand, change continually to suit the circumstances in which
they are used. The multiplicity of utterance meanings does not mean that any linguistic expression
can mean anything at all in complete disregard of what it means in a sentence.

The conventional meaning of linguistic signs and their combinations in sentence constitute
types of conceptualisation codified as linguistic knowledge while the tokens are particular and
actualised instances and must clearly be set in correspondence with them.

The letter we are referring now to, at the moment is a particular token instance of letter as a
lexical item, a general conceptual type, and a codified abstraction. It is clear that the type is more or
less stable, established by convention, whereas the token is not since it is conditioned by context.
And language use must always be a matter of actualising tokens as appropriate.

As Johnson Laird has pointed out it is possible to communicate successfully with an

incomplete knowledge of meaning when, for example, you read the sentence:

After a hearty dish of spaghetti, Bernini cast a bronze of a mastiff searching for truffles.

We may understand perfectly well even though we may not be entirely sure exactly what
alloy bronze is, or what sort of dog a mastiff is or what truffles are.

So the type of meaning that is known may be general (bronze is a kind of metal, mastiff a kind
of dog). There will be occasions when the purpose calls for increased specificity of type: for
example, in the context of a textbook on metallurgy.

Communication, then, is a matter of the mutual accommodation of type and token as

appropriate to purpose. Our concepts of meaning provide us with bearings on what words mean in
context and the context in turn provides us what evidence for extending our conceptual
representation of these meanings.

4.2 Symbol and

i
n
d
e 10
 We can call symbol to the linguistic sign as type. The knowledge of a language will enable us
to decipher strings of symbols as sentences and it is this knowledge, generally referred to as
linguistic competence, which it is the traditional business of linguists and language teachers.
Comprehension in the sense of understanding sentences is, then, a semantic matter of deciphering
symbolic meanings. But this knowledge will not only enable us to understand language in use for
this is always a matter of realizing the particular token meanings of signs in association with the
context of utterance.

This is a pragmatic matter of achieving meaning by using linguistic signs as evidence. The sign
in the utterance, therefore, does not function as a symbol but as an index: it indicates where we
must look in the world we know or can perceive in order to discover meaning. It directs our
attention away from the language itself.

Whereas symbolic meanings inhere in the signs themselves indexical meanings must be
achieved by the language user associating symbols with more relevant aspects of the world outside
language in the situation or in the mind. People who have particular knowledge and experience in
common, whose contextual realities are closely congruent, will manage to communicate by
engaging relevant aspects

However, we do not only communicate with people with whom we share something. We
need also to participate in wide networks of interaction. And here we cannot rely on particular
instances of shared knowledge and experience. We need to refer to more general and conventional
assumptions and beliefs which define what is accepted as normal or typical in respect of the way
reality is structured and to the conduct of social life. This common knowledge of shared experience
and conventionally sanctioned reality can be called schematic knowledge: it is the knowledge which
is acquired as a condition of entry into a particular culture or subculture.

Schematic knowledge then is a necessary source of reference in use whereby linguistic

symbols are converted into indices in the process of interpretation.

A central problem in teaching a foreign language lies in that we need to identify areas of
schematic knowledge which the learners will accept as independently relevant and worth acquiring
so that the learning of a language is seen the necessary means to a desired end.

Now, we may say that the achievement of indexical meaning is commonly a matter of making
a connection between the linguistic sign and the relevant aspect of schematic knowledge. We can
distinguish two kinds of schematic knowledge. If we refer to linguistic knowledge, the
internalization of the symbolic function of signs, systemic knowledge, then we can think of the
realisation of meaning in actual language use as a matter of taking bearings on two points of
reference: systemic knowledge on the one hand and schematic knowledge on the other.

4.3 Negotiating procedures

This taking of bearings on systemic and schematic knowledge is the procedural activity which
converts type to token, symbol to index, and so actualises particular meanings. It is the continuous
process of plotting a position and steering an interpretative course by adjustment and prediction. It is
in this sense that language use can be regarded as essentially a matter of the negotiation of meanings.

11
 It will be clear that on any particular occasion of meaning negotiation the more familiar the
schematic content or mode of communication, the less reliance needs to be placed on systemic
knowledge, and vice versa. This relates to the point made by Johnson-Laird earlier: that an effective
(i.e. indexical) use of language does not depend on knowing precise (i.e. symbolically complete)
meanings.

It is that close attention to the language itself and reference to systemic knowledge allows us
to negotiate meaning and acquire the kind of information which for the reader in the schematic
knowledge is provided in advance.

Perhaps the fist point that needs to be made is that the

4.4 The relationship between use and learning differs in respect to first and
negotiation of second language situations. In L1 acquisition, the child learns about
meaning and the world through language and through an engagement with the
language learning world. The two processes are, so to speak, symbiotically related.
They are the mutually reinforcing determinants of development.
Thus systemic and schematic knowledge develop concurrently supporting each other. This
experience cannot be replicated in L2 acquisition. Here learners have already been socialised into
the schematic knowledge associated with their mother tongue: they are initiated into their culture
in the very process of language learning. When they confront uses of the foreign language they are
learning, their natural inclination is to interpret them in reference to this established association,
and rely on the foreign as sparingly as possible. They will invoke as much systemic knowledge of this
language as is indexically necessary and no more, using both their first language and the foreign
language tactically as a source of clues to meaning, while taking bearings, as usual, on their
schematic knowledge.

The nature of learner errors comes up for consideration here. When learners are called upon
to use the language being learned for some communicative purpose, a purpose other than language
practice, then they will be naturally disposed to draw upon the systemic resources which have
proved serviceable in the past for the achievement of indexical meaning. These have been
predominantly those of the mother tongue. In this respect learner errors which reveal L1 influence
are the natural reflex of procedures of meaning negotiation.

Errors have generally been attributed to cognitive causes, evidence of the learner’s
psychological process of rule formation. It is also likely, that under communicative pressure learners
will place more reliance on lexical means than on the intuitive assumption that context can
compensate for an absence of refinement in grammatical signalling.

In view of all this, one might characterise second language pedagogy as a set of activities
designed to bring about the gradual shift of reliance from one systemic resource to another for the
achievement of indexical purposes.

The essential point is that meaning negotiation, which, in normal circumstances, is always a
matter of achieving an objective by the most economical means, will be carried out by taking
whatever short cuts are available. It does not in itself provide for the acquisition of a systemic
knowledge of the foreign language.

12
 The internalization of the system as a communicative resource is only likely to happen when
there is a concentration on symbol to index conversion, when the potential value of symbols is
actualised indexically in the process of discovering new meaning.

Now we move to the central dilemma in L2 pedagogy: the conditions appropriate for
acquiring communicative resources are different from the conditions of their use. The question then
is how can we continue to induce both internalization of language as a resource and the ability to
use it?

We might say that a structural approach to language teaching lays emphasis on systemic
knowledge and makes the assumption that one this is acquired the learners will discover for
themselves how it is put to use in communication. Classroom activities will tend to be those
focussing attention on rather than on interpretation by indexical inference.

Language difficulty will generally be measured in terms of decipherability, the problem of which
can be eased by educing the symbolic complexity of the text. A notional/functional approach
essentially seeks to establish correlation between systemic and schematic elements. It associates
concepts and communicative acts with their most common standard expressions in the foreign
language. In this respect it focuses on lexical/grammatical co-occurrences in formulaic phrases.
Classroom activities here would prepare the learners to economise the relevant co-occurrences and
correlation as they occur in actual use. Language difficulty will be seen in terms of non-conformity to
standard or normal ways of expressing notions and functions.

Neither approach takes as its central concern the exercise of procedures for meaning
negotiation, which require the relating and mutual adjustment of systemic and schematic
knowledge for the realisation of indexical value, and which can provide the learner with the
opportunities to learn the language through using it. But an approach which did promote a
negotiation of meaning in a natural way, seeking to cast the learner into the role of user would itself
run into problems. For it would encourage a reliance on schematic knowledge and a corresponding
avoidance of an engagement with the systemic features of the foreign language.

What seems to be needed is an approach which recognises the necessary contrivance of

pedagogy and seeks to guide learners through guided negotiating tasks. These would require them
to take bearings on both systemic and schematic knowledge and would shift the focus of procedural
work in a controlled way. There seems to be no obvious reason why such tasks should not also
allow learners to refer to the systemic and schematic knowledge of their own language and culture.
This would take pedagogic advantage of the learners’ own experience. The purpose of such an
approach would be to demonstrate that L2 has the same potential for use as the L1 encourage
learners to use on their experience of language by applying familiar procedures to the
interpretation of L2 use and so to teach the L2 system not as an end in itself but as a resource of the
achievement of meaning..

Conclusion and
Teaching
Inference In many respects there are similarities in the art of teaching and the
process of communication.

13
Teaching is a creative art which influences the learning of an organism, and communication is
intended to effect changes in human behaviour.

The teacher (sender) has to plan and select appropriate materials for his teaching. He must have a
purpose or an intention, usually termed the objectives. In any form of teaching and learning
situations, learning cannot take place unless objectives are clearly stated and defined.

Communication within the teaching-learning process is further complicated by the fact that the
teacher, as a person, is in many respects different from the student. There are factors which affect
the fidelity of the teaching-learning communication process; for example, the teacher may use
different ways to elicit responses (communication skills); the teacher's own attitude may influence
the viewpoint of the student (attitude); the teacher must teach something which is based on the
student's past experiences and perception (knowledge level); the teacher must pay attention to the
environment and background in which the student learns, i.e. (social-cultural systems) because the
student may not be able to understand things derived from foreign cultures. The teacher, when
planning the lesson and communicating with the student, must evaluate these elements in
communication before,, he selects materials and teaching media.

So, in planning materials and selecting instructional media, the teacher must know what the
communication elements are, if effective teaching is to be achieved. He must make the utmost use
of different media to stimulate the student's interests, imagination and critical thinking. As indicated
in the above, a teacher may employ interaction or verbal communication techniques or non-verbal
communication skills, or he may use symbols or signs if he finds the situations require these
techniques.

The attitude, action, appearance of a teacher is part of non-verbal communication which may
directly or indirectly affect the emotions of the students.
B.F. Skinner believes that if we want to change behavior we need merely to control the
environment in which the learners interact. Instead of using verbal or oral communication, the
lecturer may sometimes seek non-verbal communication so as to reinforce her/his oral message.

Apart from stimulating the students to think and to reason, non-verbal communication actually
reinforces interaction. Students will learn to do things on their own, to increase their mental
strength in creative and critical thinking.

The learning of a foreign language based on the development of communicative abilities will
contribute to the development of the competence in linguistic communication in the same sense
that the first language does.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, G. & Yule, G. "Teaching the Spoken L. ". CUP, 1983.

Bygate, M. "Speaking". OUP, 1987.
Crystal, D. "Linguistics". Penguin, 1971.
Halliday, MAK. "An Introduction to Functional Gr.". E. Arnold, London 1985.
Halliday, MAK & Hassan, R. "Language, Context and Text: Aspects of
Language in a Social Semiotic Perspective". OUP, 1990.
Long, M. & SSato, C. "Classroom Foreigner Talk Discourse: Forms and Functions

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of Teacher's Questions", in H. Seliger and M. Long (eds)
Rowley, Mass,"Classroom Oriented Research in SLA", Newbury House,1983.
Wells, G. et al. "Learning through Interaction. The Study of Language
Development". CUP, 1981.
Widdowson, HG. "Teaching Language as Communication". OUP, 1985.

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