Human
communication fulfills many different goals at the personal and social levels.
We communicate information, ideas, beliefs, emotions, and attitudes to one
another in our daily interactions, and we construct and maintain our positions
within various social contexts by employing appropriate language forms and
performing speech activities to ensure solidarity, harmony, and cooperation- or
express disagreement or displeasure when called for. The acquisition of
communication skills in one’s first language is a lifelong process, but the
basic skills are acquired quite early in life. When learning another language,
we have to add to, change, and readjust our native language strategies to fit
the new language and culture.
Whether
we teach “language for communication” or “language as communication”
(Widdowson. 1984:215), it is imperative that we combine knowledge of the target
language with skills and strategies that enable us to use the language
effectively and appropriately in various social and cultural contexts. This
book is intended to help teahcers develop framework of knowledge and
decision-making processes that take recent thinking in discourse analysis into
account (from both the linguistic and sociocultural perspectives).
We
have written this book to provide language teachers with discourse perspective
on the language areas they are traditionally prepared to teach: pronunciation,
grammar, and vocabulary. These areas are indeed the resources of any language
and must be part of a language teacher’s knowledge. However, when language is
used for communication, these areas are resoduces for creating and interpreting
discourse in context, not language system to be taught or learned out of
context for their own sake.
When
language is used for communication, the coparticipants typically employ one or
more skills simultaneously : listening, reading, speaking or writing. They
often switch quickly from one role and skill to another (e.g from listening to
speaking and back to listening again), or they are engaged in a task that
involves carrying out several skills simultaneously (e.g, listening and note
taking/writing). The language produced interactively by such coparticipants is
discourse (i.e, language in use). We thus agree with Cook (1989), who claims
that discourse analysis is useful for drawing attention to the language skill
(i.e, listening, reading, speaking, writing), which put user knowledge of
phonological, grammatical, and lexical resources into action whenever language
users achieve successful communication.
