Topic 1: Language as Communication PDF

**[TOPIC DEVELOPMENT]** 1. **INTRODUCTION** 2. **LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION: ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE** 1.1. Oral and written language 1.2. Teaching communication 3. **FACTORS DEFINING A COMMUNICATIVE SITUATION: SENDER, RECEIVER, FUNCTIONALITY AND CONTEXT** 2.1. Elements of communicatio...

**[TOPIC DEVELOPMENT]** 1. **INTRODUCTION** 2. **LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION: ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE** 1.1. Oral and written language 1.2. Teaching communication 3. **FACTORS DEFINING A COMMUNICATIVE SITUATION: SENDER, RECEIVER, FUNCTIONALITY AND CONTEXT** 2.1. Elements of communication. 2.2. Functionality 2.3. Context 3. **PRACTICAL APPLICATION RELATED TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS** 4. **CONCLUSION** 5. **BIBLIOGRAPHY** 5.1. Legislative references 5.2. Bibliographical references 1. **INTRODUCTION** Have you ever found yourself forced to move to a country whose language is different from your own? It could be quite challenging if we do not handle the language, since communication allows the connection with others around us. In this sense, **Reedy and Bearne (2017)** state that it is paramount to lay the foundations for effective communication in the Primary Education stage, which highlights the importance of this topic. Supporting such importance, **Royal Decree 157/2022 of March the 1^st^**, establishes in its article 9 the Competence in Linguistic Communication (CLC), which involves interacting orally, in writing, or multimodal for communicative purposes; and the Multilingual Competence (MC), which involves using a foreign language for learning and communication. In addition, the **Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2001)** holds multilingual and multicultural competence to be the ultimate goals of language learning. In the same line, **Order of May the 30^th^, 2023** refers to developing a methodology with a communicative approach to the language. Therefore, in this topic we are going to delve into the two main variables of communication, oral and written language, and how to teach communication. We will also deal with the factors involved in a communicative situation. Finally, we are going to see its practical application in order to put all this into practice. 2. **LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION: ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE** It is obvious that we use language to establish communication. But what is communication? Communication is an act by which an individual establishes contact with another and transmits information to that individual through a common system of symbols. This basic action allows the construction of societies, whether human or animal. Following **Canale and Swain (1980)**, human communication is "the exchange and negotiation of information between at least two individuals through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols, oral and written language and production and comprehension processes". From this definition we can extract that: - Communication is an exchange of information. - It needs a group of signs and a code. - It involves comprehension and production processes. With that in mind, in this section our main interest will rely on human communication, the oral and written language, and Competence in linguistic communication. **1.1. Oral and written language** Traditionally, oral language was not considered as important as written language. It was not until 1970 that new pedagogical orientations started to give priority to oral language. **Madrid and McLaren (2004)** described the basic differences between oral and written communication: - The use of written language allows us to organise our response and then review it for mistakes, while oral language is produced spontaneously. - The teaching of oral language depends on a system of phonation that students need special training to develop, whereas written language comes along easier. - The dynamics of oral communication are more complex, given that there are at least two interlocutors present, and each one influences the other in real time. Both oral and written language are divided into two processes, comprehension and production, as we can infer from the English Foreign Language specific competences 1 and 2 established by **Order of May the 30^th^, 2023**. For the comprehension process, we find three stages: - Perception of the sounds/graphemes in order to obtain meaning. - Analysis of the sense of the text. - Use of the information elaborated and creation of new schemes. For the production process, we also find three stages: - Construction of the meaning. - Transformation of the intentions into a formal message according to the grammatical rules. - Performance of the message. According to **Royal Decree 157/2022 of March the 1^st^** and **Decree 101/2023 of May the 9^th^**, the guidelines of the European Union insist on the need to acquire eight Key Competences, among which we can find the Multilingual Competence and the Linguistic Competence mentioned in the introduction. So, how do we put into practice a communicative curriculum? As stated by **Cassany (2012)**, "the ability to communicate is the sum total of the four linguistic skills, not just the perfection of each individual one". Therefore, if we want to improve students\' communication, we should integrate the four language skills in communication and interaction experiences. Some examples to do so are: **1.2.1. Action-oriented approach** The Action-oriented approach recommended in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2001) aims at the development of the competence in linguistic communication through the performance of tasks, following **Organic Law 2/2006 of May the 3^rd^, modified by Organic Law 3/2020 of December the 29^th^**. These activities are divided into real tasks, such as writing a letter, or pedagogic tasks, such as creating a poster. Like this, students see a meaning in what has been done to face real life. **1.2.2. Cooperative learning** Another way to promote communication in meaningful contexts is the use of active methodologies such as cooperative learning. During cooperative activities, students practise communication, since they have to exchange and negotiate information with their partners to complete different activities. One example of a cooperative activity that fosters communication is "*Think Pair Share*" by **Kagan (2009)**, in which students think about the answer to a question individually, then share it with a partner, and then discuss it with their team to finally write it in their notebook. **1.2.3. The role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)** According to **Trust (2018)**, when used effectively, technology can redefine and transform learning. Furthermore, **Order of May the 30^th^, 2023** suggests the use of digital tools to reinforce learning, teaching and evaluating the foreign language. Hence, ICT's can be wonderful tools to work on communication since they provide meaningful contexts for language use. One example of ICTs to practise oral and written communication is the platform *Flip*, in which students have to answer a question by recording themselves in short videos. This activity implies writing the script, and recording themselves speaking in a video 3. **FACTORS DEFINING A COMMUNICATIVE SITUATION: SENDER, RECEIVER, FUNCTIONALITY AND CONTEXT** In any communicative situation there is a series of necessary elements that make communication possible. In this section we are going to deal with the different factors defining a communicative situation. **2.1. Elements of communication** According to **Jakobson (1995)**, the main elements of communication are: - A message: what needs to be communicated; the contents of the information. - A sender: the person who has something to communicate. - A receiver or destination: the person who will receive the message. - The code: a closed and wide set of signs, which are combined using certain rules that both sender and receiver are familiar with. - The channel: the means of communication. - The context: is the situation which the sender and the receiver are in and which allows the same message to be interpreted in different ways. Bearing these elements in mind, we could divide a communication situation in four phases: **2.2. Functionality** From a linguistic point of view, it would be wrong to think that language is just a mere tool for exchanging ideas. There are different models when it comes to defining and explaining the different functions that language serves in our lives. According to **Jakobson**'s **(1995)** model, elements of communication are closely bound together with the language functions, and elaborated six general functions: - Conative: it is related to the sender, to control the behaviour of the receiver ("come here, please"). - Referential: it is related to the message, which transmits objective information about the surroundings ("the smartphone is broken"). - Expressive: it is related to the sender, when expressing one\'s own feelings. Intonation plays an important role ("nice to see you again"). - Poetic: it is related to the message, to create images of beauty through carefully chosen words ("His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe"). - Phatic: it is related to the channel, to check that the communication process is working ("hum"). - Metalinguistic: it is related to the code, when the language is used to talk about the language itself ("the verb is the subjunctive"). **2.3. Context** All the elements that appear in a communicative situation are present within a context, and this is subdivided into linguistic context (the linguistic elements surrounding the speech act) and non-linguistic context. In this last one, we can distinguish three: - The physical context: the environmental conditions where communication takes place. - The historical context: the moment when communication takes place. - The sociocultural context: the relation between the culture and society in which it is used. If we analyse this fact as foreign language teachers, we cannot ignore the importance of creating a context in the classroom, both when we introduce the new language and when we put it into practice. Context not only makes a foreign language easier to understand, but it also provides functionality and meaning to the language that students are learning. 4. **PRACTICAL APPLICATION RELATED TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS** In order to relate this topic to our teaching practice, in what follows we will present a practical application focused on communication and related to Sustainable Development Goal 3 (Agenda 2030, **Preamble of LOMLOE)** about good health and wellbeing. The game we have planned is aimed for a group of students in the 5th grade and it is related to revising content from the previous school year in the first days of school. So, it is a good moment to practise communicative situations in class. The game is called "Hot Seat", and the rules go as follows: 1. Students will work in heterogeneous cooperative groups of 4 students, following **Kagan (2009)**. 2. One student from each group will sit on the hot seat, facing away from the digital board. 3. On the digital board, we will project one word for the students in the hot seat to guess, and a timer. 4. The rest of the members of the group, facing the digital board, will give the student in the hot seat clues about the word on the digital board, participating one student at a time. 5. The student in the hot seat must guess the word before the time runs out to win a point for their team. We will carry out 4 rounds. In one round, we will focus on food, by looking at healthy and unhealthy food. Visual aids of the vocabulary on the digital board will be provided, by including a picture/icon next to each vocabulary word, in order to provide "multiple means of representation", following Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines included in **Decree 101/2023 of May the 9^th^**. Also, to attend to the diversity of our students, we will include useful sentence stems and vocabulary for the group members to use, such as *"it's healthy/unhealthy" "it's + colour" "it's + size".* 5. **CONCLUSION** Have you acquired a clearer idea of how challenging communication may be? As we have seen throughout this topic, learning oral and written communication is paramount in foreign language learning, with the ultimate goal of helping our students become communicative competent as proposed in Objective f) of Article 17 in **Organic Law 3/2020 of December the 29^th^ which modifies Organic Law 2/2006 of May the 3^rd^**. Can you remember the situation presented at the beginning of this topic? Moving to a new country where you cannot communicate at all because you do not know the foreign language? Well, this is exactly what we want to avoid for our students. Notwithstanding this, as foreign language teachers, it is worth highlighting that it is not what we teach, but how we teach it. In this sense, and as presented in this topic, we must work with our students through motivating and integrated tasks, promoting cooperation or the use of technologies in which they can practise situations likely to face in real life using both oral and written communication, in order to understand the meaning of the contents they have been learning. These situations will help them value the importance of the English language. Just like **Bona (2015)** points out "teachers have to look for communicative situations in order to create communicative citizens". 6. **BIBLIOGRAPHY** - Organic Law 3/2020 of December the 29^th^ of Education (LOMLOE), which amends Organic Law 2/2006 of May the 3^rd^ of Education (LOE). - Royal Decree 157/2022 of March the 1^st^, which establishes the ordering and basic curriculum of Primary Education. - Decree 101/2023 of May the 9^th^, which establishes the ordering and curriculum of Primary Education in the autonomous region of Andalusia. - **5.2. Bibliographical references** - - - Cassany, D. (2012). Describir el escribir: Cómo se aprende a escribir. Paidós. - - Jakobson, R. (1995). Functions of Language. En Allen y Corder (eds.). - Kagan, S. (2009). Kagan Cooperative Learning. Kagan Publishing. - Madrid, D. and McLaren, N. (2004). TEFL in Primary Education. Universidad de Granada. - Reedy D. and Bearne E. (2017). Teaching Primary English. Routledge. - Trust, T. (2018). Why do we need technology in Education? Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education.