2.3.

Speaking within an interactionist approach

During the late 1970s and the 1980s, important shifts in the field of language learning took place
under the influence of interactionist ideas that emphasized the role of the linguistic environment in
interaction with the innate capacity for language development (see Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this
volume). The changes under this approach were thus characterized by an increasing recognition of
the need to examine the complex cognitive processes involved in producing oral language from a
more dynamic and interactive perspective. Additionally, such a perspective should also pay attention
to the functions that producing spoken language fulfills, as well as accounting for the social and
contextual factors that intervene in such speech production act. The analysis of the processes that
intervene in the production of oral language was carried out by Levelt (1978, 1989). Drawing on the
discipline of cognitive psychology, Levelt (1989) proposed a model of speech production whose basic
assumption concerned the fact that messages were “planned.” Thus, in order to be able to produce
oral language, speakers had to construct a plan on the basis of four major processes: 1)
conceptualization n, which involves the selection of the message content on the basis of the
situational context and the particular purpose to be achieved; 2) formulation, which implies
accessing, sequencing and choosing words and phrases to express the intended message
appropriately; 3) articulation, which concerns the motor control of the articulatory organs to execute
the planned message; and 4) monitoring, which allows speakers to actively identify and correct
mistakes if necessary. Considering what these planning processes involved, speaking was regarded as
a complex activity that required speakers to possess a capacity to integrate different interpersonal
and psychomotor aspects during the oral production event (Bygate 1998). In fact, speakers’
automation of these key four processes was necessary because of the inherent difficulty involved in
paying attention to all of them simultaneously while subject to the pressure of time restraints
imposed during an ongoing conversation. Additionally, these planning processes also implied
speakers’ choice or selection of what they judged to be appropriate so that both meaning and form
could be brought together in such a conversation. The importance of the model developed by Levelt
(1989) with the identification of the underlying processes involved in producing oral discourse was
also consistent with both functional (Halliday 1973, 1975, 1985) and pragmatic (Searle, Kiefer, and
Bierwisch, 1980; Leech 1983; Levinson 1983) views of language. In fact, these two fields of research
paid attention to speakers’ communicative intent as being central to the connection between the
meanings they wanted to communicate and the form through which those meanings could be
expressed. Moreover, as a result of the emergence of discourse analysis, which described language in
use at a level above the sentence (McCarthy 1991), producing spoken language was no longer seen in
terms of repeating single words or creating oral utterances in isolation, but rather as elaborating a
piece of discourse (i.e., a text) that carried out a communicative function and was affected by the
context in which it was produced. The functional view of language thus accounted for the role that
this communicative function played in determining the form of the language to be used (Halliday
1973, 1975, 1985). According to Halliday, it could be theorized that, like children who learned to talk
because language served a function for them, speakers learned to use language in order to fulfill a
number of functions given a particular cultural and social context. Therefore, speaking was seen as a
contextualized process in which both the context of culture and the context of situation (Malinowski
1935) influenced the nature of the language to be used. In relation to the former type of context, the
notion of genre was developed in order to describe the ways in which spoken language was used to
achieve social purposes within a culture (Burns, Joyce, and Gollin 1996). Thus, genre was defined as
“a purposeful, socially-constructed, communicative event” (Nunan 1991: 43) which resulted in oral
texts with different communicative functions (i.e., a political speech, a church sermon, a casual
conversation, etc.). Regarding the latter type of context, the notion of register was elaborated
considering the fact that, within the broader cultural context, speakers also varied their language
depending on the social situation in which they were interacting. Consequently, their choice of a
particular register was based on the interaction of three contextual variables: 1) the field, which
concerns the topic of communication; 2) the tenor, which refers to the relationship of the
participants; and 3) the mode, which involves the channel of communication. In line with the
functional view of language, and the importance of regarding speaking as a contextualized
communicative event in which speakers’ choice of a particular linguistic form depended on their
intended meanings, the pragmatic field of research was also concerned with how such meanings
were created in context (Searle, Kiefer, and Bierwisch 1980; Leech 1983; Levinson 1983). More
specifically, pragmatics was defined by Crystal (1985: 240) as: The study of language from the point
of view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using
language in social interaction and the effects their use of language has on other participants in the
act of communication. As can be implied from this definition, apart from considering the active role
that the users (i.e., speakers) of the language played in the act of communication, the choices they
were able to make and the social context in which they participated, pragmatics also focused on the
importance of interaction. In fact, this aspect played a very important role when dealing with
pragmatics, since it was claimed that the process of communication did not only focus on the
speakers’ intentions, but also on the effects those intentions had on the hearers. The interactive view
of speaking thus became evident since the collaboration of both speakers and hearers in a given
communicative situation was of paramount importance to achieve mutual understanding.
Additionally, and drawing on the work developed in speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969),
pragmatics examined how speakers were able to perform actions by producing speech acts (e.g.,
requesting, apologizing, complaining, refusing) and how these speech acts should be performed in an
appropriate fashion. In fact, rather than producing grammatically correct utterances, the focus of
attention in pragmatics concerned speakers’ appropriate use of such utterances within various
situational contexts that affected their level of appropriacy. In this respect, the development of the
politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987) was of great relevance, since it described the
three sociopragmatic factors which qualified a linguistic form as being appropriate. These factors
involved: 1) social distance, which refers to the degree of familiarity that exists between the speaker
and hearer; 2) power, which refers to the relative status of a speaker with respect to the hearer; and
3) degree of imposition, which refers to the type of imposition the speaker is forcing on the hearer.
Thus, it was assumed that when one of these factors increased, speakers were expected to be more
polite so that they did not threaten hearers’ face (i.e., a person’s feeling of self-worth or self-image).
Given all the previous assumptions underlying an interactionist view of learning to speak, the focus of
attention in language teaching dealt with the need to prepare learners to face the typical functions of
oral language and to perform a range of speech acts appropriately, as well as to deal with commonly
occurring real-life situations. More specifically, in relation to the functional view of language, the
particular teaching method that was developed was the genre approach. This consisted in teaching
learners “how texts within certain cultures have evolved particular discourse structures to fulfil
particular social functions” (Burns and Joyce 1997: 48). The relevance of such an approach, based on
teaching learners whole texts, was originally adopted in relation to writing (see Usó-Juan, Martínez-
Flor, and Palmer this volume). However, its importance has also been increasingly highlighted in
speaking (see Burns, Joyce, and Gollin 1996; Burns and Joyce 1997; Burns this volume). Regarding the
pragmatic view of language, current research is being conducted on the role of instruction to develop
learners’ pragmatic language development, which in turn helps to increase their speaking skill (Rose
and Kasper 2001; Bardovi-Harlig and Mahan-Taylor 2003; Martínez-Flor, Usó-Juan, and Fernández-
Guerra 2003; Alcón and Martínez-Flor 2005). The compilation of articles collected in these volumes
shows the range of pragmatic features that can be taught and the different practical activities that
can be employed, as well as the effectiveness of different teaching methods that can be
implemented in both second and foreign language classrooms. As a result of the influence exerted by
the discipline of cognitive psychology as well as the functional and pragmatic views of language,
speaking was viewed as an interactive, social and contextualized communicative event. Given these
defining characteristics derived from the interactionist approach to speaking, it was claimed that
such an approach served as the theoretical foundation for teaching this skill within a communicative
competence framework. The importance therefore of integrating the speaking skill within this
framework and the description of how the rest of the components influence it is addressed in the
next section.

3. Teaching speaking within a communicative competence framework

Communicative approaches to L2 language teaching have undergone significant changes over the
past two decades. A strong background influence is associated with the work developed by Hymes
(1971, 1972), who was the first to argue that Chomsky’s (1965) distinction between competence and
performance did not pay attention to aspects of language in use and related issues of appropriacy of
an utterance to a particular situation. Thus, he proposed the term communicative competence to
account for those rules of language use in social context as well as the norms of appropriacy.
Considering how a proper operationalization of this term into an instructional framework could
contribute to make the process of L2 teaching more effective, different models of communicative
competence have been developed since the 1980s by specifying which components should integrate
a communicative competence construct (Canale and Swain 1980; Canale 1983; Savignon 1983;
Bachman 1987, 1990; Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell 1995; Alcón 2000; Usó-Juan and Martínez-
Flor this volume). In such a construct, it can be assumed that the role of speaking is of paramount
importance to facilitate the acquisition of communicative competence. Thus, the aim of this section
is to show where the speaking skill fits into the bigger picture of the framework of communicative
competence presented by Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor (this volume). More important, it is described
how the different components influence the development of this particular skill in order to increase
learners’ communicative ability in the L2. Figure 1 shows the diagram representing this framework
with speaking positioned at its core.

3.1. Discourse competence

The proposed communicative competence framework has at its heart the speaking skill since it is the
manifestation of producing spoken discourse and a way of manifesting the rest of the components.
Discourse competence involves speakers’ ability to use a variety of discourse features to achieve a
unified spoken text given a particular purpose and the situational context where it is produced. Such
discourse features refer to knowledge of discourse markers (e.g., well, oh, I see, okay), the
management of various conversational rules (e.g., turn-taking mechanisms, how to open and close a
conversation), cohesion and coherence, as well as formal schemata (e.g., knowledge of how different
discourse types, or genres, are organized). Making effective use of all these features during the
process of producing a cohesive and coherent spoken text at the discourse level requires a highly
active role on the part of speakers. They have to be concerned with the form (i.e., how to produce
linguistically correct utterances) and with the appropriacy (i.e., how to make pragmatically
appropriate utterances given particular sociocultural norms). Additionally, they need to be
strategically competent so that they can make adjustments during the ongoing process of speaking in
cases where the intended purpose fails to be delivered properly (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000).
Consequently, an activation of speakers’ knowledge from the other components proposed in the
framework displayed in Figure 1 (that is, linguistic, pragmatic, intercultural and strategic) is necessary
to develop an overall communicative ability when producing a piece of spoken discourse. Each of
these components is described in turn below.

3.2. Linguistic competence

Linguistic competence consists of those elements of the linguistic system, such as phonology,
grammar and vocabulary, that allow speakers to produce linguistically acceptable utterances (Celce-
Murcia and Olshtain 2000). Regarding phonological aspects, speakers need to possess knowledge of
suprasegmental, or prosodic, features of the language such as rhythm, stress and intonation (see
Hughes, this volume, for the importance of prosody in turn-taking). These aspects shape speakers’
pronunciation, which refers to the ability to employ speech sounds for communication (Burns and
Seidlhofer 2002) and, according to Woodwin (2001: 117), is “the language feature that most readily
identifies speakers as non-native.” Apart from being able to pronounce the words so that they can be
understood, speakers’ linguistic competence also entails knowledge of the grammatical system. Thus,
speakers need to know aspects of morphology and syntax that will allow them to form questions,
produce basic utterances in the language and organize them in an acceptable word order (see
DaltonPuffer this volume for the importance of making different types of questions as a strategy to
encourage speaking, and Hughes this volume for the relevance of syntax in turn-taking). Similarly,
speakers’ ability to choose the most relevant vocabulary or lexicon for a given situation will also
contribute to the elaboration of their spoken text. The mastery of these three linguistic aspects (i.e.,
pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary) is, therefore, essential for the successful production of a
piece of spoken discourse since it allows speakers to build grammatically well-formed utterances in
an accurate and unhesitating way (Scarcella and Oxford 1992). However, it has been claimed that it is
possible to communicate orally with very little linguistic knowledge if a good use of pragmatic and
cultural factors is made (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000). These factors refer to the next two
components proposed in the framework, which are also interrelated to build discourse competence
through speaking.

3.3. Pragmatic competence

Pragmatic competence involves speakers’ knowledge of the function or illocutionary force implied in
the utterance they intend to produce as well as the contextual factors that affect the appropriacy of
such an utterance. Thus, speakers need to master two types of pragmatic knowledge: one dealing
with pragmalinguistics and the other focusing on sociopragmatic aspects (Leech 1983; Thomas 1983).
On the one hand, pragmalinguistics addresses those linguistic resources that speakers can make use
of to convey a particular communicative act. In other words, depending on the meaning speakers
want to express, they can choose a particular form from among the wide range of linguistic
realizations they may have available. On the other hand, sociopragmatics deals with speakers’
appropriate use of those linguistic forms according to the context where the particular utterance is
produced, the specific roles the participants play within that contextual situation and the politeness
variables of social distance, power and degree of imposition. These politeness factors and the way
speakers may use them to save face play a paramount role in successful communication (Celce-
Murcia and Olshtain 2000). Additionally, speakers also need to know how to vary their spoken
utterances appropriately with respect to register, that is, when to use formal or informal styles
(Scarcella and Oxford 1992). In fact, it has been claimed that speakers use more than one register on
a regular basis (e.g., an intimate and casual register in familiar contexts, a formal register in situations
involving strangers or higher-status participants, etc.) (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000). Burns (this
volume) pays attention to the importance of dealing with all these pragmatic aspects, the notion of
register and also the importance of spoken genres when elaborating her text-based syllabus
approach to the teaching of speaking. volume) pays attention to the importance of dealing with all
these pragmatic aspects, the notion of register and also the importance of spoken genres when
elaborating her text-based syllabus approach to the teaching of speaking

3.4. Intercultural competence

Intercultural competence refers to the knowledge of how to produce an appropriate spoken text
within a particular sociocultural context. Thus, it involves knowledge of both cultural and non-verbal
communication factors on the part of the speaker. Regarding the cultural factors, speakers need to
be aware of the rules of behavior that exist in a particular community in order to avoid possible
miscommunication. For instance, the length of pauses within a normal conversation may be very
short in one culture, thus making the speakers quickly look for something to say, whereas in another
culture pauses may be desired, and even considered polite, given the fact that they allow time for
reflection and prevent speakers from overlapping with other participants in conversation (Celce-
Murcia and Olshtain 2000). Knowledge of non-verbal means of communication (i.e., body language,
facial expressions, eye contact, etc.) is also of paramount importance to communicate appropriately
when producing a spoken text. Speakers need to pay careful attention to listeners’ non-verbal
movements, such as their body language or whether to maintain or avoid eye contact, in order to be
able to repair their intervention if something goes wrong in the course of the exchange (Celce-Murcia
and Olshtain 2000). 3.5. Strategic competence The last component included in the framework, which
has been added to all the above-described competencies, refers to strategic competence. This
competence implies speakers’ knowledge of both learning and communication strategies. On the one
hand, speakers need to possess learning strategies in order to successfully construct a given piece of
spoken discourse. Bygate (this volume) points out the relevance of repetition as a strategy that may
allow speakers to contribute to their oral development. Repetition is also highlighted by Dalton-
Puffer (this volume), who, in addition, pays attention to the importance of creating purpose as a
strategy for encouraging speaking. On the other hand, speakers’ knowledge and ability to use
communication strategies is of the utmost importance in order to avoid possible breakdowns in
communication. Thus, the use of compensatory strategies, such as circumlocution, paraphrasing,
appealing for help or topic selection, assists speakers in making adjustments given an incomplete or
failing interaction (Scarcella and Oxford 1992; Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000). In short, speakers
need to become competent in using strategies in order to overcome limitations due to a lack of
competence in any of the other components integrating the proposed communicative competence
framework.

4. Conclusion

As has been shown in this chapter, a review of the changing patterns of how speaking has been
viewed over the last decades has provided us with a better understanding of why this skill has
progressively come to be learned and taught as a discourse skill in its own right. Once considered as
the result of repeating and memorizing words in isolation or just combining a series of formal
linguistic rules in the abstract, speaking is nowadays recognized as an interactive, social and
contextualized process that serves a number of functions. Given this complex communicative process
in which speakers need to take account of a variety of linguistic, contextual, cultural and interactional
aspects among others, the task of teaching the spoken language has been perceived as a very difficult
one (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000). Consequently, and in order to facilitate this task, it has been
argued that it is of great importance to teach speaking within a communicative competence
framework, since this skill has been regarded as the means which learners can use to develop their
overall L2 communicative competence. Communication, in short, is the final target learners aim to
achieve in the L2, and the skill of speaking plays a key role in their success in accomplishing this goal.

Suggested Activities

The activities included in this section are part of the Cultural Awareness Project, presented by Usó-
Juan and Martínez-Flor (this volume), the main goal of which is to develop learners’ communicative
competence through the four skills as well as their awareness of cultural differences/similarities in
different language communities. Thus, these suggested activities are part of the implementation
stage of that Project and focus specifically on the speaking skill

Activity 1

Arrange opportunities for all learners to get engaged in tandem learning (Woodin 2001), that is,
collaborative learning between speakers of different languages. The possibility of making learners
talk face-to-face with learners from other countries (such as the “Erasmus scheme,” which involves
student exchanges among European countries) allows them to develop their intercultural
communicative competence while practicing their speaking ability. Thus, after getting to know their
partners and having arranged the time and place for the tandem session will be held, learners are
asked to choose a particular cultural topic they are interested in (i.e., family, education, etc.) and to
talk about it with their tandem partners. They have to record all the conversations and bring them to
class together with a written summary, which should be used to give an oral presentation of how the
topic discussed with the tandem partners is viewed in their cultures. The aim of asking learners to
make an oral presentation of this kind is to encourage them to conduct a deeper reflection on the
topic being discussed while practicing their speaking skill. This type of recorded tandem
conversations are valuable material that can serve as the basis to prepare additional activities that
make learners reflect on linguistic, pragmatic, intercultural-related issues (e.g., tone of voice, silence)
and strategic features underlying these oral interactions.

Activity 2

Select representative passages or video scenes with cultural incidents or episodes that have been
brought in by the learners (i.e., situations in which some type of conflict or misinterpretation
develops due to the lack of an appropriate cultural framework for understanding the incident).
Distribute those passages or video scenes to different groups of learners and ask them to divide them
into different episodes in order to construct a culture minidrama (Omaggio 2001), that is, the
representation of several episodes in which a cultural conflict or miscommunication occurs. Then,
each group of learners has to prepare a particular culture minidrama and represent it orally in front
of the class. The rest of the learners have to try to explain what the source of miscommunication is
(which in fact only becomes apparent in the last scene) through class discussion. The purpose of this
activity is to make learners experience problems in cross-cultural communication while developing
their speaking skills.
Activity 3

Classify all culture-related materials brought in by all learners (i.e., written passages, audio extracts,
video scenes) according to the particular cultural topic covered (e.g., family, law and order, power
and politics, etc.) and use them as resources for further practicing the speaking skill. Arrange learners
in groups of three or four members and ask them to select the materials that deal with a given
cultural topic they are interested in. After reading or listening to the material they have chosen, they
are asked to discuss the topic by giving their own personal point of view and to record their
discussion. The transcripts from these oral discussions can then be used in the classroom as a starting
point to deal with the cultural topic with the rest of the class, as well as to analyze the oral features
employed by each particular group of learners (i.e., pauses, repetition, pronunciation, turn-taking
mechanisms, etc.).