Spoken Discourse One

“…it remains true that many of the tools we have available – the course books and so on – are based upon grammatical and other descriptions that were devised by people whose primary interest was in the written language.”

Oh good lord yes. In all my years involved with ELT in Japan I have never seen a genuine Spoken English textbook. They’re always just been grammar textbooks with a bit of talking: Reading Out Loud textbooks, basically. Endless substitution drills that do little to improve students’ spoken language skills but just continue to promote the rigid slot-and-filler view of language inherent in the grammar translation method.

It’s why I was actually quite happy by the reorganization of the senior high school curriculum this year, despite the fact that it’s notionally done away with Oral Communication as a separate strand and incorporated it into ‘English Communication’ (the other strand being English Composition). In practice what that means is that there’s no longer a standalone OC textbook, which I used to have to make something of a show of using. The ‘speaking’ activities in this year’s Communication textbook are so fucking risible that neither I nor my colleagues feel the need to even pay lip-service to using them, so I now have almost complete freedom to design the curriculum as I like. ‘Course, if it all goes wrong then I’ve got nothing left to blame, but that’s a good kind of pressure, no?

I digress..

As for the rest, well… Form follows function, which is as it should be and a notion to which I suspect I’ll return, and ‘suprasentential’ is a lovely word to roll around the mouth –

“The October sunlight glanced through the trees bathing the forest in an ethereal, suprasentential glow.”

“I’m afraid we’ll have to operate immediately, Mr Johnson, your suprasentential artery is blocked and could cause a stroke.”

“Well it was our first anniversary y’know? So I want to Anne Summers and got a couple of things. Make it a bit memorable. You should have seen the look on his face, suprasentential it was.”

              “Ohhh, you filthy cow!”

The first activity also triggers a thought I had while reading the example texts in WD2, which is that perhaps there is a useful distinction to be made between immediate and delayed discourse. Until the recent past these broadly correlated with spoken and written discourse respectively, but with the increased rise of rapid written communication (texts, emails, chatrooms etc…) written language use is coming more and more to resemble spoken language use. The txt speak in the WD2 example 3 is basically a more time-efficient form of transcription, not so different from shorthand.

I’m going to plop this here for future reference –