Theoretical/Philosophical

Foundation in ELT

Muchlas Yusak
Widyaiswara

DEPARTEMEN PENDIDIKAN NASIONAL

DIREKTORAT JENDERAL PENINGKATAN MUTU PENDIDIK DAN TENAGA KEPENDIDIKAN
LEMBANGA PENJAMIN MUTU PENDIDIKAN (LPMP) JAWA TENGAH
2006
Levels of Literacy Wells, 1987

Epistemic
Informational
Functional

Performative
 PERFORMATIVE
• the code as code – an important part of becoming literate
• simply a matter of acquiring:
– those skills that allow a written message to be decoded
into speech in order to ascertain its meaning
– those skills that allow a spoken message to be encoded in
writing, according to the conventions of letter formation,
spelling and punctuation.
• ‘breaking the code’ of knowing the relationship between
spoken and written symbols.
 FUNCTIONAL

• emphasises the uses that are made of literacy in interpersonal

communication
• is able to as a member of that particular society to cope with
the demands of everyday life that involve written language.
– reading a popular newspaper,
– writing a job application,
– following procedural instructions
• the dividing line between literacy and illiteracy
 INFORMATIONAL
• focuses on the role that literacy plays in the
communication of knowledge, particularly
discipline-based knowledge
• the curricular emphasis on reading and writing – but
particularly reading
• the student’s use for accessing the accumulated
knowledge in order to construct a meaning which
reciprocate the intention of the writer
• ‘being a text participant’ (able to ‘comprehend’ the
text)
 EPISTEMIC

• to have available ways of acting upon and

transforming knowledge and experience that are in
general unavailable to those who have never learned
to read and write
• the aesthetic aspect of language as art (literature,
poetry)
 Derewianka, 1995
CULTURE
GENRE
(PURPOSE)

SITUATION
Who is involved?
(Tenor)
The subject matter The channel
(Field) (Mode)

REGISTER

TEXT
 The Context of Culture
 The attitudes, values and shared experiences of
any group of people living in the one culture.
 Culturally evolved expectations of ways of
behaving
 Culturallyevolved ways of getting things done or
of achieving common goals (genre)
• buying and selling goods
• directing someone to the bank
• recounting recent events
• arguing a point of view
 Register
 Field: the social activity taking place.
(football, cooking, stamp collecting, studying history,
economics)
 Tenor: the relationship between participants.
• Power (equal or unequal status)
• Contact (how often you have contact with the
person to whom you are speaking or writing)
• Affect (attitudes and feelings towards topics and
participants)
 Register … continued

 Mode: the channel of linguistic communication.

• Distance in space and distance in time between
speaker/listener and reader/writer
• Distance between text and the events being
referred to, such as listening to cooking
demonstration on TV; relating the TV
demonstration to a friend; reading a recipe.
Communicative
Competence Socio-
cultural
Competence

Discourse
Competence

Linguistic Actional
Competence Competence
Strategic
Competence Celce-Murcia et al, 1995
 DISCOURSE COMPETENCE
 It concerns the selection, sequencing, and
arrangement of words, structures and utterances
to achieve a unified spoken or written text.
 The intersection of the lexicogrammar with the
signals of the communicative intent and
sociocultural context to express attitudes and
messages, and to create texts.
 Sub-areas that contribute to discourse
competence: cohesion, deixis, coherence, genre
structure, and the conversational structure
inherent to the turn-taking system in
conversation.
 Components of Discourse Competence
 COHESION
– Reference (anaphora, cataphora)
– Substitution/ellipsis
– Conjunction
– Lexical chains (related to content schemata), parallel
structure
 DEIXIS
– Personal (pronouns)
– Spatial (here, there; this, that)
– Temporal (now, then; before, after)
– Textual (the following chart; the example above)
 Components of Discourse Competence … cont.

 COHERENCE
– Organized expression and interpretation of content and
purpose (content schemata)
– Thematization and staging (theme-rheme development)
– Management of old and new information
– Propositional structures and their organizational sequences
 temporal, spatial, cause-effect, condition-result, etc.
– Temporal continuity/shift (sequence of tenses)
 GENRE/GENERIC STRUCTURE (formal schemata)
– Narrative, interview, service encounter, research report,
sermon, etc.
 Components of Discourse Competence … cont.

 CONVERSTAIONAL STRUCTURE (inherent to the turn-

taking system in conversation but may extend to a
variety of oral genres)
– How to perform openings & reopenings
– Topic establishment & change
– How to hold & relinquish the floor
– How to interrupt
– How to collaborate & backchannel
– How to do preclosings & closings
– Adjacency pairs (related to actional competence)
 Firstand second pair parts (knowing preferred and dispreferred
responses)
 LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE
 comprises the basic elements of communication:
– sentence patterns and types,
– the constituent structure,
– the morphological inflection, and
– the lexical resources, as well as
– the phonological and orthographic systems
needed to realize communication as speech or
writing.
 Components of Linguistic Competence
 SYNTAX
– Constituent/phrase structure
– Word order (cannonical and marked)
– Sentence types
 statements, negatives, questions, imperatives, exclamations
– Special constructions
 existentials (there + BE …)
 clefts (It’s X that/who …; What + sub. + verb + BE)
 question tags, etc.

– Modifiers/intensifiers
 quantifiers, comparing and equating
– Coordination (and, or, etc.) and correlation (both X and Y; either X
or Y)
– Subordinations (e.g. adverbial clauses, conditionals)
– Embedding
 noun clauses, relative clauses (e.g. restrictive and non-restrictive)
 reported speech
 Components of Linguistic Competence … cont.
 MORPHOLOGY
– Parts of speech
– Inflections (e.g. agreement and concord)
– Derivational processes (productive ones)
 compounding, affixation, conversion/incorporation

 LEXICON
– Words
 content words (Ns, Vs, ADJs)

 function words (pronouns, prepositions, verbal auxiliaries, etc)

– Routines
 word-like fixed phrases (e.g. of course, all of a sudden)

 formulaic and semi-formulaic chunks (e.g. how do you do?)

– Collocations
 V-Obj (e.g. spend money), Adv.Adj (e.g. mutually intelligible),
Adj.N (e.g. tall building)
– Idioms (e.g. kick the bucket)
 Components of Linguistic Competence … cont.

 PHONOLOGY (for pronunciation)

– Segmentals
 vowels, consonants, syllable types, sandhi variation
(changes and reductions between adjacent sounds in the
stream of speech)
– Suprasegmentals
 prominence, stress, intonation, rhythm

 ORTHOGRAPHY (for spelling)

– Letters (if writing system is alphabetic)
– Phoneme-grapheme correspondences
– Rules of spelling
– Conventions for mechanics and punctuation
 ACTIONAL COMPETENCE

competence in conveying and

understanding communicative intent,
that is, matching actional intent with
linguistic form based on the knowledge
of an inventory of verbal schemata that
carry illocutionary force (speech acts
and speech act sets).
 Components of Actional Competence
(for oral language)
KNOWLEDGE OF LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS
 INTERPERSONAL EXCHANGE
– Greeting and leave taking
– Making introductions, identifying oneself
– Extending, accepting and declining invitations and offers
– Making and breaking agreements
– Complementing and congratulating
– Reacting to interlocutor’s speech
 Showing attention, interest, surprise, sympathy, happiness, disbelief,
disappointment
 INFORMATION
– Asking for and giving information
– Reporting (describing and narrating)
– Remembering
– Explaining and discussing
 Components of Actional Competence … cont.

 OPINIONS
– Expressing and finding out about opinions and attitudes
– Agreeing and disagreeing
– Approving and disapproving
– Showing satisfaction and dissatisfaction
 FEELINGS
– Expressing and finding out about feelings
 love, happiness, sadness, pleasure, anxiety, anger, embarrassment,
pain, relief, fear
 annoyance, surprise, etc.

 SUASION
– Suggesting, requesting and instructing
– Giving orders, advising and warning
– Persuading, encouraging and discouraging
– Asking for, granting and withholding permission
 Components of Actional Competence … cont.
 PROBLEMS
– Complaining and criticizing
– Blaming and accusing
– Admitting and denying
– Regretting
– Apologizing and forgiving
 FUTURE SCENARIOS
– Expressing and finding out about wishes, hopes, and desires
– Expressing and eliciting plans, goals, and intentions
– Promising
– Predicting and speculating
– Discussing possibilities and capabilities of doing something
KNOWLEDGE OF SPEECH ACT SETS
(Note: for written language – rhetorical competence)
 SOCIOCULTURAL COMPETENCE

 thespeaker’s knowledge of how to express

messages appropriately within the overall
social & cultural context of communication,
in accordance with the pragmatic factors
related to variation in language use.
 Components of
Sociocultural Competence
 SOCIAL CONTEXTUAL FACTORS
– Participant variables
 age,
gender, office and status, social distance, relations
(power and affective)
– Situational variables
 time, place, social situation
 STYLISTIC APPROPRIATENESS FACTORS
– Politeness conventions and strategies
– Stylistic variation
 degrees of formality
 field-specific registers
 Components of Sociocultural Competence … cont.

 CULTURAL FACTORS
– Sociocultural background knowledge of the target language
community
 Livingconditions (way of living, living standards); social and
institutional structure; social conventions and rituals; major
values, beliefs, and norms; taboo topics; historical
background; cultural aspects including literature and arts
– Awareness of major dialect or regional differences
– Cross-cultural awareness
 differences;
similarities; strategies for cross-cultural
communication
 Components of Sociocultural Competence … cont.

 NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATIVE FACTORS

– Kinesic factors (body language)
 discourse controlling behaviors (non-verbal turn-taking signals)
 backchannel behaviors

 Affective markers (facial expressions), gestures, eye contact

– Proxemic factors (use of space)

– Haptic factors (touching)
– Paralinguistic factors
 acoustical sounds, nonvocal noises
– Silence
 STRATEGIC COMPETENCE
 It is knowledge of communication strategies and how to use them.
 Communication strategies are:
a) are verbal plans used by speakers to overcome problems in
the planning and execution stages of reaching a
communicative goal; e.g. avoiding trouble spots or
compensating for not knowing a vocabulary item.
(Psycholinguistic perspective)
b) involve appeals for help as well as other cooperative
problem-solving behaviors which occur after some problem
has surfaced during the course of communication, that is,
various types of negotiation of meaning and repair
mechanisms.
(Interactional perspective)
c) are means of keeping the communication channel open in
the face of communication difficulties, and playing for time
to think and to make (alternative) speech plans.
(communication continuity/maintenance perspective)
 Components of Strategic Competence
 AVOIDANCE or REDUCTION STRATEGIES
– Message replacement
– Topic avoidance
– Message abandonment
 ACHIEVEMENT or COMPENSATORY STRATEGIES
– Circumlocution (e.g., the thing you open bottles with for corkscrew)
– Approximation (e.g., fish for carp)
– All-purpose words (e.g., thingy, thingamajic)
– Non-linguistic means (mime, pointing, gestures, drawing pictures)
– Restructuring (e.g., The bus was very … there were a lot of people
on it)
– Word-coinage (e.g., vegetarianist)
– Literal translation from L1
– Foreignizing (e.g., L1 word with L2 pronunciation)
– Code switching to L1 or L3
– Retrieval (e.g. bro … bron … bronze)
 Components of Strategic Competence … cont.

 STALLING or TIME GAINING STRATEGIES

– Fillers, hesitation devices and gambits (e.g., well, actually …, where
was I …?)
– Self and other-repetition
 SELF-MONITORING STRATEGIES
– Self-initiated repair (e.g., I mean …)
– Self-rephrasing (over-elaboration) (e.g., This is for students … pupils
… when you’re at school …)
 INTERACTIONAL STRATEGIES
– Appeals for help
 direct (e.g., What do you call … ?)
 indirect (e.g., I don’t know the word in English … or puzzled
expressions)
– Meaning negotiation strategies
Indicators of non/mis-understanding
 requests
• repetition requests (e.g., Pardon? or Could you say that again
please?)
• clarification requests (e.g., What do you mean by …?)
• confirmation requests (e.g., Did you say …?)
 Components of Strategic Competence … cont.
 Expressions of non-understanding
• Verbal (e.g., Sorry, I’m not sure I understand …)
• Non-verbal (e.g., raised eyebrows, blank look)
 Interpretative summary (e.g., You mean …?/So what
you’re saying is …?)
– Responses
 repetition,rephrasing, expansion, reduction,
confirmation, rejection, repair
– Comprehension checks
 whether the interlocutor can follow you (e.g., Am I
making sense?)
 whether what you said was correct or grammatical (e.g.,
Can I/you say that?)
 whether the interlocutor is listening (e.g., on the phone:
Are you still there?)
 whether the interlocutor can hear you
 Spoken and Written Language
Spoken and Written Continuum

Most spoken Most written

Language accompanying action Language as reflection

Spoken language
Written language
 Most Spoken
• The term ‘most spoken’ refers to language
interactions where language most closely
accompanies action, and where there is the least
physical distance between participants.
• Examples of ‘most spoken’ texts include the
language that accompanies tennis matches,
basketball games, shared games, construction of
buildings, etc.
 Most Written
• The term ‘most written’ refers to language texts
where distance from action is greatest and where
distance between participants is maximal.
• Examples of ‘most written’ texts include abstract
reflections on causes and effects of distant events,
such as history or economics, theoretical arguments
and where an author writes for an unknown future
audience.