Abstract
In our view, there is a general need to gain insights into what a listener does in linguistic interaction and to provide a comprehensive account of listenership from a pragmatic standpoint. This paper examines listener roles and processes in three aspects of communication: verbal understanding, verbal production and negotiation of meaning. Traditional views of communication are invariably speaker-centred and based on coding and decoding processes. This paper contains a critical review of these issues which are then related to foreign/second language teaching. Competent non-native speakers of a language should be able to both produce and interpret language correctly. We believe that social and cognitive pragmatic theories (Linguistic Politeness Theory and Relevance Theory) can be successfully applied to second language production and comprehension. Taking as our starting point Cauldwell’s (1998) caution to the effect that we need knowledge of what happens in real communication before thinking of methodologies to teach foreign languages, this paper reviews the three communicative processes of understanding, production and negotiation, and next addresses the main implications for the establishment of a theory-driven teaching methodology.
Highlights
In our opinion, there is a general need to gain insights into what a listener does in linguistic interaction and to provide a comprehensive account of listenership
This paper explores these aspects of communication and relates them to foreign/second language teaching (FL/SL)
We have provided a cultural and sociocognitive account of the communicative processes in which listeners engage –i.e. verbal understanding, production and the negotiation of meaning –and have discussed ways in which cognitive and social pragmatics interact
Summary
There is a general need to gain insights into what a listener does in linguistic interaction and to provide a comprehensive account of listenership. Our starting point is that listeners primarily interpret the language produced by the speaker, and have a central role in the production and negotiation of meaning. Mainstream pragmatics, with the exception of Relevance Theory (RT ), is speaker centred; and (ii) these traditional approaches are based on the assumption that communication proceeds –to a lesser or greater degree– on the basis of coding and decoding information This paper explores these aspects of communication and relates them to foreign/second language teaching (FL/SL). An individual will be competent from a communicative point of view if s/he can produce and interpret the language correctly, i.e. close to native like standards In this respect we agree with Foster-Cohen (2000: 77) in that RT can be “..usefully expoited to understand second language comprehension and, perhaps, to understand second language acquisition”. This paper first reviews the processes of listening comprehension, production and negotiation of meaning from a theoretical standpoint and addresses the main implications for the establishment of a teaching methodology
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