TOPIC 5 – ORAL COMMUNICATION. ELEMENTS AND RULES OF SPEECH.

ROUTINES AND FORMULAE. STRATEGIES OF ORAL COMMUNICATION.

OUTLINE
INTRODUCTION.
1. A HISTORICAL APPROACH TO ORAL COMMUNICATION: ORIGINS AND
DEVELOPMENT.
1.1. On the nature of communication: origins and general features.
1.2. Language and communication.
1.3. Language, communication and social behavior.
1.4. Oral communication and language learning: from an oral tradition to a
communicative approach.
1.4.1. Earlier times: religious sources and oral tradition. Up to XVIth century.
1.4.2. First approaches to the oral component in language teaching. XVIIth and
XVIIIth century.
1.4.3. Approaches to the oral component in the XIXth century.
1.4.4. Current trends in XXth century: a communicative approach.
1.5. An assessment model of communicative competence: a basis for oral discourse
analysis.
1.6. Theoretical approaches to oral discourse analysis.
1.6.1. A Speech Act Theory.
1.6.2. Grice’s cooperative principle and conversational maxims.
1.6.3. Conversational Analysis and Turn-Taking.
1.6.4. Conversational Analysis and Adjacency Pairs.
2. ELEMENTS AND RULES GOVERNING ORAL DISCOURSE.
2.1. Elements governing oral discourse.
2.1.1. Linguistic elements.
2.1.2. Non-linguistic elements.
2.2. Rules governing oral discourse.
2.2.1. Rules of usage.
2.2.2. Rules of use.
2.2.3. Conversational studies.
3. EVERYDAY ROUTINES AND FORMULAIC SPEECH.
4. SPECIFIC STRATEGIES IN ORAL COMMUNICATION.
5. PRESENT-DAY DIRECTIONS REGARDING ORAL COMMUNICATION.
5.1. New directions from an educational approach.
5.2. Implications into language teaching.
CONCLUSION.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.

INTRODUCTION.
In this study, we shall approach the notion of oral communication and its
general features in relation to the field of language teaching. This survey will be
developed into three main sections. The first part is an attempt to introduce the
reader to the historical development of the notion of oral communication from its
anthropological origins to a vast literature on a theory of language learning, providing
the reader with the most relevant present-day approaches in language learning research
on this issue. The aim of this analysis is to examine briefly the components of
communicative competence and to explore the nature and the different functions of
spoken language, with particular reference to components governing oral discourse. We
shall examine the notion of communication from a diachronic perspective, analyzing its
development from its origins to the prominent role it plays nowadays in language and
language learning theories.
In the second part, a revision of the literature shall lead us, first, towards the
treatment of oral discourse within the framework of a communicative approach, and
secondly, towards a revision of the main oral components in different subsections.
Among those components to be considered in the third section of our study, we include
elements and rules governing oral discourse; everyday routines and formulaic speech,
and specific strategies in oral communication.
The third section deals with general patterns of discourse regarding elements and
rules. Hence, our study starts first with an analysis of the linguistic and non- linguistic
elements taking part in oral discourse. In next sections, it then turns to routines and
formulaic language, regarding rules of usage and rules of use within the prominent role
of conversational studies. To finish with, and in conjunction to our goal, discourse
strategies will be examined.
Furthermore, in the sixth section, we shall consider new directions in language
learning research, and current implications on language teaching, regarding the
treatment of speaking and listening skills as part of the oral component. Finally, a
conclusion will provide again a brief historical overview of the treatment given to the
oral component by a language learning theory. Bibliography will be fully listed at the
end of this survey for readers to check further references.

1. A HISTORICAL APPROACH TO ORAL COMMUNICATION: ORIGINS

AND DEVELOPMENT.
We shall provide in this section a linguistic background for the notion of oral
communication, concerning human communication systems and its main features, in
order to establish a link between the notion of communication and the concept of
language concerning human social behavior. All these terms are interrelated as they
serve as a basis for communicative event processes and their description.
Once the link between language, communication and social behavior is established,
we will give a broad account of how the oral component has been approached through
history, from an oral tradition to a communicative approach, since language is handed
down from one generation to another by a process of teaching and learning. This
historical and educational approach will progressively lead us to the main current
theories and theorists on the issue of oral discourse and communicative event processes.
Upon this basis, we will move on towards a description of a linguistic theory on oral
discourse in terms of a speech act theory and conversational analysis, where we will
approach these concepts within the framework of discourse analysis and the most
relevant figures in this field.
As a result, the third section will examine mainly elements, rules, routines and
strategies in a speaking act, in order to understand the notion of oral communication and
the nature of its social behavior implications.

1.1. On the nature of communication: origins and general features.

Research in cultural anthropology has shown quite clearly that the origins of
communication are to be found in the very early stages of life when there was a need for
animals and humans to communicate so as to carry out basic activities of everyday life,
such as hunting, eating, or breeding among others. However, even the most primitive
cultures had a constant need to express their feelings and ideas by other means than
guttural sounds and body movements as animals did. Human beings’ constant
preoccupation was how to turn thoughts into words.
It is worth, at this point, establishing a distinction between human and animal
systems of communication whose features differ in the way they produce and express
their intentions. So far, the most important feature of human language is the auditory-
vocal channel which, in ancient times, allowed human beings to produce messages and,
therefore to help language develop. Among other main features, we may mention the
possibility of exchanging messages among individuals; a sense of displacement in an
oral interaction in space and time which animals do not have; the arbitrariness of signs
where words and meanings have no a priori connection; and finally, the possibility of a
traditional transmission as language is handed down from one generation to another by
a process of teaching and learning.
From a theory of language, we shall define the notion of communication in terms
of its main features regarding the oral component, thus types and elements. First, in
relation to types of communication, we distinguish mainly two, thus verbal and non-
verbal codes. Firstly, verbal communication is related to those acts in which the code is
the language, both oral and written.
Thus, giving a speech and writing a letter are both instances of verbal
communication. Secondly, when dealing with non-verbal devices, we refer to
communicative uses involving visual and tactile modes, such as kinesics, body
movements, and also paralinguistic devices drawn from sounds (whistling), sight
(morse) or touch (Braille). According to Goytisolo (2001), the oral tradition in public
performances involves the participation of the five senses as the public sees, listens,
smells, tastes, and touches.
Thirdly, regarding elements in the communication process, we will follow the
Russian linguist Roman Jakobson and his productive model on language theory which
explains how all acts of communication, be they written or oral, are based on six
constituent elements (1960). It is worth noting at this point that, within the aim of this
unit, we shall relate Jakobson’s elements to their respective components in oral
communication.
Briefly, according to Jakobson, the Addresser/encoder (speaker) sends a Message
(oral utterance) to the Addressee/ decoder (listener). Messages are embedded in or refer
to Contexts which the Addressee must be able to grasp and perhaps even verbalize. The
Addresser and Addressee need to partially share a Code (language as verbal, and
symbols as non-verbal devices) between them, that is, the rules governing the
relationship between the Message and its context; and the Message is sent through a
physical channel (air) and Contact, a psychological connection, is established between
Addresser and Addressee so that they may enter and stay in communication (1960).

1.2. Language and communication.

Linguists often say that language and communication are not the same thing, and
certainly this is true. People can and do communicate without language, and species that
do not use language, which include all except Homo Sapiens, seem able to
communicate adequately for their purposes, with and without language. If language
were nothing more than a tool for communication, it would warrant social
psychologists’ interest (Krauss & Chiu 1993). However, there are common features to
the notions of language and communication, such as purposes and elements
(participants).
 Main contributions on describing communication purposes are given by the
anthropologist Malinowsky who claimed in the early twentieth century for two main
purposes, thus a pragmatic purpose related to the practical use of language both oral
and written, and also, a ritual purpose associated to ceremonies and ancient chants.
More recently, another definition comes from Halliday (1973) who defines language as
an instrument of social interaction with a clear communicative purpose. Moreover,
Brown and Yule (1973) established a useful distinction between two basic language
functions, thus transactional and interactional, whose communication purpose was
mainly to maintain social relationships through speech.
Regarding participants, according to Johnson (1981), oral communication is
depicted as an activity involving two (or more) people in which the participants are
both hearers and speakers having to react to what they hear and making their
contributions at high speed. In the interaction process, he adds, each participant has to
be able to interpret what is said to him and reply to what has just been said reflecting
their own intentions. We are talking, then, about an interactive situation directly related
and dependent on the communicative function and the speech situation involving
speaker and hearer. As we shall see in next section, the way participants interact in a
communicative event has much to do with social psychology, as social life constitutes
an intrinsic part of the way language is used.

1.3. Language and social behavior.

As we may perceive, language pervades social life. It is the principal vehicle for the
transmission of cultural knowledge, and the primary means by which we gain access to
the contents of others’ minds. Language is involved in most of the phenomena that lie at
the core of social psychology, thus attitude change, social perception, personal identity,
social interaction, and stereotyping among others. Moreover, for social psychologists,
language typically is the medium by which subjects’ responses are elicited, and in
which they respond. For instance, in social psychological research, more often than not,
language plays a role in both stimulus and response (Krauss & Chiu 1993).
Just as language use is present in social life, the elements of social life constitute an
intrinsic part or the way language is used. Linguists regard language as an abstract
structure that exists independently of specific instances of usage. However, any
communicative exchange is situated in a social context that constrains the linguistic
forms participants use. How these participants define the social situation, their
perceptions of what others know, think and believe, and the claims they make about
their own and others’ identities will affect the form and content or their acts of
speaking.
The ways languages are used are constrained by the way they are constructed,
particularly the linguistic rules that govern the permissible usage forms, for instance,
grammatical rules. Language has been defined as an abstract set of principles that
specify the relations between a sequence of sounds and a sequence of meanings. Thus,
the sound of a door slamming may express the slammer’s exasperation eloquently, but
language conveys meaning in an importantly different way. For present purposes, we
will think about language as a set of complex, organized systems that operate in concert
when any particular act of speaking is under revision with respect to levels of analysis
that have significance for social behaviour (Miller 1975).
In the first level of analysis, we find that languages are made up of four systems,
the phonological, the morphological, the syntactic, and the semantic which, taken
together, constitute its grammar. Firstly, the phonological system is concerned with the
analysis of an acoustic signal into a sequence of speech sounds, thus consonants,
vowels, and syllables, that are distinctive for a particular language or dialect. Out of the
variety of sounds the human vocal tract is capable of producing, each language selects a
small subset that constitute that language’s phonemes, or elementary units of sound.
Secondly, the morphological system is concerned with the way words and meaningful
subwords are constructed out of these phonological elements. Thirdly, the syntactic
system is concerned with the organization of these morphological elements into higher
level units, such as phrases and sentences. Finally, the semantic system is concerned
with the meanings of these higher-level units.
At another level of analysis, acts of speaking can be regarded as actions intended
to accomplish a specific purpose by verbal means. Looked at this way, according to
Austin (1962) and Searle (1969, 1985), utterances can be thought of as speech acts that
can be identified in terms of their intended purposes, thus assertions, questions,
requests among others. However, we must bear in mind that the grammatical form does
not determine the speech act an utterance represents. For instance, two similar
utterances like “How can I get to Central Park?” and “Could you tell me how I can get
to Central Park?” are both in the interrogative mode, but they constitute quite different
speech acts. Considerations on this sort require a distinction be drawn between the
semantic or literal meaning of an utterance and its intended meaning. Acts of speaking
are imbedded in a discourse made up of a coherently related sequence of such acts.
Thus, conversation and narratives are two types of discourse, and each has a formal
structure that constrains participants’ acts of speaking.
The sections that follow review how oral communication has been approached
from a language learning theory in four periods in history, thus earlier times up to the
sixteenth century; first approaches during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries;
approaches in the nineteenth century, and finally, current approaches in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. We believe that this literature review will help the reader
understand the role of religion, oral tradition, and language teaching approaches in the
development of oral communication studies and research. We also believe that a clearer
understanding of the social nature of the situations in which language is used will
deepen our general understanding of the principles and mechanisms that underlie
language use, and in particular, oral discourse. Later sections will draw upon linguistic
concepts introduced above.

1.4. Oral communication and language learning: from an oral tradition to a

communicative approach.
1.4.1. Earlier times: religious sources and oral tradition. Up to XVIth century.
As Juan Goytisolo (2001) stated in his speech on defending threaten cultures at the
Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible heritage of Humanity, we
must first examine our historical knowledge of both oral and written cultures so as to
provide ourselves a cultural identity in society. The fact that the existence of homo
sapiens and appearance of language can be traced back some forty or fifty thousand
years whereas the first evidence of writing is from 3500 B.C., reveals the antiquity or
the oral patrimony of humanity. Therefore, the period which encompasses primary
orality is consequently ten times the length of the era of writing. Since ancient times,
tribal chiefs, chamans, bards and story-tellers have been in charge of preserving and
memorizing for the future the narratives of the past. Goytisolo also says that nowadays,
it is difficult to find continuers of an oral tradition entirely unpolluted by writing and its
technological and visual extensions in our present society, governed by mass
communication. He mentions a growing disequilibrium when observing that only
seventy-eight of the three thousand languages now spoken in the world possess a living
literature based on one of the hundred and six alphabets created throughout history. In
other words, hundreds and hundreds of languages used today on our planet have no
written form and their communication is exclusively oral.
Goytisolo further points out that acquiring knowledge of this primary orality is an
anthropological task in the field of literature and oral narrative. If all cultures are based
on language, that is, a combination of spoken and heard sounds, this oral
communication which involves numerous kinetic and corporal elements, has
undergone over the centuries a series of changes as the existence of writing and
awareness of the latter have gradually changed the mentality of bards, chamans, tribal
chiefs and narrators. The usual forms of popular and traditional expression were oral
literature, music, dance, games, mythology, rituals, and even architecture. Besides,
cultural places were also important to provide a framework for cultural activities to
take place in a concentrated manner. Thus, sites for story-telling, rituals, marketplaces,
and festivals. The time for a regularly occurring event was also a part of oral tradition,
for instance, daily rituals, annual processions, and regular performances.
Anthropological studies account for non-verbal codes used by humans as improved
systems of communication before language was developed. Thus, an art that sprang
from the tangible, were probably grimaces, gestures, pauses, and laughter as bodily
paralinguistic movements that belong to a situation which is not exclusively oral but it
is part of an extraordinary heritage linked to public performances.
To perform in public is to be linked to a considerable body of religious tradition
and myth in many cultures concerning the nature and origins of language (Crystal
1985). That transitional period between sounds and speech was to be characterized by a
connection between divinity and language. Therefore, words were regarded as having a
separate existence in reality, and as to have embodied the nature of things to be used
deliberately to control and influence events. According to the anthropologist
Malinowsky, it was believed that if words controlled things, then their power could be
intensified by saying them over and over again. Therefore, magic formulae,
incantations, rhythmical listing of proper names, and many other rites exemplify the
intensifying power of words.
Many primitive tribes thought that evils, or people, could be controlled by language
in these traditions. There are many examples in folklore of forbidden names which,
when discovered, were thought to break the evil spell or their owners. Thus, names such
as Tom-tit-tot, Vargaluska, or the famous Rumpelstiltzkin. In a tribal community, to
utter the name of a dead person would bring the evil of death upon themselves. In
Homeric Verses, we find a conclusive demonstration that Homer’s hexameters were a
result of the requirements of public recital in the agora, a specific situation that imposed
recourse to easily remembered epithets, sayings, phrases and formulas.
Also, in the Roman levies, too, the authorities took good care to enroll first men
with auspicious names, such as Felix or Victor, and the like so as not to bother people’s
death spirit. Examples of this kind abound in the history of cultures and they simply
indicate how deeply ideas about language can come to be ingrained within the
individual psyche, and testify to the existence of a language awareness which exercised
considerable influence in the development of language as a system of signs. Yet, it was
the language of worship which first put an end to the oral traditions in an attempt to
preserve in texts their early stages of orality, secondly, the invention of typography in
1440, and nowadays, the modern revolution in computing. Also, in recent decades there
has been a fertile investigation of the origin and evolution of Vedic hymns, Biblical
narrative and the European literatures of the early Middle Ages. Within Spanish
literature prior to the invention of the printing press, in the fourteenth century, we may
mention the bardic literature of the various popular Songbooks and the masterpiece that
is the Archpriest of Hita’s Book of Good Love.

1.4.2. First approaches to the oral component in language teaching. XVIIth and
XVIIIth century.
Historically speaking, it is not too difficult to find evidence of the main themes and
issues which indicate the respectable ancestry and variegated history of language study.
Language has always been so closely tied in with such fields as philosophy, logic,
rhetoric, literary criticism, language teaching, and religion that it is rare to find great
thinkers of any period who do not at some point in their work comment on the role of
language in relation to their ideas (Crystal 1985).
We have found mainly two references to the oral component as a link to language
teaching in the seventeenth century with a strong religious component. For instance, the
theologian Jan Amos Komensky (1592-1670), Comenius, already stated the reasons for
learning a foreign language claiming that through language, we come to a closer
understanding of the world. He states indirectly the role of the oral component to the
religious issue when saying that modern languages are degenerate forms of an original
tongue that was taken from us at the Tower of Babel.
This religious concern towards language is also present in other contemporary
works. Thus, in The Leviathan (1660), the philosopher Thomas Hobbes devoted chapter
IV “Of Speech” to oral discourse with a strong religious component. In his account of
the nature of mankind, he states that the first author of speech was God himself, that
instructed Adam how to name such creatures as He presented to this sight. Moreover, in
this extract, he makes a religious reference to the wide variety of languages worldwide
and also, he addresses language teaching as one of the main purposes of learning
languages when saying that at the tower of Babel, man was forced to disperse
themselves and the variety of tongues taught into several parts of the world.
It is worth pointing out that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the status
of Latin changed from a living language that learners needed to be able to read, write in,
and speak to a dead language which was studied just as an intellectual exercise. During
this period, language teaching crystallized in Europe, and the analysis of the grammar
and rhetoric of Classical Latin were the current models for language teaching. It was not
until the eighteenth century that modern languages began to enter the curriculum of
European schools and progressively developed from grammatical to more
communicative approaches focusing on oral skills, thus listening and speaking. A
progressive account of the development in the treatment of the oral component from the
eighteenth century on is the aim of our next section.

1.4.3. Approaches to the oral component in the XIXth century.

As we have mentioned above, a grammar translation method was the dominant
foreign language teaching method in Europe from the 1840s to the 1940s. However,
even as early as the mid- nineteenth century, there was a greater demand for ability to
speak foreign languages, and various reformers began to reconsider the nature of
language and of learning. Among them, we may mention an Englishman, T. Pendergast,
and two Frenchmen, C. Marcel and F. Gouin. However, their ideas did not become
widespread because they were outside of the established educational circles.
One of the most relevant early contributions to a communicative approach
concerning the oral component with no religious links emerged from an empirical study
carried out by François Gouin in his work L’art d’enseigner et d’étudier les langue
(1880). In his work, he gave an account of the relevance of the oral component when
learning languages. He describes his own efforts to learn German by learning grammar
with no success at all. Then, during a visit to France, he observed how his nephew, who
six months before did not utter a word in German, could hold on in a conversation with
logical sequences just by watching German workers in his village. This convinced him
of the inefficiency of his own methods as the child became active by conversing with
adults with no grammar lessons. What he had done, according to Gouin, was to
continually ask questions, climb all over the place, and watch what the workers were
doing. Back at home, the child reflected on his experience, and then recited it to his
listeners, ten times over, with variations, attempting to produce a logical sequence of
activities. To Gouin, the learner then progresses from experience, to ordering that
experience, and then to acting it out. This conception of teaching presents language in
concrete, active situations, as communicative approaches account for nowadays.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was an increasing emphasis on the oral
component as linguists such as Henry Sweet of England, Wilhelm Vietor of Germany,
and Paul Passy of France became interested in the problem of the best way to teach
languages. They believed that language teaching should be based on scientific
knowledge about language, and that it should begin with speaking and expand to other
skills. Also, that words and sentences should be presented in context, that grammar
should be taught inductively, and that translation should, for the most part, be avoided.
These ideas spread, they were known as the Direct Method, the first of the natural
methods.

1.4.4. Current trends in XXth century: a communicative approach.

In the field of psychology, in the early to mid -1900s, behaviorism has had a great
effect on language teaching studying animal behavior first, and moving towards human
behavior later. One of the most famous of these scientists was Skinner who worked on
oral skills in language learning. He theorized that a child repeats words and
combinations of words that are praised and thus learns language. Behaviorist theorists
believed that languages were made up of a series of habits, and that if learners could
develop all these habits, they would speak the language well. From these theories arose
the audio- lingual method, which is based on using drills for the formation of good
language habits by means of oral skills such as listening and speaking.
During the mid to late twentieth century, great changes took place after World War
II, with particular influence on language teaching and learning. Since language diversity
greatly increased, there were more opportunities for international travel and business,
and international social and cultural exchanges. As a result, renewed attempts were
made in the 1950s and 1960s which constituted the starting point for more
communicative approaches in language teaching. Several factors influence this further
development. First, the use of new technology in language teaching at the level of oral
skills, such as tape recorders, radios, TV, and computers. Secondly, research studies on
bilingualism and thirdly, the establishment of methodological innovations, such as the
already mentioned audio-lingual method.
It is in this context that the linguist Noam Chomsky challenged the behaviorist
model of language learning and proposed a theory called Transformational Generative
Grammar. Chomsky’s theory claims for an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely
homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by
such grammatically irrelevant conditions […] in applying his knowledge of the
language in actual performance (1965). He also established a distinction between the
notions of competence and performance, being competence the implicit or explicit
knowledge of the system of the language whereas performance addresses to the actual
production and comprehension of language in specific instances of language use.
However, Chomsky states that linguistic knowledge is separated from sociocultural
features.
Chomsky’s distinction served as basis for work of many other researchers such as
the American anthropologist Dell Hymes, who claimed that native speakers know more
than just grammatical competence. In his work On communicative competence (1972),
he included not only grammatical competence, but also sociolinguistic and contextual
competences. Following a tradition on sociolinguistics, Hymes had a broader view of
the notion of communicative competence as the underlying knowledge a speaker has of
the rules of grammar including phonology, orthography, syntax, lexicon, and semantics,
and the rules for their use in socially appropriate circumstances. Therefore, we
understand competence as the knowledge of rules of grammar, and performance, the
way the rules are used. As we may observe, the oral component is directly addressed in
this approach.
In the following sections, the communicative approach will provide the framework for a
model assessment with a communicative competence theory where the four
competences at work in a communicative event will be examined in order to state the
different sections which constitute the development of this study. Thus, elements and
rules, everyday routines and formulaic speech, and strategies governing the oral
discourse.

1.5. An assessment model of communicative competence: a basis for oral discourse

analysis.
In the 1970s and 1980s, an approach to emerged both in Europe and North America
focusing on the work of anthropologists, sociologists, and sociolinguists on foreign and
second language teaching. In the 1980s, the rapid application of a teaching tasks system
broken down into units gave prominence to more interactive views of language
teaching, which became to be known as the Communicative Approach or simply
Communicative Language Teaching. Besides, language was considered as social
behavior, seeing the primary goal of language teaching as the development of the
learner’s communicative competence.
Learners were considered to need both rules of use to produce language
appropriate to particular situations, and strategies for effective communication. Scholars
such as Hymes (1972), Halliday (1970), Canale and Swain (1980) or Chomsky (1957)
levelled their contributions and criticisms at structural linguistic theories claiming for
more communicative approaches on language teaching, where interactive processes of
communication received priority. Upon this basis, the introduction of cultural studies is
an important aspect of communicative competence as communicating with people from
other cultures involves not only linguistic appropriateness but also pragmatic
appropriateness in the use of verbal and non-verbal behavior. This issue is the aim of an
ethnography of communication theory in order to approach a foreign language from a
pragmatic and linguistic point of view.
One of the principles of Communicative Language Teaching is the concept of
communicative competence. The term, introduced by Hymes (1972), implies the
knowledge of language rules, and of how these rules are used to understand and
produce appropriate language in a variety of sociocultural settings. We must point out
that this concept demonstrated a shift of emphasis among linguists away from a narrow
focus on language as a formal system. Hymes was concerned with the social and
cultural knowledge which a speaker needs in order to understand and use linguistic
forms. His view, therefore, encompasses not only knowledge but also the ability to put
that knowledge into use in communication.
The verbal part of communicative competence comprises all the so-called four
skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing. It is important to highlight this, since
there is a very common misunderstanding that communicative competence only refers
to the ability to speak. It is both productive and receptive. Hymes stated that native
speakers know more than just grammatical competence. So far, he expands the
Chomskyan notions of grammaticality (competence) and acceptability (performance)
into four parameters subsumed under the heading of communicative competence. The
four competences at work regarding the elements and rules of oral discourse are as
follows: linguistic competence, pragmatic competence, discourse competence, strategic
competence, and fluency (Hedge 2000).
First, the linguistic competence, as it deals with linguistic and non- linguistic
devices in the oral interaction. This heading subsumes, according to Canale and Swain
(1980) all knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence -
grammar semantics and phonology. It therefore refers to having control over the purely
linguistic aspects of the language code itself, regarding verbal and non- verbal codes.
This corresponds to Hymes’ grammatical aspect and includes knowledge of the lexicon,
syntax, phonology and semantics. Besides, it involves rules of formulations and
constraints for students to match sound and meaning; to form words and sentences
using vocabulary; to use language through spelling and pronunciation; and to handle
linguistic semantics.
Secondly, the pragmatic competence as it also deals with the knowledge the
learner has to acquire the sociocultural rules of language. Regarding the rules of
discourse, it is defined in terms of the mastery of how to combine grammatical forms
and meanings (Canale and Swain 1980). When we deal with appropriateness of form,
we refer to the extent to which a given meaning is represented in both verbal and non -
verbal form that is proper in a given sociolinguistic context. Moreover, according to
Hedge (2000), in order to achieve successful communication, the spoken or written
message must also be appropriate to the social context in which it is produced. This is
the role of sociolinguistic competence, which is concerned with the social knowledge
necessary to select the language forms that are appropriate in different settings, and with
people in different roles and with different status. This competence enables a speaker to
be contextually appropriate or in Hymes’s words (1972), to know when to speak, when
not, what to talk about with whom, when, where and in what manner.
Thirdly, the rules of use and usage, proposed by Widdowson (1978) have to do
with the discourse competence. Here, usage refers to the manifestation of the
knowledge of a language system and use means the realization of the language system
as meaningful communicative behaviour. Discourse analysis is primarily concerned
with the ways in which individual sentences connect together to form a communicative
message.
This competence addresses directly to the mastery of how to combine grammatical
forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text in different genres
(Canale and Swain 1980) by means of cohesion in form and coherence in meaning.
Cohesion deals with how utterances are linked structurally and facilitates
interpretation of a text by means of cohesion devices, such as pronouns, synonyms,
ellipsis, conjunctions and parallel structures to relate individual utterances and to
indicate how a group of utterances is to be understood as a text. Yet, coherence refers to
the relationships among the different meanings in a text, where these meanings may be
literal meanings, communicative functions, and attitudes.
 Finally, we come to the fourth competence at work, the strategic competence.
(Canale 1983) where verbal and nonverbal communication strategies may be called into
action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables
or due to insufficient competence. This may be achieved by paraphrase,
circumlocution, repetition, hesitation, avoidance, guessing as well as shifts in register
and style. Hedge (2000) points out that strategic competence consists of using
communication strategies which are used by learners to compensate for their limited
linguistic competence in expressing what they want to say.
The term fluency relates to language production, and it is normally associated with
speech. It is the ability to link units of speech together with facility and without
inappropriate slowness, or undue hesitation.

1.6. Theoretical approaches to oral discourse. The role of pragmatics on discourse

analysis and conversational studies.
Within the framework of communicative competences, in this section we shall
describe the research that is relevant to this area, in order to provide a theoretical
possible to distinguish several different traditions as regards methodology and
theoretical orientations. Among the most relevant figures in this field, we may mention
Austin, Searle, Grice and Goffman whose contributions are still at work. First of all,
there is a tradition of statistical studies of linguistic material, but often without any
clear distinction between spoken and written material (Johansson & Stenström 1991),
and therefore not reviewed in our study.
Secondly, another approach is the discourse analytic tradition based on speech act
theory.
According to Brown (1994), discourse analysis, a branch of linguistics and, in fact,
an extension of the linguistics model, deals with language in context beyond the level of
the sentence, enabling us to follow the implications of a given utterance. It contributes
towards an understanding of cognitive processes. These analyses are conceived both as
a grammar of discourse as it is socially oriented, and also, as a linguist application
concerning cohesion and coherence. The Prague School linguists had introduced
discourse into the agenda of mainstream linguistics through the functional linguistic
study.
Also, many studies of spoken language have been carried out from a mainly
sociological or sociolinguistic perspective. This is true, for instance, of the influential
tradition called Conversation Analysis which is the sociological counterpart of
discourse analysis whose practisers give an autonomous status. It is a branch of
ethnomethodology where talk, which is rule governed, becomes the object of an
investigation of social structures and relations, and the structure of a conversation is
identified, focusing on the devices for managing the interaction and constructing joint
meaning. Conversational mechanisms are, thus turn-taking and the notion of adjacency
pairs, examined in next subsections. Besides, conversational analysis is used as a means
of understanding second language acquisition of communication strategies (Faerch and
Kasper 1983), including the negotiation of meaning and the compensatory strategies
non-native speakers use when they have an incomplete knowledge of a foreign
language.
In the study of interaction phenomena, the following phenomena have been
described recently as follows: turn taking and different types of sequences such as
sequences of topics, speech acts, and sub-activities (Brown & Yule 1983). In the area of
feedback, the most extensive studies have been studied before under different headings,
such as interjections, back-channeling, return words (Sigurd 1984), reactive, and
response words. There is potentially a close interrelation between discourse and
conversational analysis and pragmatics (Searle 1969), taking into account social and
cognitive structures.
It is worth noting, then, that communicative intentions cannot be mapped onto
word strings. Rather, speakers must select from a variety of potential alternative
formulations the ones that most successfully express the meanings they want to convey.
As a result, for the addressee, decoding the literal meaning of a message is only a first
step in the process of comprehension; an additional step of inference is required to
derive the communicative intention that underlies it. Approaches that focus on the role
of communicative intentions in communication reflect what will be called the
Intentionalist paradigm (Krauss & Chiu 1993). Fundamental to the intentionalist
paradigm are two sets of ideas that are basic to pragmatic theory: speech act theory and
the cooperative principle. Both concepts are to be reviewed respectively within the
framework of discourse analysis and conversational analysis.

1.6.1. A Speech Act Theory.

Speech act theory was inspired by the work of the British philosopher J.L. Austin
whose posthumously published lectures How to do things with words (1962, 1975)
influenced a number of students of language including the philosopher John Searle
(1969, 1985), who established speech act theory as a major framework for the study of
human communication. In contrast to the assumptions of structuralism where langue is
seen as a system, over parole concerning the speech act, speech act theory holds that the
investigation of structure always presupposes something about meanings, language
use, and extralinguistic functions.
In How to Do Things with Words, Austin (1962) starts by enunciating a distinction
between constative and performative utterances. According to him, an utterance, which
originally is a spoken word or string of spoken words with no particular forethought or
intention to communicate a meaning, becomes constative if it describes some state of
affairs whose correspondence with the facts is either true or false. Performatives, on the
other hand, do not describe or report or constate anything as true or false. It is worth
mentioning here that the attitude of the person performing the linguistic act, his
thoughts, feelings, or intentions is of great relevance at this distinction.
Furthermore, Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) conceptualized speech acts as
comprising three components. First, the locutionary act, the act of saying something as
the actual form of an utterance. Second, the illocutionary act, as the communicative
force of the utterance. Third, the perlocutionary act, depicted as the communicative
effect of the utterance upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, of the
speaker, or of other persons. In other words, a locutionary act has meaning; it produces
an understandable utterance. An illocutionary act has force; it is informed with a certain
tone, attitude, feeling, motive, or intention, and a perlocutionary act has consequence; it
has an effect upon the addressee.
Searle (1969) summarizes Austin’s speech acts, divided into verdictives,
commissives, exercitives, behabitives, and expositives, under five categories. Thus,
firstly, assertives to tell people how things are by stating; secondly, directives to try to
get people to do things by means of commanding and requesting; thirdly, expressives, to
express our feelings and attitudes by thinking, forgiving, or blaming; fourthly,
declaratives to bring about changes through our utterances by means of bringing about
correspondence between the propositional content and reality, through baptizing,
naming, appointing or sacking; and finally, commissives to commit ourselves to some
future actions by promising and offering. It is also possible to do more than one of these
things at the same time. Although these speech acts are abstract notions and do not
necessarily or uniquely correspond to particular English verbs, Searle (like Austin
before him) lists a number of English verbs as examples of the different types of speech
acts.
In examining what people say to one another, we can use Searle’s classification in
trying to understand what people are doing with language. In a speech act we may find
greetings, questions or requests for information, assertions or responses and
assessments. Once we start to look at actual interaction, for instance, a conversation, we
realize that we need a unit of analysis wider than Speech Act. What people say to one
another partly acquires its meaning from the sequence within which it occurs, for
example, an answer to a question. For this reason, conversation analysts introduced the
notions of Cooperative Principle, Turn –Taking and Adjacency Pair, by Grice and
Goffman respectively.

1.6.2. Grice’s cooperative principle and conversational maxims.

The English language philosopher H. Paul Grice (1969) was not the first to
recognize that non-literal meanings posed a problem for theories of language use, but he
was among the first to explain the processes that allow speakers to convey, and
addressees to identify, communicative intentions that are expressed non-literally, as for
him, meaning is seen as a kind of intending, and the hearer’s or reader’s recognition
that the speaker or writer means something by x is part of the meaning of x.
His insight that the communicative use of language rests on a set of implicit
understandings among language users has had an important influence in both linguistics
and social psychology. In a set of influential papers, Grice (1957, 1969, 1975) argued
that conversation is an intrinsically cooperative endeavour. To communicate
participants will implicitly adhere to a set of conventions, collectively termed the
Cooperative Principle, by making their messages conform to four general rules or
maxims where speakers shape their utterances to be understood by hearers. Thus, the
maxims are quality, quantity, relation and manner.
First, quality envisages messages to be truthful; quantity, by means of which
messages should be as informative as is required, but not more informative; relation, for
messages to be relevant; and manner, where messages should be clear, brief and
orderly.

1.6.3. Conversational Analysis and Turn-Taking.

A main feature of conversations is that they tend to follow the convention of turn
taking. Simply, this is where one person waits for the other to finish his/her utterance
before contributing their own. This is as much a utilitarian convention as mere manners
– a conversation, given the aforementioned definition, would logically cease to take
place if the agents involved insisted on speaking even when it was plain that the other
was trying to contribute.
It is, additionally, comforting to know that the other person respects your opinions
enough not to continually interrupt you. The best example of this occurs in the Houses
of Parliament – a supposed debating chamber which is often anything but, due to the
failure of the members to observe the turn-taking code. Note, however, that a person
rarely explicitly states that they have finished their utterance and are now awaiting
yours. Intriguing exceptions to this are in two-way radios, where many social and
psychological cues are lacking, and thus it is more difficult for speakers to follow turn-
taking.
 The potential for one to reply can be missed, deliberately or not, so that the first
person may contribute once more. Failure to realise this can result in an awkward pause
or a cacophony of competing voices in a large crowd.

1.6.4. Conversational Analysis and Adjacency Pairs.

Another fundamental feature of conversation is the idea of adjacency pairs.
Posited by Goffman (1976), an example would be found in a question-answer session.
Both conversing parties are aware that a response is required to a question; moreover, a
particular response to a given question. I might invite a friend into my house and ask:
“Would you like a biscuit?” To which the adjacency pair response is expected to be
either “Yes” or “No”. My friend may be allergic to chocolate, however, and place an
insertion sequence into the response: “Do you have any ginger snaps?” the reply to
which would cause him to modify his answer accordingly.
In the above consideration of turn-taking, such observations may be used in our
social interactions when the second agent did not take their opportunity to respond to
the first, and the implication is that they have nothing to say about the topic. But
perhaps the transition relevance place was one in which the second agent was in fact
selected, but failed to respond, or responded in an inappropriate manner.
This infinity of responses is what makes language so entertaining, and in the above
cases the speakers might make inferences about the reasons for incorrect responses.
These may be not to have responded because he did not understand the question, or not
to agree with the interlocutor. As Goffman notes, a silence often reveals an
unwillingness to answer. Dispreferred responses tend to be preceded by a pause, and
feature a declination component which is the non-acceptance of the first part of the
adjacency pair. Not responding at all to the above question is one such – and has been
dubbed an attributable silence, thus, a silence which in fact communicates certain
information about the non-speaker.
It has been noted that various physical cues, such as gestures or expressions, are in
play during orthodox face-to-face exchanges, and these are obviously lacking in a
telephone conversation. Since humans are so adept at speaking over the phone, it is easy
to conclude that the cues are not as important as once imagined – we manage without
them so well, after all. However, this argument does not take into account the cues one
picks up from the voice – it is quite easy to detect if somebody is confident, or nervous
on the phone, from the words they use, the pauses, the tone and pronunciations of the
words. In short, we may be able to substitute these auditory cues for more conventional
physical cues, and then empathize with the other person. This way, we could be
visualizing, or at least imagining with a fair degree of accuracy, how the person is
feeling, and gaining cues that way.
Once we have introduced a theoretical framework on the various theories and
research on oral discourse, we shall examine the components of spoken discourse under
different headings in order to provide a relevant account of the communicative event. In
our next section, the first heading appears under the name of elements and rules
governing oral discourse, where the notions of a speech theory, cooperative principles
and their implicatures will be under revision.

2. ELEMENTS AND RULES GOVERNING ORAL DISCOURSE.

Given that it is possible to separate a text from the communicative event in which it
occurs, we may go on to explore the relationship between text features and components
of events. These can be described in terms of rules governing oral discourse, norms or,
following Grice’s terminology, maxims.
So far, this section will be divided into two sections, first, linguistic elements at
work and non-linguistic elements. Secondly, rules of oral discourse focusing on rules of
use, rules of usage and conversational studies.

2.1. Elements governing oral discourse.

Elements governing oral discourse are approached in terms of a communicative
event, which is described as a sociocultural unit where the components of which serve
to define salient elements of context within which the text becomes significant. Also,
communicative behavior is not limited to the creation of oral texts, and correspondences
are likely to be found concerning paralinguistics, kinesics and proxemics in oral
interaction.

2.1.1. Linguistic elements.

Regarding the linguistic level in oral discourse, the phonological system is
involved and is concerned with the analysis of acoustic signals into a sequence of
speech sounds, thus consonants, vowels, and syllables. At this level, we find certain
prosodic elements which provide us with information about the oral interaction. Thus,
stress, rhythm and intonation. Also, routines are to be dealt with, but in a further section
(Halliday 1985).
Regarding stress, it is present in an oral interaction when we give more emphasis to
some parts of the utterance than to other segments. It is a signaling to make a syllable
stand out with respect to its neighboring syllables in a word or to the rest of words in a
longer utterance. We may establish a distinction between two types of stress markers,
thus primary stress and secondary stress within the same word. Primary stress is the
main marker within the word and secondary stress is a less important marker.
Foreign language learners must be concerned with the relevant role of primary
stress, as a change of stress within a word may change the whole meaning of it. For
instance, a word like record may change its meaning from verb to noun if a student does
not apply the right primary stress on it. The concept of emphasis is closely related, then,
to stress. Emphasis is essential in an oral exchange of information as it gives the
message a non-literal meaning, providing foreign language students with a choice to
highlight the information they may consider important at the speaking act.
Another important element which characterizes oral interaction is rhythm, which is
determined by the succession of prominent and non-prominent syllables in an utterance.
We will observe a quick and monotonous rhythm if prominent and non-prominent
syllables take place in short equal units of time, though not easy to find in authentic
speech. On the contrary, rhythm will be inexistent and chaotic if longer and irregular
units of time take place in an utterance or speech act.
Then, we may observe that the term establishes a relationship between accents and
pauses, which, used properly, contribute to keeping attention by allowing voice
inflection, change of intonation and change of meaning. Pauses may be characterized by
being predictable or not with a rhythm group. Thus, they coincide the boundaries of the
rhythm groups by fitting in naturally, or break them as it happens in spontaneous
speech. Predictable pauses are, then, those required for the speakers to take breath
between sentences or to separate grammatical units, and unpredictable pauses are those
brought about by false starts or hesitation.
The third prosodic element is intonation which is characterized in general terms by
the rising and falling of voice during speech, depending on the type of utterance we may
produce. In case of statements, we will use falling intonation whereas in questions we
use rising intonation. As we will see, intonation and rhythm play an important role
when expressing attitudes and emotions.
As a general rule, speakers use a normal intonation when taking part in an oral
interaction, but depending on the meaning the speakers may convey, they will use a
different tone within the utterance. The tone is responsible for changes of meaning or
for expressing special attitudes in the speaker, such as enthusiasm, sadness, anger, or
exasperation. Three types of intonation are involved in a real situation. Thus, falling and
rising tones, upper and lower range tones, and wide and narrow range of tones.
Respectively, they refer first, to certainty, determination or confidence when we use
falling tones in order to be conclusive whereas indecision, doubt and uncertainty is
expressed by means of rising tones to be inconclusive. Secondly, excitement and
animation on the part of the speaker is expressed by upper range tones whereas an
unanimated attitude corresponds to lower ranges. Finally, in order to express emotional
attitudes, we use a wide range of tone whereas in order to be unemotive, we rather use a
narrow range tone.

2.1.2. Non-linguistic elements.

As they speak, people often gesture, nod their heads, change their postures and
facial expressions, and redirect the focus of their gaze. Although these behaviors are not
linguistic by a strict definition of that term, their close coordination with the speech they
accompany suggests that they are relevant to an account of language use, and also, can
occur apart from the context of speech, spontaneous or voluntarily.
Conversational speech is often accompanied by gesture, and the relation of these
hand movements to the speech are usually regarded as communicative devices whose
function is to amplify or underscore information conveyed in the accompanying speech.
According to one of the icons of American linguists, Edward Sapir, people respond to
gesture with extreme alertness, in accordance with an elaborate and secret code that is
written nowhere, known to none, and understood by all (Sapir 1921). Gestures are then,
to be classified in different types, such as emblems or symbolic gestures as essentially
hand signs with well-established meanings (thumbs -up and V for victory, pointing,
denial, and refusing). In contrast, we may find simple and repetitive rhythmic hand
movements coordinated with sentence prosody, called batons, as using head and
shoulders. Also, unplanned gestures that accompany spontaneous speech, called
gesticulations, representational gestures, or lexical movements, related to semantic
content of speech in order to describe things like size, strength or speed.
Concerning facial expression, it deals with an automatic response to an internal
state although they can be controlled voluntarily to a considerable extent, and are used
in social situations to convey a variety of kinds of information (smiling and happiness).
Changes in addressees’ facial expressions allows the addressee to express understanding
concern, agreement, or confirmation where expressions such as smiles and head nods as
considered as back-channels.
In relation to gaze direction, a variety of kinds of significance has been attributed
to both the amount of time participants spend looking at each other, and to the points in
the speech stream at which those glances occur, such as staring, watching, peering or
looking among others. As proximity, body-orientation or touching, gazing may express
the communicators’ social distance, by means of looking up to or looking down to.
The primary medium by which language is expressed, speech, also contains a good
deal of information that can be considered nonverbal. A speaker’s voice transmits
individuating information concerning his or her age, gender, region of origin, social
class, and so on. In addition to this relatively static information, transient changes in
vocal quality provide information about changes in the speaker’s internal state, such as
hesitation or interjections. Changes in a speaker’s affective states usually are
accompanied by changes in the acoustic properties of his or her voice (Krauss and Chiu
1993), and listeners seem capable of interpreting these changes, even when the quality
of the speech is badly degraded, or the language is one the listener does not understand.

2.2. Rules governing oral discourse.

According to the Ministry of Education, since Spain entered the European
Community, there is a need for learning a foreign language in order to communicate
with other European countries. Within this context, the Spanish Educational System
(B.O.E.), within the framework of the Educational Reform, establishes a common
reference framework for the teaching of foreign languages, and claims for a progressive
development of communicative competence in a specific language.
Educational and professional reasons justify the presence of foreign languages in
the curricula at different educational levels. Students, then, are intended to be able to
carry out several communication tasks with specific communicative goals within
specific contexts. In order to get these goals, several strategies as well as linguistic and
discursive skills come into force in a given context. Therefore, a communicative
competence theory accounts for rules of usage and rules of use in order to get a
proficiency level in a foreign language within the framework of social interaction,
personal, professional or educational fields.
Then, rules of usage are concerned with the language users’ knowledge of
linguistic or grammatical rules (linguistic or grammatical competence) whereas rules of
use are concerned with the language users’ ability to use his knowledge of linguistic
rules in order to achieve effectiveness of communication, that is, discourse,
sociolinguistic and strategic competences. As the main aim for students is to improve
their educational and professional life from a global perspective, rules involve two
different implications, thus, the achievement of communication effectiveness, and their
appropriateness in specific social and cultural contexts.
To sum up, the learning of a foreign language is intended to broaden the students’
intellectual knowledge as well as to broaden their knowledge on other ways of life and
social organization different to their own. Furthermore, the aim is to get information on
international issues, to broaden their professional interests and consolidate social values
to promote the development of international communication.

2.2.1. Rules of usage.

As we have previously seen, language is the principal vehicle for the transmission
of cultural knowledge, and the primary means by which we gain access to the contents
of others’ minds. It is also considered as the ability to speak and be understood by
others. This involves an ability to produce and therefore, understand the same sounds
produced by others. The ways languages are used are constrained by the way they are
constructed, particularly the linguistic rules that govern the permissible usage forms, for
instance, grammatical rules. Language is defined as an abstract set of principles that
specify the relations between a sequence of sounds and a sequence of meanings, and is
analyzed in terms of four levels of organization. Thus, the phonological, the
morphological, the syntactic, and the semantic levels which, taken together, constitute
its grammar.
Firstly, the phonological system is concerned with the phonological knowledge a
speaker has in order to produce sounds which form meaningful sentences. For instance,
an analysis of an acoustic signal into a sequence of speech sounds, thus consonants,
vowels, and syllables, will allow the speaker to distinguish plural, past, and adverb
endings, as well as to recognize foreign accents that are distinctive for a particular
language or dialect or produce voiced or voiceless stops, fricatives or plosives sounds in
their appropriate contexts.
Besides, when learning a foreign language, speakers may be aware of the variety of
sounds the human vocal tract is capable of producing selecting language’s phonemes, or
elementary units of sound according to how speech sounds occur and how to follow
regular rules in the target language.
Secondly, the morphological system is concerned with the way words and
meaningful subwords are constructed out of these phonological elements. Morphology
involves internal structures by means of which the speakers are able to recognize
whether a word belongs to the target language or not. This is achieved by means of
morphological rules that follow a regular pattern, such as suffixes and prefixes. These
rules that determine the phonetic form of certain patterns, such as plural, regular simple
past or gerunds, are named morphophonemic rules, as they are applied by both
morphology and phonology.
Therefore, when a non-native word is added to the target language, they do it by
means of morphological rules which belong to that vernacular language, such as
derivation, compounding, blending or back-formation. Then, we may easily distinguish
a Spanglish word or a loan from another country, as siesta and paella, entering the
dictionary of the target language as part of their language and culture.
Thirdly, the syntactic system is concerned with that part of grammar which stands
for speakers’ knowledge of how to structure phrases and sentences in an appropriate and
accurate way. As mentioned above, knowing a language not only implies linguistic
knowledge but also the ability to arrange the appropriate organization of morphological
elements into higher level units, such as phrases and sentences.
Special attention is paid to the sequence of wording, as we may find grammatical
and ungrammatical sentences as the rules of syntax do not always account for the
grammaticality of sentences. We may find ambiguity or double meaning in expressions
which may lead the speaker to wrong assumptions on the meaning of the utterance.
Also, by means of word sequencing, syntactic rules reveal the relations between the
words in a sentence as they are orderly governed, for instance, subject, verb, and
adverbs. To sum up, this ability to produce utterances in an appropriate and coherent
way has to do with the creative aspect of language as the speaker may produce an
unlimited number of sentences, as a main feature of language usage.
Finally, the semantic system is concerned with the meanings of these higher-level
units. Semantics is concerned with the linguistic competence in terms of a capacity to
produce meaning within an utterance. The arbitrariness of language implies to
comprehend sentences because we know the meaning of individual words.
Nevertheless, speaking a language not only involves knowing the meaning of words but
also knowing how to combine language rules to convey meaning within an utterance.
Thus, we may find rules involved in the semantics of the sentence, such as subject-verb
concord in terms of third person singular; rules to interpret phrasal verbs within
prepositional phrases; different nuances brought about semantic fields in verbs, such as
the degree of loudness when speaking (shouting and whispering), the time nuance when
looking (watching, staring, or gazing), or the degree of touch (stroking or hitting)
among others.
However, linguistic rules do not follow a strict pattern in everyday use. We may
distinguish mainly three types of semantic rule violation. Thus, anomaly when a speaker
may create a non-understandable word or utterance because of a non-appropriate use of
a semantic rule; a poetic use of malformations is metaphors, with no literal meaning but
connected to abstract meaning; and finally, idioms, in which the meaning of an
expression may not be related to the individual meaning of its parts as it makes no sense
as they are culturally embedded. For instance, phrasal verbs.

2.2.2. Rules of use.

From a discourse-based approach, the notion of use means the realization of the
language system as meaningful communication linked to the aspects of performance.
This notion is based on the effectiveness for communication, by means of which an
utterance with a well-formed grammatical structure may or may not have a sufficient
value for communication in a given context.
As we have previously mentioned, within the context of a communicative
competence theory, our current educational system claims for a progressive
development of communicative competence in a specific language. Students are
intended to be able to carry out several communication tasks with specific
communicative goals within specific contexts by means of linguistic and discursive
skills.
Regarding rules of use in order to get a proficiency level in a foreign language,
students are concerned with the language users’ ability to use his knowledge of
linguistic rules, that is, discourse, sociolinguistic and strategic competences.
Students, then, are intended to apply their linguistic knowledge to how to construct
discourse within the textual competence according to three main rules of
appropriateness, coherence and cohesion, as main discourse devices. Considerations on
this sort require a distinction be drawn between the semantic or literal meaning of an
utterance and its intended meaning.
Concerning appropriateness, any language presents variations within a linguistic
community. Each member speaks or writes in a different way and their acts of speaking
are imbedded in a discourse, both conversation and narrative type, made up of a
coherently related sequence of acts and appropriateness in context. Besides, these types
of discourse have a formal structure that constrains participants’ acts of speaking and
each person chooses the language variety and the appropriate register according to the
situation, thus the issue, channel of communication, purpose, and degree of formality.
Another discourse device is coherence which deals with the use of information in a
speech act regarding the selection of relevant or irrelevant information, and the
organization of the communicative structure in a certain way, such as introduction,
development and conclusion. The amount of information may be necessary and
relevant, or on the contrary, redundant and irrelevant. Unnecessary repetition of what is
already known or already mentioned stops communication from being successful at
comprehending the important unknown parts of the speech act. Speakers are intended to
select not only the structure of the content of messages but also to organize information
in a logical and comprehensible way in order to avoid break downs in communication.
Besides, phonology and syntactic fields play an important role when emphasizing
important information by means of stressing the relevant information through different
tones and accents, and word sequencing, when new information is emphasized at the
beginning or the end of an utterance in order to focus the attention of the addressee on
new items.
Regarding cohesion, there is a wide range of semantic and syntactic relations
within a sentence in order to relate our speech act forming a cohesive unit by means of
reference, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical organization. We will develop these
concepts following Halliday (1985) and his work An Introduction to Functional
Grammar. Firstly, according to Halliday, reference relates to a participant or
circumstantial element introduced at one place in the text that can be taken as a
reference point for something that follows, such as the definite article (the) and personal
pronouns (he, she, we, they). Ellipsis is defined as a clause, or a part of a clause, or a
part of a verbal or nominal group, that may be presupposed at a subsequent place in
the text by the device of positive omission, like in short answers (Yes, I can; No, I
don’t). Since conjunction is a clause or clause complex, or some longer stretch of text,
it may be related to what follows it by one or other of a specific set of semantic
relations. According to Halliday, the most general categories are those of opposition
and clarification, addition and variation, and the temporal and causal-conditional. The
continuity in a text is established by means of lexical cohesion through the choice of
words. This may take the form of word repetition; or the choice of a word that is related
in some way to a previous one either semantically or collocationally. Many researchers,
among them, Widdowson (1978) claimed that, in a speech act, cohesion and coherence
must be described in terms of rules of use and depicted as procedures concerning
grammatical devices. He envisages cohesion as a rule of use, and coherence to be a rule
of usage.

2.2.3. Conversational Studies.

Conversational studies demonstrate how spoken English adapts to incorporate
many functions and accommodates a vast variety of registers and contexts in a speech
act. Cultural influence on speech and the implications of this for the second language
speaker are two main tenets within current speech and communication theories.
Conversation is the main means by which humans communicate, and is thus vital for
full and rich social interaction. An obvious definition of conversation is a process of
talking where at least two participants freely alternate in speaking as they interact with
their social environment. However, the analysis of conversation is not a simple matter.
It has been taken up by pioneering sociologists known as ethnomethodologists.
Ethnomethodology was a sociological and pragmatic type of quantitative methods
looking at the dynamics of conversation used by agents.
There is potentially a close interrelation between discourse and conversational
analysis and pragmatics (Searle 1969), taking into account social and cognitive
structures. They are interrelated with language in use, and in particular, with
communicative events and communicative functions, the role of speech acts where
language is an instrument of action. In fact, conversational analysis with its sociological
origins and its emphasis on social interaction, regards all its work as concerned with
social action.
This tradition on cultural studies was first introduced in a language teaching theory
in the early 1920s and improved in the 1970s by the notion of the ethnography of
communication, a concept coined by Dell Hymes. It refers to a methodology based in
anthropology and linguistics allowing people to study human interaction in context.
Ethnographers adhering to Hymes’ methodology attempt to analyze patterns of
communication as part of cultural knowledge and behavior. Besides, cultural relativity
sees communicative practices as an important part of what members of a particular
culture know and do (Hymes 1972). They acknowledge speech situations, speech
events, and speech acts as units of communicative practice and attempt to situate these
events in context in order to analyze them.
Hymes’ (1972) well-known SPEAKING heuristic where capital letters
acknowledge for different aspects in communicative competence, serves as a framework
within which the ethnographer examines several components of speech events as
follows. S stands for setting and scene (physical circumstances); P refers to participants
including speaker, sender and addresser; E means end (purposes and goals); A stands
for act sequence (message form and content); K deals with key (tone and manner); I
stands for instrumentalities (verbal, non-verbal and physical channel); N refers to norms
of interaction (specific proprieties attached to speaking), and interpretation
(interpretation of norms within cultural belief system); and finally, G for genre,
referring to textual categories.
This interpretation of communicative competence can serve as a useful guide to
help second language learners to distinguish important elements of cultural
communication as they learn to observe and analyze discourse practices of the target
culture in context. As for actual ethnographers, second language learners must have the
opportunity to access the viewpoints of natives of the culture being studied in order to
interpret culturally defined behaviors. The issue of culture under study will be discussed
in our next section where different interpretations of communicative competence are
examined from early approaches to present-day studies.
Within a conversational analysis, we find mainly two features of conversations.
First, what we understand under the convention of turn taking. Simply, this is where
one person waits for the other to finish his/her utterance before contributing their own.
The potential for one to reply can be missed, deliberately or not, so that the first person
may contribute once more. Sacks (1978) suggests that, historically speaking, there is an
underlying rule in conversation, as Greek and Roman societies had within an oratory
discipline where at least and not more than one party talks at a time. For him, there are
three main levels in turn -taking. The first level refers to the highest degree of control he
can select the next speaker either by naming or alluding to him or her. In a second
degree of control, the next utterance may be constrained by the speaker but without
being selected by a particular speaker. Finally, the third degree of control is to select
neither the next speaker nor utterance and leave it to one of the other participants.
Another fundamental feature of conversation is the idea of adjacency pairs,
proposed by Goffman (1976) and later developed by Sacks (1978). By this concept, a
conversation is described as a string of at least two turns. An example would be found
in a question-answer session where exchanges in which the first part of the pair predicts
the occurrence of the second, thus ‘How are you?’ and ‘Fine, thanks. And you?’ Both
conversing parties are aware that a response is required to a question. Moreover, a
particular response to a given question is expressed by means of greetings, challenges,
offers, complaints, invitations, warnings, announcements, farewells and phone
conversations.
Furthermore, another contribution to conversational analysis, as we have
previously mentioned, was Grice’s (1967) Cooperative Principle. He proposed a set of
norms expected in conversation, and formulated them as a universal to help account for
the high degree of implicitness in conversation and the required relation between rule -
governed meaning and force. Therefore, Grice analyses cooperation as involving four
categories of maxims expected in conversation. Thus, the first maxim is quantity which
involves speakers to give enough and not too much information. Secondly, within
quality, they are genuine and sincere, speaking truth or facts. The third maxim, relation,
makes reference to utterances which are relative to the context of the speech. Finally,
manner represents speakers who try to present meaning clearly and concisely, avoiding
ambiguity. They are direct and straightforward.
Within conversational structure, another distinction is identified by Brown and
Yule (1994), and it is the one between ‘short turns’ and ‘long turns’. They define them
as follows: A short turn consists of only one or two utterances, a long turn consists of a
string of utterances which may last as long as an hour’s lecture…what is required of a
speaker in a long turn is considerably more demanding than what is required of a
speaker in a short turn. As soon as a speaker ‘takes the floor’ for a long turn, tells an
anecdote, tells a joke, explains how something works, justifies a position, describes an
individual, and so on, he takes responsibility for creating a structured sequence of
utterances which must help the listener to create a coherent mental representation of
what he is trying to say. Besides, what the speaker says must be coherently structured.
Possible examples of everyday situations which might require longer turns from the
speakers are such things as narrating personal experiences, participating in job
interviews, arguing points of view, describing processes or locations and so on.

3. EVERYDAY ROUTINES AND FORMULAIC SPEECH.

Everyday routines and formulaic speech follow a tradition on cultural studies, called
an ethnography of communication. Also, they deal with the terms coined in the 1960s
by the philosopher J. L. Austin, in How to Do Things with Words (1962), to refer to acts
performed by utterances which conveyed information, in particular to those which
require questions and answers as a formulaic speech. Within a speech act theory, we
may distinguish a conventional semantic theory by studying the effects of locutionary,
illocutionary and perlocutory acts. They mean respectively, performative utterances on
speakers and hearers that result through or as a result of speech, secondly, acts that
occur in speech, and thirdly, responses which hearers called perlocutionary acts.
There are a wide range of kinds of speech act. Among the most relevant surveys on
speech act theories, we shall mention John R. Searle, who in his work Speech Acts in
1979, recognizes five types. Firstly, representative speech act, where speakers are
committed in varying degrees to the truth of the propositions they have uttered, by
means of swearing, believing, and reporting. Secondly, directives, where speakers try to
get hearers to do something by commanding, requesting, or urging. Thirdly,
commissives, which commit speakers in varying degrees to courses of action by means
of promising, vowing, and undertaking. Fourthly, declarations, whereby speakers alter
states of affairs by performing such speech acts as I now pronounce you man and wife.
Fifth, expressives, where speakers express attitudes, such as congratulating and
apologizing.
According to Austin (1962), in order to be successful, speech acts have to meet
certain conditions. Thus, a marriage ceremony can only be performed by someone with
the authority to do so, and with the consent of the parties agreeing to the marriage.
Speech acts may be direct or indirect. For instance, compare Shut the door, please and
Hey, it’s cold in here, both of which are directives.
Also, according to Seaville and Troike (1982) in his work The Ethnography of
Communication, linguistic routines are fixed utterances or sequences of utterances
which must be considered as single units, because meaning cannot be derived from
consideration of any segment apart from the whole. The routine itself, they add, fulfils
the communicative function, and in this respect is performative in nature. In order to
make effective discourse productions, learners need to approach their speeches from a
conscious sociolinguistic perspective, in order to get considerable cultural information
about communicative settings and roles. Routines are also analyzed in terms of length,
from single syllables to whole sentences, such as ‘See you!’ and ‘I am looking forward
to seeing you again!’ A sequence of sentences may be memorized as fixed phrases, and
consequently, some of them are learnt earlier and others, later. For instance, the first
routines a student learns in class are commands, such as ‘Sit down or stand up’,
requests, such as ‘May I come in, please?’ or Can I have a rubber, please?’. Routine’s
structure is mainly given by a sociolinguistic and cultural approach to language.
Non-native speakers may not grasp the nuances regarding a certain type of
utterance patterns, such as greeting routines or phone conversation patterns, which
have no meaning apart from a phatic function and introductory sentences. Within an
educational context, main researches on the field of cross-cultural rhetorical
considerations, such as Holmes and Brown (1987) and Wolfson (1981), point out that it
is not the responsibility of the language teacher qua linguist to enforce foreign language
standards of behaviour, linguistic or otherwise. Rather, it is the teacher’s job to equip
students to express themselves in exactly the ways they choose to do so-rudely,
tactfully, or in an elaborately polite manner.
Understanding routines require a cultural knowledge because they are generally
abstract in meaning and must be interpreted at a non-literal level. What we want to
prevent them being unintentionally rude or subservient. Without overstressing the
constraints on participants, it is clear that space-time loci, organizational context,
conventional forms of messages, and preceding communications, in fact all components
of communicative events, serve to increasingly restrict the range of available choices.
Thus, Holmes and Brown (1987) address three types of failure. Firstly, a pragmatic
failure which involves the inability to understand what is meant by what is said.
Secondly, the pragmalinguistic failure which is caused by mistaken beliefs about
pragmatic force of utterance. Finally, the sociopragmatic failure which is given by
different beliefs about rights and mentionables. People usually reject consciously
routines and rituals when they are meaningless and empty of meaning, thus
condolences, funeral rituals, weddings, masses and invitations among others.
Another instance is brought about by Wolfson (1981) in developing sociocultural
awareness. According to this model, this type of awareness will lead to a discussion of
the differences between the cultural and social values of a first language learner and the
foreign language community. He goes further on studying cross-cultural
miscommunication in the field of compliments, when learners from a different cultural
background do not understand certain behavior rules from the foreign language target
culture. Hence, ritual contexts involve formulaic language with great cultural
significance. The meaning of symbols cannot be interpreted in isolation but in context.
For instance, a funeral ritual is different in Europe and in America. Both routines and
formulaic speech meaning depend on shared beliefs and values within the speech
community coded into a sensitivity to cultural communication patterns.
The literature on cross-cultural communication breakdown is vast, as it is related to
a number of aspects such as size of imposition; taboos; different judgement of power
and social distance between different cultures; and different cultural values and
priorities. Therefore, important pedagogic advantages may be expected from further
developing this approach. These include more realistic learning activities, improved
motivation, new types of achievable objectives, and the potential to transform a passive
attitude to authentic texts into an active engagement in developing the effectiveness of
communication practices in a classroom setting.

4. SPECIFIC STRATEGIES IN ORAL COMMUNICATION.

In this section we address the fourth area of Communicative Competence. In the
words of Canale (1983), strategic competence is the verbal and nonverbal
communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns
in communication due to performance variables or due to insufficient competence. This
is quite a complex area but in a simplified way we can describe it as the type of
knowledge which we need to sustain communication with someone. This may be
achieved by paraphrase, circumlocution, repetition, hesitation, avoidance, guessing as
well as shifts in register and style. According to Canale and Swain (1980), strategic
competence is useful in various circumstances as for instance, the early stages of second
language learning where communicative competence can be present with just strategic
and socio-linguistic competence.
This approach has been supported by other researchers, such as Savignon and
Tarone. Thus, Savignon (1983) notes that one can communicate non-verbally in the
absence of grammatical or discourse competence provided there is a cooperative
interlocutor. Besides, she points out the necessity and the sufficiency for the inclusion of
strategic competence as a component of communicative competence at all levels as it
demonstrates that regardless of experience and level of proficiency one never knows all
a language. This also illustrates the negotiation of meaning involved in the use of
strategic competence as noted in Tarone (1981).
Another criterion on strategic competence proposed by Tarone (1981) for the
speaker to recognize a meta-linguistic problem is the use of the strategies to help getting
the meaning across. Tarone includes a requirement for the use of strategic competence
by which the speaker has to be aware that the linguistic structure needed to convey his
meaning is not available to him or to the hearer. As will be seen later, strategic
competence is essential in conversation and we argue for the necessity and sufficiency
of this competence.

5. PRESENT-DAY DIRECTIONS REGARDING ORAL COMMUNICATION.

5.1 New directions in language teaching.
According to Hedge (2000), since the introduction of communicative approaches,
the ability to communicate effectively in English has become one of the main goals in
European Language Teaching. The Council of Europe (1998), in response to the need
for international co-operation and professional mobility among European countries, has
recently published a document, Modern languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. A
Common European Framework of reference, in which the acquisition of communicative
and pragmatic competence in a second language is emphasized. Both contributed
strongly to the development of ‘the communicative classroom’, increasing the
emphasis on teaching the spoken language.
Although students recognize the importance of developing communicative skills in
the target language, they often have a passive attitude towards speaking in the
classroom. Students generally have fewer problems in taking short turns, since they are
required to give minimal responses to participate in a conversation with the teacher or
classmates based on simple exchanges. They tend to be reluctant, however, to expose
themselves in the classroom, making it very difficult to get them to speak at any length.
My concern derives from the problem of how to actually get learners speaking in a
meaningful way in the classroom.
Moreover, one of the proposed models for school-leaving examination, is to get
the students’ competence in the foreign language to be assessed by means of an oral
interview. During the interview, students will be expected to report on and discuss
topics related specifically to the syllabus. They will be therefore required to produce an
extended piece of spoken English. Thus, the particular need to develop students’
competence in using spoken language for informative purposes is of crucial importance.
This model makes particular reference to the development of the skills involved in
producing long turns of transactional speech.
Similarly, the Spanish Educational System states (B.O.E. 2002) that there is a need
for learning a foreign language in order to communicate with other European countries,
and a need for emphasizing the role of a foreign language which gets relevance as a
multilingual and multicultural identity. Within this context, getting a proficiency level
in a foreign language implies educational and professional reasons which justify the
presence of foreign languages in the curricula at different educational levels. It means to
have access to other cultures and customs as well as to foster interpersonal relationships
which help individuals develop a due respect towards other countries, their native
speakers and their culture. This sociocultural framework allows learners to better
understand their own language, and therefore, their own culture.
The European Council (1998) and, in particular, the Spanish Educational System
within the framework of the Educational Reform, establishes a common reference
framework for the teaching of foreign languages, and claims for a progressive
development of communicative competence in a specific language. Students, then, are
intended to be able to carry out several communication tasks with specific
communicative goals within specific contexts. In order to get these goals, several
strategies as well as linguistic and discursive skills come into force in a given context.
Thus, foreign language activities are provided within the framework of social
interaction, personal, professional or educational fields.
Therefore, in order to develop the above-mentioned communication tasks in our
present educational system, a communicative competence theory includes the following
subcompetences. Firstly, the linguistic competence (semantic, morphosyntactic and
phonological). Secondly, the discourse competence (language functions, speech acts,
and conversations). Thirdly, the sociolinguistic competence (social conventions,
routines and formulaic speech, communicative intentions, and registers among others).
Fourthly, the strategic competence will be included as a subcompetence of
communicative competence within this educational framework. So far, students will
make use of this competence in a natural and systematic way in order to achieve the
effectiveness of communication through the different communication skills, thus,
productive (oral and written communication), receptive (oral and written comprehension
within verbal and non-verbal codes), and interactional.

5.2. Implications into language teaching.

In recent years, this has started to change, partly because of better technical aids for
the collection, storage and analysis of spoken language data, but also because of a
growing awareness among researchers of the importance of spoken language studies for
a deeper understanding of the human linguistic faculty and human linguistic
communication. Today, the area of spoken language studies is a rapidly growing
research field, but it is still true that, for most languages in the world, detailed and
comprehensive studies of spoken language are lacking. There is a great need for better
general theories of the structure of spoken language and its function in human
communication in different social activities.
Today, pronunciation teaching is experiencing a new resurgence, fueled largely by
the increasing awareness of the communicative function of suprasegmental features in
spoken discourse (Brown and Yule 1983). In the late 80’s, researchers called for a more
top-down approach to pronunciation teaching (Pennington 1989) emphasizing the
broader, more meaningful aspects of phonology in connected speech rather than practice
with isolated sounds, thus ushering pronunciation back into the communicative fold.
Materials writers responded with a wealth of courses and recipe books focusing on
suprasegmental pronunciation (Bradford 1988, Gilbert 1984, Rogerson & Gilbert 1990).
A closer look at such materials, however, reveals that, with notable exceptions
(Cunningham 1991), most commercially produced course books on pronunciation today
present activities remarkably similar to the audiolingual texts of the 50’s, relying
heavily on mechanical drilling of decontextualized words and sentences. While
professing to teach the more communicative aspects of pronunciation, many such texts
go about it in a decidedly uncommunicative way. The more pronunciation teaching
materials have changed, it seems, the more they have stayed the same.

CONCLUSION.
Speaking is a language skill that uses complex and intricate forms to convey
meaning. In many ways, through its nature, it is the most difficult of all the language
skills to study. Speech is where language is most instantly adaptable; it is where culture
impinges on form and where second language speakers find their confidence threatened
through the diversity of registers, genres and styles that make up the first language
speaker’s day to day interaction. Language represents the deepest manifestation of a
culture, and people’s values systems, including those taken over from the group of
which they are part, play a substantial role in the way they use not only their first
language but also subsequently acquired ones. This section, then, will be focusing on
the discourse level, that is, the level of language beyond that of the sentence, considered
in its context.
Students should be encouraged to talk from a very early stage since, from a
linguistic point of view, as spoken language is relatively less demanding than written
language. However, Brown and Yule (1983) state that the problems in the spoken
language are going to be much more concerned with on–line production, and with the
question of how to find meaningful opportunities for individual students to practice
using a rather minimal knowledge of the foreign language in a flexible and inventive
manner, than with linguistic complexity. Furthermore, according to the acquisitionist
view, learners should not be put under undue pressure to produce spoken language at
the earliest possible stage, since they may well require a ‘silent period’ in which to
absorb and process linguistic input.
A review of the literature in this survey revealed that although recent developments
in foreign language education have indicated a trend towards approaching the
acquisition of a second language in terms of communicative competence, there is a
growing interest in traditional resources have proven inadequate. Students are expected
to learn to function properly in the target language and culture, both interpreting and
producing meaning with members of the target culture. However, providing experiences
for contact with language in context has been problematic. Limited access to the target
culture has forced teachers to rely on textbooks and other classroom materials in
teaching language, and these materials may not necessarily furnish a sufficiently rich
environment for the acquisition of communicative competence, including many aspects
of discourse activity, such as paralinguistic and extralinguistic behavior. Hypermedia
and multimedia environments may provide a more appropriate setting for students to
experience the target language in its cultural context.
Also, pronunciation teaching materials are envisaged to be used in the future.
Contemporary materials for the teaching of pronunciation, while still retaining many of
the characteristics of traditional audiolingual texts, have begun to incorporate more
meaningful and communicative practice, an increased emphasis on suprasegmentals,
and other features such as consciousness raising and self-monitoring which reflect
current research into the acquisition of second language phonology.
To conclude this section, we may say that conversational analysis gives a
fascinating insight into the implicit communicative rules which guide our social
interactions. It is interesting to speculate how conversation may evolve in the future,
with virtual meetings and chatting in cyberspace destroying many of the implicit rules
of traditional communication. Yet, conversational analysts may have much to write
about in the future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.
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 Juan Goytisolo (2001), Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible
heritage of Humanity 18 May 2001. Speech delivered at the opening of the meeting
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On communication process and language teaching

 Brown, G. & G. Yule (1983) Teaching the Spoken Language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
 Canale, M., and M. Swain, 1980. Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to
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On a theory of communicative competence

 Brown, G. and G. Yule. 1983. Discourse Analysis. CUP.
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On Discourse Analysis and Conversational studies

 Austin, J. L. (1962) How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brown, G. and G. Yule (1983) Discourse Analysis. CUP.
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 Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts: An essay in the philosophy of language.
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On future directions and implications on language teaching

 B.O.E. (2002)
 Council of Europe (1998) Modern Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. A
Common European Framework of reference.
 Hedge Tricia (2000) Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom (OUP)