Language use and the language user/learner

Sections 4.6.1 to 4.6.3 confine themselves to text types and the media which carry them. Matters often dealt with under ‘genre’ are treated in this Framework in 5.2.3 ‘pragmatic competences’.

Users of the Framework may wish to consider and where appropriate state:

•whether and, if so, how, the differences in the medium and in the psycholinguistic processes involved in speaking, listening, reading and writing in productive, receptive and interactive activities are taken into account a) in the selection, adaptation or composition of the spoken and written texts presented to learners, b) in the way that the learners are expected to handle the texts, and c) in the evaluation of the texts which learners produce;

•whether and, if so, how learners and teachers are made critically aware of the textual characteristics of a) classroom discourse b) testing and examination rubrics and answers, and c) instructional and reference materials;

•whether and, if so, how learners are brought to make the texts they produce more appropriate to: a) their communicative purposes, b) the contexts of use (domains, situations, recipients, constraints), c) the media employed.

4.6.4Texts and activities

The output of the process of language production is a text, which once it is uttered or written becomes an artefact carried by a particular medium and independent of its producer. The text then functions as the input to the process of language reception. Written artefacts are concrete objects, whether carved in stone, handwritten, typed, printed or electronically generated. They allow communication to take place despite the complete separation of producer and receiver in space and/or time – a property on which human society largely depends. In face-to-face oral interaction the medium is acoustic, sound waves which are normally ephemeral and irrecoverable. Indeed, few speakers are able to reproduce in exact detail a text they have just uttered in the course of conversation. Once it has served its communicative purposes it is discarded from memory – if indeed it has ever lodged there as a complete entity. However, as a result of modern technology, sound waves can be recorded and broadcast or stored in another medium and later reconverted into speech-waves. In this way, the temporo-spatial separation of producer and receiver is made possible. Furthermore, recordings of spontaneous discourse and conversation can be transcribed and analysed at leisure as texts. There is necessarily a close correlation between the categories proposed for the description of language activities and the texts resulting from those activities. Indeed the same word may be used for both. ‘Translation’ may denote either the act of translating or the text produced. Similarly, ‘conversation’, ‘debate’ or ‘interview’ may denote the communicative interaction of the participants, but equally the sequence of their exchanged utterances, which constitutes a text of a particular type belonging to a corresponding genre.

All the activities of production, reception, interaction and mediation take place in time. The real-time nature of speech is apparent, both in the activities of speaking and

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listening and in the medium itself. ‘Before’ and ‘after’ in a spoken text are to be taken quite literally. In a written text, which is usually (excluding ‘scrolled’ texts) a static spatial artefact, this is not necessarily so. In production, a written text can be edited, passages inserted or deleted. We cannot tell in what order the elements have been produced, though they are presented in a linear order as a string of symbols. Receptively, the reader’s eye is free to move over the text in any way, possibly following the linear sequence in strict order, as a child learning to read will generally do. Skilled, mature readers are much more likely to scan a text for highly information-bearing elements in order to establish an overall structure of meaning and then return to read more closely

– and if need be to re-read a number of times – such words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs as are of particular relevance to their needs and purposes. An author or editor may well use paratextual features (see section 4.4.5.3) to steer this process and, indeed, plan the text in accordance with the way in which it is expected to be read by the audience for which it is intended. Similarly, a spoken text may be carefully planned in advance so as to appear to be spontaneous, yet to ensure that an essential message is effectively conveyed under the different conditions that constrain the reception of speech. Process and product are indissolubly linked.

The text is central to any act of linguistic communication, the external, objective link between producer and receiver, whether they are communicating face to face or at a distance. The diagrams below show in a schematic form the relation between the user/learner, on whom the Framework is focused, the interlocutor(s), activities and texts.

1. Production. The user/learner produces a spoken or written text, received, often at a distance, by one or more listeners or readers, who are not called upon to reply.

1.1.Speaking

(listener)

USER → sound waves → Listener

(listener)

1.2. Writing

(reader)

USER → written text → Reader

(reader)

2.Reception. The user/learner receives a text from one or more speakers or writers, again often at a distance, and is not called upon to reply.

2.1.Listening

(speaker)

Speaker → sound waves → USER

(speaker)

2.2.Reading

(writer)

Writer → written text → USER

(writer)

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Language use and the language user/learner

3. Interaction. The user/learner enters into a face-to-face dialogue with an interlocutor. The text of the dialogue consists of utterances respectively produced and received by each party in alternation.

4. Mediation covers two activities.

4.1. Translation. The user/learner receives a text from a speaker or writer, who is not present, in one language or code (Lx) and produces a parallel text in a different language or code (Ly) to be received by another person as listener or reader at a distance.

Writer (Lx) → text (in Lx) → USER → text (in Ly) → Reader (Ly)

4.2. Interpretation. The user/learner acts as an intermediary in a face-to-face interaction between two interlocutors who do not share the same language or code, receiving a text in one language (Lx) and producing a corresponding text in the other (Ly).

In addition to interaction and mediation activities as defined above, there are many activities in which the user/learner is required to produce a textual response to a textual stimulus. The textual stimulus may be an oral question, a set of written instructions (e.g. an examination rubric), a discursive text, authentic or composed, etc. or some combination of these. The required textual response may be anything from a single word to a threehour essay. Both input and output texts may be spoken or written and in L1 or L2. The relation between the two texts may be meaning-preserving or not. Accordingly, even if we overlook the part which may be played in the teaching/learning of modern languages by activities in which the learner produces an L1 text in response to an L1 stimulus (as may often be the case with regard to the sociocultural component), some 24 activity types may be distinguished. For example, the following cases (Table 6) in which both input and output are in the target language.

Whilst such text-to-text activities have a place in everyday language use, they are particularly frequent in language learning/teaching and testing. The more mechanical meaning-preserving activities (repetition, dictation, reading aloud, phonetic transcription) are currently out of favour in communication-oriented language teaching owing to their artificiality and what are seen as undesirable backwash effects. A case can perhaps be made for them as testing devices for the technical reason that performance depends

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Table 6. Text-to-text activities

closely on the ability to use linguistic competences to reduce the information content of the text. In any case, the advantage of examining all possible combinations of categories in taxonomic sets is not only that it enables experience to be ordered, but also that it reveals gaps and suggests new possibilities.

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