2.4.1.2. Interaction with context

Any use of language is not static. You do not decide on an appropriate piece of language, say it, and then walk away, except in especially dramatic situations. In conversation with another person you constantly have to interpret what is being said as the conversation continues. The listener in a conversation uses what has been said to help him understand the message that is being conveyed. Based on what has gone before in the conversation, he will also predict what is coming next. Thus the listener is preparing himself to understand the message. Although, of course, his prediction may be wrong.

What a good listener is able to do, then, is to process what he hears on the basis of the context it occurs in. And this does not just mean the context variables that govern appropriacy. It also involves the verbal and informational context that is created by sentences before and after the language the listener is processing. In other words, you will probably not understand an isolated sentence from a lecture unless you relate it to what the speaker has already said.

The listener in a conversation is in a similar position to a reader of a written text, for the latter, too, processes what he reads on the basis of what comes before and after it. Both the reader and listener, then, are constantly interacting with the language they see or hear, analysing the context in which it occurs.

2.4.1.3. Structuring discourse

We have described how competent language users need to know how to use the grammar and vocabulary of the language appropriately. The way a recipient interacts with context while receiving information has become part of our knowledge too. But there is another kind of knowledge that concerns an incipient, the person who transmits information. That is the skill of structuring discourse. We may know how to say things in the language, but we may be unable to string them together, helpless to organise the points we wish to make, or doubt what to say first.

In writing, for example, we tend to organise paragraphs in predictable order such as starting with a topic sentence, continuing with example sentences and going on, sometimes, with contrary points of view before reaching a conclusion. In speech we use intonation and the restatement of points together with a range of speech phenomena to structure what we say.

All the ‘knowledges’ we have talked so far concern the knowing of or about certain things: grammar, vocabulary, appropriacy, discourse structure, etc. We have been able to describe this knowledge as competence or communicative competence. But perhaps there is also another type of competence – the knowledge of how to use the language, the knowledge of how to access and use all those other knowledges. Together with (communicative) competence, we may also have a strategic competence, which is not knowledge about anything, but rather knowledge of how to evaluate what is said to us and of how to plan and execute what we want to say back. It is the knowledge of what to do with the language competence that we have, and it is this dynamic processing mechanism, which puts all the other knowledges we have to real use.