Language and Communication: A Comprehensive Guide

Posted on Jun 28, 2024 in Language

TOPIC 1: Language and Communication: Spoken and Written Language. Factors in a Communicative Situation: Sender, Receiver, Purpose, and Context.

1. Introduction

Language is an essential and characteristic part of being human. Children all over the world begin to speak at the same age and follow the same learning pattern because all languages have a similar basic structure. Language is what human beings mainly use for communication.

Traditional Foreign Language Teaching concentrated on getting students consciously to learn items of language in isolation. Following Krashen’s theory, people got to know about language (learning) but could not use it in a real context (acquisition).

Our current educational system, which has been set by RD 157/2022, March 1st, and specifically the Decree 61/2022, July 13th, which establishes the Official Curriculum in Madrid, has incorporated this functional and communicative potential of language on its objectives and methodology as it is established in the Organic Law 2/2006 LOE, May 3rd, “the domain of a second language has become a priority in the global world we are living in”; a law which has been recently modified by 3/2020 LOMLOE, December 29th.

Throughout this topic, I will explain what communication and language are as well as their main characteristics. Then I will move to explain the differences between oral and written language, without forgetting the development of the concept of communicative competence. Finally, I will compile all the ideas in a brief conclusion and list the bibliography I have used to elaborate on the topic.

2. Language as Communication: Spoken and Written Language

Think about the following situations for a moment: a dog barking, a baby crying, or a siren from an ambulance. All these scenarios imply message transmission using a different language. Therefore, all these situations tell us that without language, communication would be impossible.

2.a. Definition and Properties of Language

The concept of language has many different definitions, and in this sense, we can mention authors such as Sapir (1921) who defined it as “a purely human and non-instinctive way of communicating by means of voluntarily produced symbols”.

At this point, it can be stated that language is directly related to human communication. Otherwise, as we have seen, human communication is not the only one since there is a wide range of types of communication (among animals, ambulance language, etc.)

But, which elements have to be taken into account to distinguish human language from the rest? To answer this question, Yule (1985) pointed out the following properties of human language:

Displacement: speakers can talk about events remote in time and space.
Arbitrariness: There is no link between the signal and the nature of the reality to which it refers; there is no intrinsic connection.
Productivity: human language is essentially creative. Humans can understand and produce new sentences.
Cultural transmission: it is the process whereby a language is transmitted from generation to generation within a specific context.
Discreteness: the sounds in language are meaningfully different and opposite among them, which means that each sound in language is treated as discrete. This way, two words can have as the unique difference a unique phoneme and, as a result, two different meanings (e.g.: pack and back).

2.b. Language Functions

At this point, another important question emerges: “what is language for?”

When we talk about functions of language, we may mean no more than the way people use their language.

There are several familiar classifications of linguistic function; however, one of the most widely known classifications of functions of language was proposed by the Swedish linguist Roman Jakobson in his article “Linguistics and Poetics.” To understand them better, we will look at them in an adaptation of the well-known book written by Eric Carle.

The story starts like this:

“In the light of the moon, a little egg lay on a leaf. One Sunday morning, the warm, gold, and the shiny sun came up and… “Pop!” Do you know what happened”
– “What?”
– “Out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar. He started to look for some food. On Monday, he ate through one apple…” and so on.

Let us analyze the different language functions in this story:

“In the light of the Moon, a little egg lay on a leaf.” In this sentence, we can see the referential function since the language is used to refer to reality.
“One Sunday morning, the gold, warm and shiny sun.” Here, the poetic function appears since the language has different rhymes.
“And suddenly: Pop! Do you know what happened?” Here, the conative function is used since the sender wants to attract the receiver’s attention.
“What?” The students would answer. This is the phatic function in which some feedback is given.
“Suddenly a tiny and very hungry caterpillar appears. Mmmmmm, I am very hungry! I need food!:” in this case, we can see the expressive function since the caterpillar is expressing its feelings.
“On Monday, which always goes with a capital letter, he ate a big apple”: finally, here we can see the metalinguistic function since language is used to speak about the language itself.

2.c. Characteristics and Differences Between Writing and Speech

However, it is also important to explain the differences and characteristics of spoken and written language.

Traditionally speaking, written language was considered superior to spoken language due to the fact that it was the medium of Literature.

Nowadays, both are equally important and necessary. Writing cannot substitute speech and speech cannot substitute writing. As far as speech is concerned, it is considered the universal material of human language, and it is studied by phonetics. Within it, we can deal with three main branches of study:

Articulatory phonetics deals with the production of sounds.
Acoustic phonetics deals with the transmission of speech sounds.
Auditory phonetics deals with the reception of speech sounds.

Within speech, the pressure to think at the same time we are speaking promotes mistakes and simple sentences. It also tends to be more expressive and is normally supported by the use of gestures and body language.

In contrast, written language is the representation of a language by means of a system of signs. Its evolution has been much slower than that of speech. Two types of written systems can be distinguished:

Non-phonological systems, which do not show a clear relationship between the symbols and the sounds of the language. They include pictographic or Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Phonological systems show a clear relationship between the symbols and the sounds. Within them, we can deal with two different systems: on the one hand, syllabic systems (each grapheme corresponds to a spoken syllable) and alphabetic systems (direct correspondence between graphemes and phonemes is established).

However, it can be stated that written and spoken language have mutually interacted and that they are mutually dependent.

2.d. Concept of Communicative Competence

After having dealt with the concept of language, its properties, and the differences between spoken and written language, I will explain an important concept when teaching a foreign language: Communicative Competence, since it constitutes the aim to be reached at the end of the Primary Education Stage.

Throughout language and communication studies, some authors, like Chomsky, talked about language. In this case, he states that language is a set of sentences, each finite in length, created out of a finite set of elements. He also states that a speaker has a subconscious ability to use the grammar already known in his mother language to create new utterances in the foreign language. This is what he called Communicative Competence.

Nevertheless, authors such as Hymes said that Chomsky had missed out on the rules as he considered that speakers had an intuitive mastery of the foreign language they are learning at the moment. According to this, he establishes four sub-competences:

Systematic potential: The speaker has the ability to produce sentences in the language he is learning at the moment following learnt rules.
Appropriacy: The speaker focuses on the context and the purpose to decide which type of language is appropriate to the given situation.
Occurance: The speaker knows how often a structure is used in the target language he uses. For example: “I had my hair cut” is less frequently used than “I cut my hair.”
Feasibility: The speaker knows whether something is possible or not in the language.

Actually, it was Savignon who established a description of how the components mentioned above interact and states “Communicative competence is a dynamic concept, it depends on the cooperation of all the participants involved. It can be defined as an interpersonal rather than an intrapersonal trait.”

2.e. Definition of Communication

This concept leads us to another important concept: communication. Thus, first of all, let me define it and, later on, I will deal with communication theory. Anderson (1959) defined communication as the process by which we understand others making efforts to be understood by them.

In general terms, it can be affirmed that most linguists agree on the concept of communication as a process that involves a sender who encodes and sends a message which is carried via the communication channel to the receiver who decodes the message, processes the information, and sends an appropriate reply via the same communication channel.

Moreover, Austin was the author who drew that words sometimes do not communicate information but are equivalent to actions. According to their behavior, the utterances can have different effects:

Locutionary acts: saying something that is meaningful and that can be understood. It refers to the literal meaning (e.g.: “It’s raining.”).
Illocutionary acts: using a sentence to perform a function which happens when promising, arresting… (e.g.: “I promise I’ll cook tonight.”).
Perlocutionary acts: it is the result or effect the utterance has on the hearer which happens when persuading, convincing…

3. Communication Factors

After having dealt with the concepts of communication and language in a detailed form, I will move on to the second part of the topic, which will be devoted to the most important communication factors, which are the following ones:

Sender: is the person who sends the message.
Receiver: is the person who gets the message.
Purpose: is the intention of the message.
Context: is the physical or social situation where communication takes place. It affects the comprehension of the message.
Channel: is the means through which the message travels.
Medium: is often used to describe a means of communication. It should be applied to those media which include more than one form, such as television.
Message: is the content of information produced by the sender to the receiver. They work at two different levels: what the sender means and what he says unintentionally (use of non-verbal signs).
Feedback: is the response one gets from sending a message and the adjustments made according to the response.
Encoding/Decoding: implies both: the sender encodes the message and the receiver has to decode it.
Conventions: are the unwritten rules that govern the use of the different forms of communication.
Signs: are part of language. Consequently, they are also part of any communicative act.
Code: is a set of signs organized by rules. It has to be mastered by all the participants of a communicative act to get understanding among them.
Register: is the defined style of language and the degree of formality in the use of language.

4. Conclusion

To conclude, I would like to underline the importance of language within a communicative act since it allows us to establish a continuous relationship with those around us. Furthermore, as language can be oral or written, communication can be established in a compensated way. Therefore, and from an educative point of view, we must teach our students to communicate not only in their mother tongue but also in a foreign language and learn both the language and the cultural aspects that influence how we express ourselves.

5. Bibliography

Crystal, O. L. D. (2018). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (3rd Revised ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Hymes, D. (1972). On Comunicative Competence (in Sociolinguistics). Penguin.
Jakobson, R., & Halle, M. (2017). Fundamentals of Language. Andesite Press.