TOPIC 5. ORAL COMMUNICATION. ELEMENTS AND NORMS
GOVERNING ORAL DISCOURSE. ROUTINES AND FORMULAE. TYPICAL
STRATEGIES IN ORAL COMMUNICATION.
1. INTRODUCTION
2. GENERAL CHARACTERISTIS OF ORAL COMMUNICATION
2.1. Differences between spoken and written language
2.2. Formal Characteristics of Spoken English
3. ELEMENTS AND NORMS GOVERNING ORAL DISCOURSE
3.1. Elements of oral discourse
3.2. Rules governing oral discourse
3.2.1. Turn-taking rules
3.2.2. The Cooperative Principle
4. ROUTINES AND FORMULAE
5. ORAL COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES.
5.1. Planning Strategies
5.2. Strategies related to the syntactic form of oral discourse
5.3. Politeness strategies: Brown and Levinson’s Theory
6. CONCLUSION
7. DIDACTIC TRANSPOSITION
8. CURRICULAR LINKS
9. BIBLIOGRAPHY
, 1. INTRODUCTION
Oral communication is a type of activity that involves the use of speech and one of the
channels available to language users: the oral channel. It is very often associated with
conversations, there are two types of spoken interactions depending on the
communicative purpose: Conversation and encounters.
Conversations are interactions which are interpersonally motivated. Conversation
analysis offers explanations about characteristics and structure of conversations in close
relation with other linguistic fields, such as discourse analysis. Encounters are
interactions which are pragmatically motivated and also analyzed by discourse analysis.
There are four types of oral communication depending on the structure of the oral
interaction.
1. Casual conversations. They do not follow any fixed structure (a topic that
appears and speakers start interacting about it)
2. Discussions. They are headed by a chairperson who controls next speakers.
3. Debates. Turns to establish “for” and “against” arguments about a particular
issue.
4. Rituals. When the speaker’s turns and words are established in advance. For
example, a conference or a presentation of a syllabus.
The aforementioned are subtypes studied within discourse analysis and conversation
analysis. Some of the findings of these two fields are dealt with below throughout this
topic, regarding the structure and elements of oral communication and norms and
strategies behind its use.
2. GENERAL CHARACTERISTIS OF ORAL COMMUNICATION
2.1. Differences between spoken and written language
Speakers have a greater range of possibilites when communicating as opposed to
writters. First and foremost, speakers can vary their intonation and stress depending on
the relevance of what they are transmitting. By varying their pitch, they can convey
their attitude connected to the message. At any point in a speech event, speakers can
rephrase what they are saying and there can be changes in the speed of speech as well.
Feedback from the listeners will condition the variety of gestures, expressions and
interruptions of the speaker. This feedback may be immediate, although not always.
And lastly, the most important feature that distinguishes speech from writing is that
there is no need for accuracy but rather for fluency instead.
In written communication there is far greater pressure for accuracy and logical
organization. Additionally, the writer suffers from the disadvantage of not getting
immediate feedback from the reader, and in some cases, none at all. There is no
possibility to ask for clarification of what has been said. And finally, writers cannot
use intonnation and stress cannot be distinguished.
, 2.2. Formal Characteristics of Spoken English
The following features can be considered the most typical of the spoken English, which
at the same time differentiate it from written English:
1. First person narration involving the speaker in the speech.
2. Preference of active voice over passive
3. Coordination: parataxis
4. Contractions
5. Slurring (e.g. gonna, wanna, kinda)
6. Discourse fillers (e.g. Umm, er, well)
7. Repetition of lexical words and reformulation
8. Use of tags, intonation emphazizers and verb tense shifting
9. Use of hedges and false starts
10. Deictic this/that instead of the
11. Use of ellipsis
3. ELEMENTS AND NORMS GOVERNING ORAL DISCOURSE
3.1. Elements of oral discourse
A conversation is any stretch of continuous speech between two or more people within
an audible range of each other who have the mutual intention to communicate. The field
concerned with the study of spoken language is Conversation Analysis. It identifies how
people exchange speech by means of turn-taking and adjacency pairs, which are
explained below.
In a conversation we understand that speakers produce utterances by taking up what the
last person has said. These two utterances together form the so-called adjacency pairs.
They are considered to be basic structural units in a conversation. The first utterance is
called the first pair part (FPP) and is regularly followed by certain kinds of responses
or a second utterance, which is called the second pair part (SPP).
Typical closed pairs include greeting/greeting, farewell/farewell, question/answer,
among others, e.g. “Hi” “Hello”. Other pairs offer several options as second pair parts,
e.g. compliment/acceptance or complaint/apology. These pairs are open as the
acceptance or apology may take place or not, regarding they are not obligatory.
Depending on the type of answer as the second part, we may get a preferred answer or a
dispreferred one, as discussed in the following paragraphs.
In conversational analysis, there is a branch of study called the preference
organization, which establishes that there can be two types of second pair parts. On the
one hand, the most predictable or expected response is a preferred response, e.g.
question-answer (it tends to be unmarked because there is no need to include an element
to mitigate the effect, as it is what is expected). On the other hand, the less predictable
option is a dispreferred response, e.g. question-question. If a dispreferred response is
given, then markers need to be taken into account to mitigate the effect it may have on
, the hearer, e.g. “Would you like to come to the cinema tonight?” The expected answer
is a positive one (“Yes”) and thus no mitigation is required. There may be answers that,
according to the norms of discourse analysis, should be preferred but turn into
dispreferred ones with mitigations (as another question instead of a positive response),
e.g. “Would you like to come to the cinema?” “And you, do you want to come with
me?”. Other elements can also interfere, as intentions.
Furthermore, dispreferred responses can be rejections, which are usually marked by
mitigations as well, like in the example “Would you like some peanuts?” “No, I can’t
have them because I am allergic to them” (the answer is mitigated when justifying the
reason why).
The most used resources for mitigating are:
1. Request for clarification. “Sorry, what?”
2. Giving excuses.
3. Expression of difficulty in the communicative process.
4. Rejection (the strongest), commonly marked by a pause of hedging markers, e.g.
“well”, “erhh” (In English a straight up “no” would not be accepted)
The dispreferred reply should always be marked using one feature or another because if
not the unmarked response will be considered as strange and rude.
In some occasions the answer given in the second pair part may give place to another
utterance as a result of the pair. As a consequence, a chain of pairs can then be created.
For example:
When there is a request plus a rejection, followed by a repetition of the request plus a
repeated rejection (ignoring), as in the following utterances.
First pair part: “Excuse me. Can I borrow your pencil?”
Second pair part: “No, sorry, the pencil is mine, I cant lend it to you.”
There would be two options: for the speakers to leave the conversation there or to repeat
the request again and form a chain: “Please, but I really need it!” (the answer would be
ignoring such request).
Adjacency pairs are devices for speakers and hearers to coordinate their talk through a
series of reciprocal obligations. As reflected in the example below, they serve a function
beyond the mere coordination of two turns, regarding other factors can interfere.
A: “I forgot to tell you the two best things that happened to me today.”
The reaction of the hearer will enable the speaker to continue the dialogue (if the
following utterance is said) or not (if there is no reaction).
B: “Oh fantastic, what were they?” (the speaker would continue)
A: “I got a very good mark in maths and I found 10 euros in the street.”
