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TOPIC 5
Oral communication. Elements and norms governing oral discourse.…
TOPIC 5
Oral communication. Elements and norms governing oral discourse. Most common routines and formulae. Typical strategies in oral communication.
I) Oral communication
I.2) Characteristics
A) General
- clarity
- better understanding
- intonation and stress
- rephrasing
- body language
- flexibility
- direct exchange of message
- media used
- minimum time and cost
- immediate feedback
- changeability
- degree of formality
- possibility of distortion
B) Formal
- 1st person narration
- preference of the active voice
- parataxis
- contradictions
- slurring
- discourse fillers
- repetition of lexical words, reformulation, and redundancy
- expressive, interaction, tag questions, intonation emphasizers
- verb tense shifting
- use of hedges and vague terms
- false starts, reformulation, topic changes
- deictic this/that instead the
- bigger number of function words than lexical words
I.1) Communication
Canale: “exchange and negotiation of information between at least two individuals through verbal and non-verbal symbols, oral and written/visual modes and production and comprehension processes”
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I.3) Functions
A) Reality construction
- :dart: define reality
- Blumer (1969): people use verbal communication to define everything from ideas, emotions, experiences, thoughts, objects, and people
- definitions :arrow_right: descriptive + evaluative
- people's statements reflect how they understand and live in their world
B) Categorization
- :dart: organize complex ideas and experiences into meaningful categories
- verbal communication organize random events into understandable categoires (people :arrow_right: friends, family, colleagues, romantic partners...)
C) Cognition
- :dart: help people think
- the ability to reason and communicate distinguish humans from animals
- development of memories using language :arrow_right: past, present, future
- Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: languages determines thought
- people who speaks different languages think differently
I.4) Facing communication problems
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Successful behaviour that uses supporting strategies :arrow_right: development of an alternative plan
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III) Routines and formulae
- techniques that allow participants in oral discourse to communuicate more efficiently
- routines: unvarying procedures used to construct discourse
- formula: fixed form of words used as a conventional expression / forms used by speakers to compensate for the indefiniteness of spoken language
- III.1) Tags
- elements added as an afterthought to a grammatical unit used as a retrospective qualification loosely attached to the preceding clausal material
- A) Retrospective comment clause
- modifies the stance of the preceding clause
- B) Question tags
- interactive function of eliciting the hearer's agreement or confirmation
- III.2) Interjections
- inserts with an exclamatory function, expressive of the speaker's emotion
- oh: the most common one
- surprise
- unexpectedness
- emotive arousal
- less common ones
- show intensity of feeling
- wow: surprised, impressed, delighted
- ah / ooh: pleasant + unpleasant feelings
- oops / whoops
- when a minor mshap occurs
- unpleasant emotions
- ugh: disgust
- ow / outh: physical pain
- arrgh / urgh: pain + displeasure
- tt: regret + disapproval
- hm: doubt + lack of enthusiasm
- III.3) Attention signals
- attract the attention of addresses
- familiar + impolite: followed by a directive / vocative you
- III.4) Response elicitors
- generalised question tags with a more speaker-centred role
:dart: message is understood and accepted
- huh?, eh?, alright?, okay?
- :!: right?: requires a verbal response
- III.5) Response forms
- brief and routinised responses to a previous remark by a different speaker
- :dart: message is understood and accepted
- yes, no, okay, uh, huh, mhm
- III.6) Greetings and farewells
- reciprocated in a 'symmetrical' exchange
- the briefer it is, the more informal it is
- III.7) Discourse markers
- inserts placed at the beginning of an utterance
- well, right, now, I mean, you know, you see...
- III.8) Various polite speech-act formulae
- formulae used in conventional speech acts: thanking, apologizing, requesting, congratulating...
- they elicit a polite reply
- Happy birthday, Merry Christmas, Congratulations to..., Sorry, Glad...
- III.9) Expletives
- used for taboo expressions (swearwords) used as exclamations in reaction to a negative experience
- A) Taboo expletives
- religion: damn, bloody hell, Christ
- sex: fuck
- bodily excretion: shit
B) Euphemistic expletives
- camouflage theur taboo origin by phonetic modifications or substitution of different but related words
- frack, holly cow
- III.10) First person imperatives with let's
- ?????
IV) Oral communication strategies
- Ellis: strategies are how the learner pocesses the second language input to develop linguistic knowledge
- strategies can be consciuous and behaviour (memorisation, repetition to remember)
- strategies can be subconscious and psycholinguistic (inference, overgeneralisation)
- Selinker (1972): introduced the term communication strategy
- Varadi (1973): first systematic analysis of communication strategies
IV.1) Enabling strategies to foster oral communication
A) Cognitive strategies: promoting active listening and storing information
- deliberate manipulation of language to improve learning
- Inferencing: guessing the meaning, predicting outcomes, filling in missing information
- Elaboration: using prior knowledge and relating it to new knowledge
- Translation: rendering ideas from one language to another
- Transfer: using knowledge of one language to facilitate reading in another
- Deduction / Induction: applying rules to understand the target language
B) Metacognitive strategies: planning, monitoring, and evaluating what to say and how to say it
- develop an awareness of their thinking processes as they learn
- Planning: what needs to be done to accomplis tasks + action plan to overcome difficulties
- Monitoring: checking, verifying, correcting during a task
- Evaluation: checking the outcome
C) Socio-affective strategies: self-regulation
- O’Malley & Chamot (1990): regulate and control emotions, motivations, and attitudes towards learning + learn through contact and interaction with others
- Brown and Levinson: theory of politeness strategies
- Face: self image that we want to show to the world
- Positive face: need to be appreciated
- Negative face: need not to be bothered
- Social interaction consists of playing off the positive and negative face against those of other interactants
- Politeness strategies: on record badly, on record with redressive action toward positive politeness, on record with redressive action toward negative politeness, off record, Face Threatening Act
- Learning politeness is essential in a foreign language class
IV.2) Communication strategies
- :dart: overcome problems to convey the intended meaning
- three categories: non verbal (facial expressions, voice tone, body language), verbal (oral or written), visual)
- Dornyei (1995):
A) Avoidance
- tendency not to use certain topics or linguistic elements due to phonological, syntactic or lexical constraints
- the student prefer to keep silent
B) Compensatory strategies
- compensation for missing knowledge
- eleven types: circumlocution, word coinage, prefabricated patterns, appealing for help, time-gaining strategies, approximation, literal translation, code-switching, use of all-purpose words, foreignizing, non-linguistic signals