Читать книгу Collins Teaching Techniques for Communicative English - Jane Revell - Страница 9

We use language to communicate. We do not just communicate facts to each other, we always convey what we feel about those facts – finding a completely neutral statement is impossible. If I say ‘It’s raining’, listeners will know whether I’m surprised (because the sun was shining only ten minutes ago), or whether I’m upset (because we were going to have a picnic), or whether I’m relieved (because the hockey match will be cancelled) and so on, and the clues they will use to deduce this will not necessarily be verbal ones.

Words are used to communicate propositions. Words can also convey attitudes, but more often than not, attitudes are conveyed by intonation, gesture, facial expression and many other non-verbal means. Meaning is conveyed not only through language, but also through bodily contact, physical proximity, orientation, bodily posture, gesture, head-nods, facial expression, eye movement and even appearance. Also important are the non-linguistic aspects of speech itself: the speed at which a person speaks, how loud or how softly they speak, the pitch and the quality of their voice (whether husky, whispered, strident, etc.), all these things contribute to the meaning of the actual words said.

La Barre’s work on gesture^[1:1] seems to prove that this is both specific to certain cultures and arbitrary (and therefore needs to be taught), rather than universal and instinctive. We may think that everybody uses a finger to point at something like we do, but the American Indians, for example, point with their lips. When a Masai spits, it is a sign of affection, not of contempt. The Basuto hiss to applaud; the Japanese to show respect to a social superior. While Westerners stand up to show their respect, Fijians and Tongans sit down. Even very widespread gestures like nodding the head to mean ‘yes’ and shaking it to mean ‘no’ are not totally universal: the Anin in Japan, the Semang in Malaya and the Ethiopians all use different gestures to indicate ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

There are also wide cultural differences when it comes to bodily contact and physical proximity. While Latin peoples tend to stand very close to the person they’re talking to and often touch each other in the course of a conversation, Northern Europeans often prefer to keep a greater distance between speakers and touch each other less (although this does seem to be changing with more and more cross-cultural communication).

To prevent misunderstandings arising, students need to be able to communicate not only propositions, but also the attitude that is appropriate to what they are saying. It is not being advocated that learners become proficient in non-verbal communication at the expense of their linguistic skills, even though it’s quite possible to make yourself understood on certain matters simply by grunting and waving your arms about! Verbal and non-verbal aspects of communication should interrelate in a teaching programme, and some of the activities suggeted later have been designed with this in mind.