Concept Of Reciprocity In Discourse - Assignment Example

?CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 2. CONCEPT OF RECIPRO IN DIS 3. NON-RECIPRO 4. TEACHING CONVERSATIONAL SKILLS 5. METHODS 6. CONCLUSION RECIPROCITY 1. INTRODUCTION Before examining the concept of reciprocity as it applies to a speech situation let us look at the origin and meaning of the word ‘reciprocity’. It is derived from the Latin word ‘ reciprocus’, which means ‘alternating’. It contains the prefixes ‘re—‘ ( back ) and ‘pro---‘ ( forward ). These morphemes imply some kind of a back and forth movement. ‘Reciprocity’ is also related to feedback, interaction and causality. In a speech situation when a speaker puts across his message, the hearer listens to it and signals that he has heard it. This is the feedback. This takes place constantly between the speaker and the listener, and there is interaction among them. The response of a speaker depends upon what he hears. The speech is a cause and the response is the effect. Hence, there is causality involved in reciprocity. 2. CONCEPT OF RECIPROCITY IN DISCOURSE A speech situation involves a speaker and a listener. “Reciprocity condition of speech refers to the relation between the speaker and the listener in the process of speech.” ( Bygate, 1987 ) Speech is a reciprocal activity. At this point, it is necessary to differentiate between speech and writing. The way language is organized in speech is different from the way it is organized in writing. In order to speak fluently, a speaker must have grammatical competency which includes knowledge of vocabulary, pronunciation, sentence structure and meaning. But speaking does not mean merely putting together words in a grammatical structure. The capacity to use language appropriately is called communicative competence. It is the knowledge that underlines the use of grammatical competence in communicative situations. Speech situation consists of various factors like topic, purpose, social relations, environment etc. These differ from culture to culture and community to community. In short, “speaking is not a discrete skill. It overlaps a number of other areas. Structure of conversation is culturally determined.” ( Hughes, R., 2002 ) Now let us look closely at what happens when two people speak. The speaker has a message which he encodes and transmits to the listener through speech. The listener listens to the speech and decodes the message. The listener then responds in the same way, by transmitting a message. Hence, the speaker becomes the listener and vice versa. An individual takes turns at being a speaker and a listener alternately. This is called ‘turn taking’. In a speech event, the participants are face-to-face and the turn-taking is a continuous process. Hence, we see that casual conversations are also organized by rules. People take turns at speaking and listening, they answer questions, mark the beginning and end of a conversation, make mistakes and correct themselves. All this needs some kind of direction and control on the part of the speakers. People do not say – I have finished now. You can answer my question. Conversations are organized covertly and the organizational principles provide a discreet interactional framework. It is within this framework that reciprocity takes place. “Reciprocity develops during the ongoing negotiation of meaning between speaker and listener, thus producing a joint construction of communication.” ( Byrne D., 1987 ) Reciprocity involves the use of turn-taking skills, strategies to interrupt and to control the topic, which are necessary to maintain meaningful interaction. During conversations, individuals follow norms like politeness principles and co-operative principles. They also reciprocate each others’ verbal and non-verbal behavior. In a social intercourse, people are obligated to help and not to harm those who help them. Social activity is also reciprocal and ubiquitous. The ability to appropriately reciprocate or compensate a partner’s communicative response is an essential element of communicative competence. Both speaker and listener are actively involved in a conversation and they adapt to each others’ messages. These patterns of adaptation are related to specific linguistic and pragmatic abilities. Human conversation is an exercise in pure co-operation in which conversational partners work together toward a common goal, the efficient exchange of information. The above discussion points out that oral communication have certain typical characteristics. A vast bulk of spoken material is spontaneous, face-to-face, transient, unplanned, dynamic and context dependent. Bygate ( 1987 ) focuses on two aspects of speech – 1.Processing conditions 2. Production. Unlike writing, speakers have to face processing conditions under certain constraints. One constraint is the time pressure. Compared to writers, speakers have less time to plan, organize and execute a message. A characteristic feature of communicative activity is that it involves the production of a message in real time. Bygate considers the special features of speaking to result from two sets of condition under which people speak – processing and reciprocity. In terms of processing, speaking requires simultaneous actions. The words are being spoken as they are being decoded and as they are being understood. Handling the demands of spontaneous production under what Bygate calls processing conditions, accounts for performance features of speech such as pauses, hesitations, repetitions, use of formulaic expressions, using fillers, ellipsis and simplifying structures. These not only help to relieve the processing load but also help to confirm the message. Oral production involves the construction and execution of a message under these constraints of processing and reciprocity conditions. Production activities are related to the time-bound nature of speaking. According to Bygate, in order to speak fluently an individual must have knowledge as well as skills. Knowledge refers to the grammatical rules, the meaning of words etc. Skill refers to the ability of using knowledge in actual speech situations. In production activity, the knowledge required is the speaker’s knowledge of grammar and pronunciation rules. Related skills are facilitation and compensation Speakers can facilitate a speech production by simplifying structures. Due to time constraint, they do not construct long and complex structures. They usually revert to parataxis that is, tacking new sentences to previous ones. Eg. Look there --- er – can you see--- er --- a boy – sitting on a bench? – er with a packet of pop corn? --- reading a book? Speakers also try to make their speech economical by ellipsis that is, omitting words and taking shortcuts. This is possible only when the listener knows the background of the situation and what the speaker is referring to. Eg. Mother – Oh, the door ---! Daughter – Yes, I shut it. Mother – And the ---- Daughter – Yes, it has come in. (they are referring to the dog) This is possible because the mother and daughter use ‘shared knowledge’ which enables them to understand what others perhaps may find meaningless. “Shared knowledge is important for everyday communicative exchanges.” ( Marianne Celce Murcia, Olshtain Elite, 2000 ) There are some stock phrases or conventional colloquial or idiomatic expressions which are helpful in maintaining the fluency of a conversation. They are ‘ready to use’ in several common situations like telegraph messages or short message templates. The speaker finds them handy and convenient because they are grammatically well constructed. Such expressions are easy to memorize and use. Eg. What difference does it make anyway? It is always like that. When faced with an unusual message, a speaker sometimes really needs time to think about the content of what he is going to say in a given situation, the kind of tone and words especially when their impact really matters and when he is committed to what he is going to say. But the conversation must continue uninterrupted. So he uses ‘fillers’ or ‘hesitation devices’ or repetitions. Eg. Bob – Are you subscribing for the magazine? You can give me the cheque now. Walter – The magazine --- well --- I mean --- let’s see--- I will tell you tomorrow. Besides facilitation, there are compensation techniques. Making mistakes is common in speech. The speaker sometimes forgets what he has said and repeats himself or corrects himself. In speech, corrections are tolerated and necessary. Eg. Assistant – Yes sir, I have already dispatched thousand, ---- let me see, one thousand --- no – two thousand boxes. ( correction ) Yes sir, I have dispatched two thousand boxes yesterday. ( repetition ) Thus, we can conclude that a smooth flow of conversation, sometimes idle, sometimes informative, argumentative or negotiating is possible due to the flexibility in speech and responses of the participants. Reciprocity is an advantage which compensates for the irregularities and messiness in speech. 3. NON RECIPROCITY This kind of reciprocity is not possible in written mode on account of its nature. The writer does not know who is reading what is written. There is no immediate feedback. The writer has no way of knowing whether his message has reached across to the readers. Sometimes, there may be no readers at all. Non-reciprocity is also observed in mass media. The newsreaders on TV constantly deliver information and news from their end. They have no way of knowing how the listeners are affected by it. It is not a two-way interaction and there is no alternation of roles between the creator and receiver of the message. Oral speech would be difficult to interpret and a meaningless waste of energy if there would be no reciprocity in discourse. The success of any speech event depends so much on reciprocity. 4. TEACHING CONVERSATIONAL SKILLS When we talk about teaching conversation to second language learners, let us take into consideration the characteristic features of speech like fillers, pauses, hesitation devices, repetition etc. When all these are permissible while using one’s own mother tongue, why should second language learners be expected to produce grammatically correct and complete, complex structures? This would be unfair. Rather too much is expected from second language learners than from native speakers. Traditional language teaching materials took the written medium to be dominant. But more recent materials are more sensitive to the skill itself and to the spoken medium. Recently, some materials have been developed that aim to provide learners with writing, speaking and listening in a natural and realistic way. Over the last two decades, language teaching practices have started emphasizing the need to make formal language learning as natural as possible by using authentic materials in the classroom. “Language resources and discourse processing are presented in an interactive and integrated manner that encourages both principled use of authentic discourse samples and simulation of natural language processing” ( Marianne Celce Murcia, Olshtain Elite, 2000 ) Learners have to learn when it is appropriate to perform a particular language function and how to encode it. They frequently experience problems with both. It is agreed that instruction can be useful for teaching language skills like listening and speaking in the classroom. Classroom situation provides an opportunity to control and manipulate specifically designed and delivered a special input package to the learners. The question is what should be this input and how it should be organized and delivered. As a living language is acquired by a second language learner, a large number of other things besides grammatical knowledge need to be adjusted for successful communication to take place. These are matters to do with culture, social interaction and politeness norms which exist in the target language. It is necessary to understand that a classroom situation is necessarily different from a natural, real life situation. 5. METHODS Following are some methods and procedures used for developing communicative competence of learners and enabling them to reciprocate during conversations and speak fluently: LISTENING SKILL a. Different listening texts are prepared and students listen to them in groups or pairs. After listening to their own separate parts of the texts, they exchange information through questions and answers. b. The same topic is described to different students in different ways, and they discuss and arrive at a conclusion. For example, a road accident is described from the point of view of the driver, the victim, and an eye-witness. c. A single message is divided into parts. Each student listens to one part and later the students discuss and reconstruct the whole message. d. The teacher gives oral instructions and the students follow them. e. Students listen to a problem and solve it. f. Students listen to a partial text and try to guess the situation, the participants and the relation between the speakers. g. The message is accompanied by other non-linguistic sounds like coughs, sneezes, claps, horns etc, which interfere constantly with listening. The students explain the message clearly after listening to it. h. The message is constructed by using few cryptic sentences, accompanied by sounds and gestures or non-verbal cues. The students interpret the message after listening and viewing it. SPEAKING SKILL a. Role Play – Students are assigned characters which they assume and converse with each other. For eg. A king, a beggar, a priest etc. “In classroom environments, teachers and students may be seen as members of socio-linguistic contexts in which spoken language has social and pedagogical functions.” ( Douglas Altimoro Consolo, 2000 ) b. Simulation – It is similar to role play but it is more controlled. Students are given a situation in addition to a role. c. Mime – The teacher performs mimes and the students describe them. d. Sentence completion – The teacher utters an incomplete sentence and the students have to complete it. e. Sequencing – The teacher reads out sentences in a jumbled order which the students arrange correctly. f. Prediction – The teacher begins an utterance and the students predict what is going to follow. All the above activities can be carried out in a classroom situation. Tape recorders, video CDs and films can be used for presenting model situations, in which characters use formulaic expressions and other devices commonly used for reciprocation. The students can learn them by heart and understand when they can be used. Hence, for functional purposes, materials can be produced for common situations like interviews, introductions etc. Electronic media can be very useful in second language teaching. “Video is an extremely dense medium, one which incorporates a wide variety of visual elements and a great range of audio experiences in addition to spoken language.” (Jack C Richards, Willy Renandya, 2008). Classroom interaction can be of various types. According to Tickoo “The teacher interacts with the whole class, --- pupils interact with each other, --- or pupils work with materials or aids.” ( Tickoo, M L, 2007 ) 6. CONCLUSION The objectives in the speaking classroom may change radically in the future, as insights emerging from corpora of natural speech and language processing combine to help us understand what speech is actually like. One thing is certain. Use of authentic texts consisting of natural language situations and opportunity for all types of interaction in the classroom can go a long way in developing the communicative skills of second language learners. “Susan M. Gass has always made clear that the purpose of interaction is the promotion of learning, and that empirical SLA research should be relatable to classroom practices.” ( Alison Mackey, Charlene Polio, 2009 ). But all materials are to be taken as a compromise. Even text-books can be biased. “Research to date has not revealed a language learning technique that absolutely guarantees successful acquisition” (Smith, Sharwood, 1994) Real life situations are most unpredictable and maintaining fluency and reciprocity proves to be a challenge to learners. REFERENCES Akmajian, Adrian and Demers, A Richards and Farmer, K Ann and Harnish, Robert M.. (2008). Pragmatics - The study of Language use and communication. In: Asoke K Ghosh Linguistics - An introduction to Language and Communication. 5th ed. New Delhi: Prentice Hall of India Private Ltd.. p361-403. Bygate,M.(1987)Speaking.Oxford:OUP. Retrieved from books.google.co.in. Available from http://www.google.co.in/search?tbm=bks&tbo=1&q=bygate+m&btnG=Search+Books Byrne,D.(1987).TeachingOralEnglish.London:Longman. Retrievedfromgoogle.co.in.Availablefromhttp://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&tbo=1&tbm=bks&q=Byrne+D.-teaching+oral+english&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq= Celce Murcia Marianne. (2000). 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