“as^signment 5”

INTRODUCTION

History

Systemic Functional approaches to genre have contributed richly to how genre is understood and applied in textual analysis and language teaching over the last twenty-five years.

Theory

Functional Linguistics (SFL) operates from the premise that language structure is integrally related to social function and context. Language is organized the way it is within a culture because such an organization serves a social purpose within that culture. “Functional” thus refers to the work that language does within particular contexts. “Systemic” refers to the structure or organization of language so that it can be used to get things done within those contexts. “Systemic” then refers to the “systems of choices” available to language users for the realization of meaning (Christie, “Genre Theory” 759; emphasis added).

Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a theory of language centered around the notion of language function. While SFL accounts for the syntactic structure of language, it places the function of language as central (what language does, and how it does it), in preference to more structural approaches, which place the elements of language and their combinations as central.

SFL starts at social context, and looks at how language both acts upon, and is constrained by, this social context.

• Context concerns the Field (what is going on),
• Tenor (the social roles and relationships between the participants),
• The Mode (aspects of the channel of communication, e.g., monologue /dialogic, spoken/written, +/- visual-contact, etc.)

Systemic semantics includes what is usually called 'pragmatics'. Semantics is divided into three components:

1. Ideational Semantics (the propositional content);
2. Interpersonal Semantics (concerned with speech-function, exchange structure, expression of attitude, etc.);
3. Textual Semantics (how the text is structured as a message, e.g., theme-structure, given/new, rhetorical structure etc.

Child language development

Some of Halliday's early work involved the study of his son's developing language abilities. This study in fact has had a substantial influence on the present systemic model of adult language, particularly in regard to the metafunctions. This work has been followed by other child language development work, especially that of Clare Painter. Ruquaya Hasan has also performed studies of interactions between children and mothers.

Language and social context

A great deal of the work in SFL can be traced to Halliday’s Language as Social Semiotic, in which Halliday describes how “the network of meanings” that constitute any culture, what he calls the “social semiotic,” is to a large extent encoded in and maintained by its discourse-semantic system, which represents a culture’s “meaning potential” (100, 13). This is why, as Halliday argues, language is a form of socialization, playing a role in how individuals become socialized and perform meaningful actions within what he calls “contexts of situation.”

In an updated version of the Teaching Learning Cycle that attempts to address some of these concerns, Feez and Joyce add a separate categorycalled “Building the Context” which precedes text modeling. The context building stage of the cycle employs ethnographic strategies for “learners to experience and explore the cultural and situational aspects of the social context of the target text” (Feez 66). Such strategies include research, interviews, field trips, role-playing, and cross-cultural comparisons.

On the theoretical front, critics have raised concerns about SFL’s view of genre and its trajectory, moving as it does from social purpose/ text structure to register analysis to linguistic analysis. While Martin is careful to note that genre realizes ideology, which he defines as the “system of coding orientations engendering subjectivity—at a higher level of abstraction than genre” (“Analysing” 40), and while Christie and Martin have acknowledged the role of genre “in the social construction of experience” (Genres and Institutions 32), the SFL model, critics note, does not examine the ways in which genres not only realize but also help reproduce ideology and social purpose. That is, bytaking “genres at their word,” such a view of genre also takes social purposes at their word, thereby ignoring why certain social purposes exist in the first place as well as what institutional interests are most served through these purposes and their enactments.

These orders of abstraction are organised into three levels or strata - semantics, lexicogrammar and phonology (or graphology).   

·        Semantics is the interface between language and context of situation (register). Semantics is therefore concerned with the meanings that are involved with the three situational variables Field, Tenor and Mode. Ideational meanings realise Field, interpersonal meanings realise Tenor and textual meanings realise Mode.

·        Lexicogrammar is a resource for wording meanings, ie. realising them as configurations of lexical and grammatical items. It follows then, that lexicogrammar is characterised by the same kind of metafunctional diversification discussed above. This takes us back to our discussion in section three where we showed that functional grammar included three separate analyses, each describing the construction of one of three different kinds of meaning which all operate simultaneously in each clause.

·        Ideational (experiential and logical) meanings construing Field are realised lexicogrammatically by the system of Transitivity. This system interprets and represents our experience of phenomena in the world and in our consciousness by modelling experiential meanings in terms of participants, processes and circumstances. Resources for chaining clauses into clause complexes, and for serialising time by means of tense, address logical meanings.

·        Interpersonal meanings are realised lexicogrammatically by systems of Mood and Modality and by the selection of attitudinal lexis. The Mood system is the central resource establishing and maintaining an ongoing exchange between interactants by assuming and assigning speech roles such as giving or demanding goods and services or information.

·        Textual meanings are concerned with the ongoing orchestration of interpersonal and ideational information as text in context. Lexicogrammatically textual meanings are realised by systems of Theme and Information. Theme selections establish the orientation or angle on the interpersonal and ideational concerns of the clause whereas Information organises the informational status or relative newsworthiness of these concerns.

“assignment 4”

♠DISCOURSE ANALYSIS♠

The scope of linguistic analysis itself soon broadened to include semantic studies, text linguistics, discourse analysis and all kinds of language studies that placed language in a social context and claimed, therefore, that language was a social phenomenon, an instrument of communication.

 Discourse Analysis is a term used to describe a range of research approaches that focus on the use of language.

 There are many different types of discourse analysis such as

v  conversation analysis,

v  discursive psychology,

v  critical discourse analysis, and

v  Foucauldian discourse analysis.

 A discourse is a set of meanings through which a group of people communicate about a particular topic. Discourse can be defined in a narrow or a broad sense and a narrow definition of discourse might refer only to spoken or written language. However, discourse analysis more often draws on a broader definition to include the shared ways in which people make sense of things within a given culture or context, including both language and language-based practices (i.e. the ways in which things are accomplished).

 Most forms of discourse analysis assume that discourse does not just describe an external reality, but rather that it is constructive of the world as we experience it.

 For example, if the main way in which we discuss dependant drinking relates to ‘the disease of alcoholism’, we are participating in the construction through language of a world in which ‘alcoholics’ deserve medical support and sympathy and are treated by doctors in buildings called hospitals.

On the other hand, if dependent drinkers are described in terms such as ‘feckless’, we are engaging with a moral discourse about drinking in which the problem of heavy drinking may appropriately be dealt with through moral education and enforcement.

 People cannot begin to think and speak about things in ways that are outside of the discourses available to us and therefore we are all seen as being subject to discourse. Within each discourse, there are certain subject positions available.

 Some (but not all) forms of discourse analysis have an explicit focus on the relationship between discourse and power, as dominant discourses define what is seen as truth within a given context.

Some examples of types of discourse analysis:

• Conversation analysis focuses on a fine grained analysis of the ways in which language is used, for example how people reply to a spoken invitations or the uses of a specific word or phrase. Some conversation analysis uses quantitative techniques. Conversation analysis does not usually pay attention to factors outside the text unless such factors are evident in the text – for example, if they are referred to by the speakers.

• Discursive psychology applies the notion of discourse to psychological topics such as memory and attitudes.

• Critical discourse analysis considers the social power implications of particular discourses with an explicit aim of challenging power imbalances.

• Foucauldian discourse analysis draws on the ideas of Foucault, often considering the development and changes of discourses over time. Foucauldian discourse analysis is generally concerned with the webs of power relationships that are enacted and constructed through discourse. 

“assignment 3”

In the mid-1990s I had many discussions with colleagues concerning the role of ‘communicative competence’ in language teaching and applied linguistics. The term communicative competence was coined by Hymes (1972), who defined it as the knowledge of both rules of grammar and rules of language use appropriate to a given context.

Bachman’s (1990) model of communicative language ability included three elements, namely language competence, strategic competence and physiological mechanisms. 

· Language competence comprises two further components: organisational and pragmatic competence.

-On the one hand, organisational competence consists of grammatical and textual competence, thereby paralleling Canale’s (1983) discourse competence.

-On the other hand, pragmatic competence consists of illocutionary competence and sociolinguistic competence, the former referring to knowledge of speech acts and language functions and the latter referring to the knowledge of how to use language functions appropriately in a given context.

Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) further divided communicative competence into linguistic, sociocultural, strategic, discourse and actional competencies. In analysing these components they start with the core, that is to say:

·         Discourse competence, which concerns the selection and sequencing of sentences to achieve a unified spoken or written text. This competence is placed in a position where linguistic, sociocultural and actional competencies shape discourse competence, which in turn, also shapes each of the three components.

This is where the top-down communicative intent and sociocultural knowledge intersect with the lexical and grammatical resources to express messages and attitudes and to create coherent texts. Celce-Murcia et al. (1995: 13–15)describe several sub-areas of discourse competence, four of which are mostimportant with regard to the current model:

a. cohesion: conventions regarding use of reference (anaphora/cataphora), substitution/ ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical chains (i.e. Halliday and Hasan l976).

b.  deixis: situational grounding achieved through use of personal pronouns, spatial terms (here/there; this/that), temporal terms (now/then; before/after), and textual reference (e.g. the following table, the figure above).

c.  coherence: expressing purpose/intent through appropriate content schemata, managing old and new information, maintaining temporal continuity and other organizational schemata through conventionally recognized means.

d. generic structure:  formal schemata that allow the user to identify an oral discourse segment as a conversation, narrative, interview, service encounter, report, lecture, sermon, etc.

·         Linguistic competence entails the basic elements of communication, such as sentence patterns, morphological inflections, phonological and orthographic systems, as well as lexical resources.

Linguistic competence includes four types of knowledge:

1.     phonological: includes both segmentals (vowels, consonants, syllable types) and suprasegmentals (prominence/stress, intonation, and rhythm).

2.    lexical:  knowledge of both content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) and unction words (pronouns, determiners, prepositions, verbal auxiliaries, etc.).

3.    morphological: parts of speech, grammatical inflections, productive derivational processes.

4.   syntactic: constituent/phrase structure, word order (both canonical and marked), basic sentence types, modification, coordination, subordination, embedding.

·         Sociocultural competence Sociocultural competence refers to the speaker’s pragmatic knowledge, i.e. how to express messages appropriately within the overall social and cultural context of communication.  This includes knowledge of language variation with reference to sociocultural norms of the target language.  In fact a social or cultural blunder can be far more serious than a linguistic error when one is engaged in oral communication. 

Celce-Murcia et al. (1995: 23–24) describe several sociocultural variables, three of which are most crucial in terms of the current model. 

1.    social contextual factors:  the participants’ age, gender, status, social distance and their relations to each other re: power and affect.

2.    stylistic appropriateness: politeness strategies, a sense of genres and registers.

3.    cultural factors: background knowledge of the target language group, major dialects/regional differences, and cross cultural awareness.

·          Actional competence involves the understanding of the speakers’ communicative intent by performing and interpreting speech act sets.

Interactional competence has at least three sub-components relevant to the current model:

1. actional competence: knowledge of how to perform common speech acts and speech act sets in the target language involving interactions such as information exchanges, interpersonal exchanges, expression of opinions and feelings, problems (complaining, blaming, regretting, apologizing, etc.), future scenarios (hopes, goals, promises, predictions, etc.) 

2. conversational competence: inherent to the turn-taking system in conversation described by Sachs et.al. (l974) but may be extendable to other dialogic genres:

·         how to open and close conversations

·         how to establish and change topics

·         how to get, hold, and relinquish the floor

·         how to interrupt

·         how to collaborate and backchannel, etc.

3. non-verbal/paralinguistic competence includes:

·         kinesics (body language),  non-verbal turn-taking signals, backchannel behaviors, gestures, affect markers, eye contact.              

·         proxemics (use of space by interlocutors)

·         haptic behavior (touching)

·         non-linguistic utterances with interactional import (e.g. ahhh! 

·         Uh-oh. Huh?) the role of silence and pauses.           

·          Strategic competence, which is concerned with the knowledge of communication strategies and how to use them. Strategic competence refers to those fixed and prefabricated chunks of language that speakers use heavily in everyday interactions.

1. routines: fixed phrases like of course, all of a sudden and formulaic chunks like How do you do?  I’m fine, thanks; how are you?

2. collocations: 

- verb-object:  spend money, play the piano

-adverb-adjective: statistically significant, mutually intelligible

- adjective-noun: tall building, legible handwriting

3. idioms: e.g., to  kick the bucket = to die; to get the ax = to be fired/terminated

4. lexical frames:  e.g., I’m looking for ______________. See you (later/tomorrow/ next week, etc)

     At about that time applied linguists and language teachers were developing the communicative approach to language teaching in reaction to grammar translation and audiolingual approaches to language pedagogy. Many applied linguists adopted Hymes’ terminology and perspective, and his notion of communicative competence thus became part of the theoretical justification for a new language teaching approach and new teaching materials that were compatible with communication as the goal of second or foreign language teaching.

Teaching communicative competence through the four skills: A focus on intercultural competence

In an attempt to help language teachers tackle cultural aspects in the language classroom, the purpose of this final section is that of proposing a cultural project for building learners’ communicative competence in the target language. The project is organized around three main stages: explanation, collection and implementation, which are described in turn.

1.       Explanation

In the first stage, i.e. Explanation, the teacher explains to learners the concept of intercultural competence in order to make them aware of the importance of paying attention to the culture of the target language. Once the concept has been introduced, learners are told they are to explore the culture of the target language and they are presented with a list of key areas that offer the possibility for developing intercultural competence, including Family,  Education,  Law and Order or  Power and Politics among others.

2.       Collection

In the second step, i.e. Collection, learners are given the task to gather material outside the classroom in relation with the cultural topics they have agreed to work with in the first stage.

3.        Implementation

In the third stage, i.e. Implementation, learners work with a variety of activities that require their use of the four skills (i.e., listening, speaking, reading and writing) in order to develop their overall communicative competence, and promote their cross-cultural awareness and understanding.

a.        Listening skill: Sample activities

Activities such as video-taped cultural dialogues, audio- or video-taped cultural misunderstandings and taped-recorded interviews with native speakers, among many others, could promote listening skills with a special emphasis on the intercultural competence.

b.      Speaking skill: Sample activities

Activity formats such as face-to-face tandem learning, making up questions to a native speaker or role-playing, among others, may develop speaking skills with a particular emphasis on the intercultural component.

c.       Reading skill: Sample activities

A variety of activities may be used in the language class to develop reading skills with a focus on the intercultural component. This section mentions a few, including critical reading, cultural bump activities, activities that focus on written genres or cultural extensive reading, among others.

d.      Writing skill: Sample activities

  Activities such as tandem e-mail learning, designing stories and story    continuation, among others, may develop writing skills with a particular emphasis on the intercultural component.

Conclusion

                        Developing learners’ communicative competence has long been among the major goals of L2 instructional programs. It is our position that crucial to that development is an understanding of discourse as the key competence with the rest of the competencies (i.e. linguistic, pragmatic, intercultural and strategic) shaping it. Accordingly, we have argued that the four language skills play a key role in fostering learners’ communicative competence since they are the manifestations of interpreting and producing a spoken or written piece of discourse, as well as a way of manifesting the rest of the components of the communicative competence construct. In this paper, and taking the intercultural competence as the point of departure, we have presented a sampling of activities in the four language skills for helping learners to communicate fluently and appropriately in the target language and culture. Although the four language skills have been presented separately for clarity purposes, the design of most activities has considered all the skills conjointly, consistent with how people interact with each other in real life. As a final remark therefore, we hope that the activities proposed in this paper may help learners see language learning not merely as language practice but as a communicative activity.

“assignment 2”

I.  Traditional Approaches of Communicative Language Teaching

Pre-twentieth-Century Trends

Based on the statement of a brief survey from Celce Murcia that prior to the twentieth century, language teaching methodology vacillated between two types of approaches: getting learners to use  a language (speak and understand it) VS getting learners to analyze a language (to learn its grammatical rules).

Both the classical Greek and medieval Latin periods were characterized by an emphasis on teaching people to use foreign languages. During the Renaissance, the formal study of the grammars of Greek and latin became popular through the mass production of book made possible by the invention of the printing press.

The Direct Method became very popular in Frence and Germany, in 1886 it also became popular in Europe. The International Phonetic Association developed the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and became part of the Reform Movement in language teaching in the 1890s. The work of these phoneticians focused on the teaching of pronunciation and oral skill, which they felt had been ignored in Grammar-Translation.

Later, the Modern language Association of America, based on the Coleman Report (Coleman 1929), endorsed the Reading Approach to language teaching. The Reading Approach, as reflected in the work of Micheal West (1941) and others, held the sway in the United States until the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Word War II broke out and made it imperative for the U.S. military to quickly and effeciently teach foreign language learners how to speak and understand a language.

The Audiolingual Approach (Fries 1945), which drew heavily on structural linguistics (Bloomflied 1933) and behavioral psychology (Skinner 1957) was born.

Nine Twentieth-Century Approaches to Language Teaching

-          The terminologies that crucial in this chapter

1	Approach	Something that reflect a certain model or research paradigm—a theory if you like (this term is the boardest)
2	Method	Is a set of procedures, i.e a system that spells out rather precisely how to teach a second or foreign language (more specific than approach)
3	Technique	Is a classroom device or activity and thus represents the narrowest of the three concepts.

 The most  problematic of Anthony’s three concepts is method. Some methods and their originators follow:

 ·         Silent Way (Gattegno 1976)

·         Community Language Learning (Curran 1976)

·         Total Physical Response (Asher 1977)

·         Suggestology, Suggestopedia, or Accelerated Learning (Lozanov 1978)

At this point Celce-Murcia will outline eachof the nine approaches listed above.

1.       Grammar-Translation Approach(used to teach classical languages to the teaching of modern languages)

2.       Direct Approach (a reaction to the Grammar Translation Approach and its failure to produce learners who could communicate in the foreign language they had been studying)

3.       Reading Approach (a reaction to the problems experienced in implementing the Direct Approach, reading was viewed as the most usable skill to have in a foreign language since not many people traveled abroad at that time, also few teachers could use their foreign language well enough to use a direct approach effectively in class)

4.       Audiolingualism ( reaction to the Reading Approach and its lack of amphasis on oral-aural skill; this approach became dominant in the US during 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, it draws from the Reform Movement and the Direct Approach but adds features from structural linguistics (Bloomfield 1933) and behavioral psychology (Skinner 1957) )

5.       Oral-Situation Approach (a reachtion to the Reading Approach and its lack of amphasis on oral-aural skill, this approach was dominant in Britain during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, it draws from the Reform Movement and the Direct Approach but adds features from Firthian linguistics and the emerging professional field of language pedagogy)

6.       Cognitive Approach (a reaction to the behaviorist features of the Audiolingual Approach; influenced by cognitive psychology [Neisser 1967] and Chomsky linguistics [Chomsky 1959, 1965])

7.       Affective-Humanistic Approach (a reaction to the general lack of affective considerations in both Audiolingualism and the Cognitive Approach, e.g. Moskowitz 1987 and Curran 1976)

8.       Comprehension-Based Approach (an out growth of research in first language acquisition led some language methodologiests to assume at second and foreign language acquisition, e.g., Winits 1981, Krashen and Terrell)

9.       Communicative Approach (an outgrowth of the work of anthropological linguists [e.g., Hymes 1972] and Firthian linguists [e.g., Halliday 1973] who view language first and foremost as a system for communication)

II. Classic Communicative Language Teaching

Communicative Language Teaching for Twenty-First Century

According Sandra J. Savignon within the last quarter century, communicative language teaching (CLT) has been put forth around the world as the “new” or “innovative” way to teach English as a second and foreign language. Teaching materials, coure descriptions, and curriculum guidelines proclaim a goal of communicative competence.

Not long ago, Americans structural linguistics and behaviorist psychology, were the prevailing influences in language teaching methods and materials, second/ foreign language teachers talked about communication in terms of four language skills; listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Speaking and writing were collectively described as active skills, reading and listening as passive skills.

Today, listeners and readers no longer are regarded as passive. They are seen as active participants in the negotiation of meaning. The skill needed to engage in speaking and writing activities were described subsequently as productive, whereas listening and reading skill were said to be receptive.

While certainly an improvement over the earlier active/ passive representation, the terms ‘productive’ and ‘receptive’ fall short of capturing the interactive nature of communication. The communicative competence needed for participantion includes not only grammatical competence, but pragmatic competence.

There is general acceptence of the complexity and interrelatedness of skills in both written and oral communication and of the need for learners to have the experience of communication, to participate in the nogotiation of meaning.

The term communicative attached itself to programs that used a functional-national syllabus based on needs assessment, and the language for specific purposes (LSP) movement was launched.

Other European developments focused on the process of communicative classroom language learning. A system of ‘chains’ encourage teachers and learners to define their own learning path through principled selection of relevant exercises (Piepho 1974; Piepho and Bredella 1976).

Supplementary teacher resource materials promoting classroom CLT became increasingly popular during the 1970s (e.g., Maley and Duff 1978). Meanwhilem, in the US, Hymes (1971) has reacted to Chomsky (1965) characterization of the linguistics competence to represent the use of language in the social context, or the observance of sociolinguistics norms of appropriacy. Halliday’s meaning potential, similary his focus was not language learning, but language as social behavior.

At the same time, in a research project at the Uneversity of Illinois, Savignon (1972) use the term ‘communicative competence’ to characterize the ability of classroom language learners to interact with other speakers, to make meaning. At a time when pattern practice and error avoidence were the rule in language teaching, this study of adult classroom acquisition of Frence looked at the effect of practice on the use of coping strategies as part of an instructional program.

The coping strategies identified in this study became the basis for subsequent identification by Canale and Swain (1980) of stratrgic competence which—along with grammatical competence and sociolinguistics competence—appeared in their three component framework for communicative competence.

The classroom model shows the hypothetical Integration of four components that have been advanced as comprising communicative competence, they are grammatical competence, discourse competence, sociocultural competence, and strategic competence.

•Grammatical Competence refers to sentece level grammatical forms, the ability  to recognize the lexical, morphological, syntactic, and phonological features of a language and to make use of these features to interpret and form words and sentences.

•Grammatical competence is not linked to any single theory of grammar and does not include the ability to state rules of usage. 

•Discourse Competence is concerned not with isolated words or phrases but with the interconnectedness of a series of utterences, written words, and/ or phrase to form a text, a meaningful whole.

•the familiar concept is coherence and cohesion.

•Sociocultural Competence extends well beyond linguistics forms and is an interdiciplinary field of inquiry having to do with the social rules of language use.

•Sociocultural competence requires an understanding of the social context in which language is used, the roles, the information, and the function of the interaction.

•Strategic Competence is the coping stategies that we use in unfamiliar contexts, with contraints doe to imperfect knowledge of rules or limiting factors in their application such as fatigue or distraction

In recent years, many innovations in curriculum planning have been proposed that offer both native and veteran teachers a dizzying array of alternatives Games, yoga, juggling, and jazz have been proposed as aids to language learning. Rapidly increasing oppurtunities for computer-mediated communication, both syncronious – online char room – and asyncronous – the full spectrum of information and interaction available in the internet, etc.

The Range Options

• Language Arts
• Language for a purpose
• My language is me: Personal English language Use
• You Be, I’ll Be. Theater Art
• Beyond the classroom