Verbal Communication And The Interactional Use Of Language

This paper attempts to discuss the importance of teaching interactional use of language in foreign language teaching programs. Starting with an investigation of the failure that learners of foreign languages may experience in real-life communication, it explores the nature and characteristics of verbal communication and examines the rules and principles that govern communicative behavior in the light of the Speech Act theory, the Cooperative Principle (CP), the Politeness Principle (PP) and the Face-saving Theory. The paper suggests that verbal communication could be understood as speech events composed of speech acts which communicators perform to convey meanings. To achieve communicative goals, communicators have to observe the CP in the exchange of meanings, and the flouring of the CP often implies the speaker's efforts to observe the PP, that is, to avoid threatening the hearer's faces so that the social relationship between the speaker and the hearer is not harmed. This enables us to view verbal communication in terms of its twofold functions: to transmit information and to establish or maintain social relationships, with the latter being termed as the "interactional use of language". The paper then goes on to examine the "interactional use of language" in real-life communication, and particularly in language learners' communicative practice, with the observation that the interactional use of language has not yet received sufficient attention in our foreign language teaching programs, and this has been contributing to language learners' failure in using the foreign language to achieve social goals. Forthis reason, the paper proposes that to ensure success in our foreign language teaching programs, both teachers and students show Id be made aware of the importance of the interactional use of language in the first place. Based on this awareness, teachers must make efforts to integrate this use of language into an effective foreign language teaching curriculum, which will make use of the advantages of different approaches, including the traditional grammar-translation and the contemporary communicative approaches, and facilitate not only learners' mastery of the linguistic elements such as vocabulary and grammatical structures, but also their development of pragmatic competence, that is, to use the learned language to achieve social goals.