Communicative Competencereoriented: Multimodality and embodiment

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Communicative Competence reoriented
Multimodality and embodiment

• David Block
• Institute of Education
• University of London

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Paper outline

• Introduction
• Communicative competence A short and partial
  personal journey with a construct
• Going back to Hymes
• Goffman and Bourdieu in the background
• Language learning, identity and multimodality
• Multimodality and the analysis of participation
  patterns
• Back to communicative competence with a
  multimodal lens
• Back to communicative competence in (EFL)
  language teaching
•  

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Canale and Swain (1980)

• Grammatical competence knowledge of morphology,
  syntax, phonology and lexis
• Sociolinguistic competence knowledge required
  to produce language appropriate to contexts and
  interlocutors
• Discourse competence- knowledge required to
  produce coherent supra-sentencial units
• Strategic competence knowledge of how to get
  through communication breakdowns and/or make
  communication more effective.

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Hymess (1974) programme for sociolinguistics

• Sociolinguists need to study language not only as
  a linguistic phenomenon, but also as a social
  one, examining social problems and language use
  in addition to the formal features of language.
• Sociolinguistic research should be socially
  realistic.
• Sociolinguistic research should be socially
  constituted.

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Communicative events (Hymes, 1974 10)

• 1) the various kinds of participants in
  communicative events senders and receivers,
  addressors and addressees, interpreters and
  spokesmen and the like
• 2) the various available channels , and their
  modes of use, speaking, writing, printing,
  drumming, blowing, whistling, singing, face and
  body motion as visually perceived, smelling,
  tasting, and tactile sensation
• 3) the various codes shared by various
  participants, linguistic, paralinguistic,
  kinesic, musical, interpretive, interactional,
  and other

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• 4) the settings (including other communication)
  in which communication is permitted, enjoined,
  encouraged, abridged
• 5) the forms of messages , and their genres,
  ranging verbally from single-morpheme sentences
  top the patterns and diacritics of sonnets,
  sermons, salesmens pitches, and any other
  organized routines and styles
• 6) the attitudes and contents that a message may
  convey and be about
• 7) the events themselves, their kinds and
  characters as wholes

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Early multimodality

• the various available channels , and their modes
  of use, speaking, writing, printing, drumming,
  blowing, whistling, singing, face and body motion
  as visually perceived, smelling, tasting, and
  tactile sensation (Hymes, 1974 10)
• ... the use of several semiotic modes in the
  design of a semiotic product or event, together
  with the particular way in which these modes are
  combined. (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001 20).

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On face-to-face communication

• Everyone knows that when individuals in the
  presence of others respond to events their
  glances, looks, and postural shifts carry all
  kinds of implication and meaning. When in these
  settings words are spoken, then tone of voice,
  manner of uptake, restarts, and the variously
  positioned pauses similarly qualify. As does
  manner of listening. Every adult is wonderfully
  accomplished in producing all of these effects,
  and wonderfully perceptive in catching their
  significance when performed by accessible others.
  (Goffman, 1981 1-2)

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On traditional approaches to observed speech

• the terms speaker and hearer imply that
  sound alone is at issue, when, in fact, it is
  obvious that sight is organizationally very
  significant too, sometimes even touch. In the
  management of turn-taking, in the assessment of
  reception through visual back-channel cues, in
  paralinguistic function of gesticulation, in the
  synchrony of gaze shift, in provision of evidence
  of attention (as in middle-distance look), in the
  assessment of engrossment through evidence of
  side-involvements and facial expression in all
  of these ways it is apparent that sight is
  crucial, both for the speaker, and for the
  hearer. For the effective conduct of talk,
  speaker and hearer had best be in a position to
  watch each other. (Goffman, 1981 129-130)

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Habitus

• systems of durable, transposable dispositions,
• structured structures predisposed to function as
  structuring structures, that is, as principles of
  the generation and structuring of practices and
  representations
• ... they can be objectively regulated and
  regular without in any way being the product of
  obedience to rules,
• ... objectively adapted to their goals without
  presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an
  express mastery of the operations necessary to
  attain them ... (Bourdieu, 1977 72)

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Body hexis

• Habitus, as predisposed dispositions, structured
  structures, is embodied body hexis, i.e. a
  political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned
  into a permanent disposition, a durable way of
  standing, speaking, walking and thereby of
  feeling and thinking (Bourdieu, 1990 69-70).

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Body hexis and childhood

• The child imitates not models but other
  peoples actions. Body hexis speaks directly to
  the motor function, in the form of a pattern of
  postures that is both individual and systematic,
  because it is linked to a whole system of
  techniques involving the body and tools, and
  charged with a host of social meanings and values

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• in all societies, children are particularly
  attentive to gestures and postures which, in
  their eyes, express everything that goes to make
  an accomplished adult- a way of walking, a tilt
  of the head, facial expressions, ways of sitting
  and of using implements, always associated with a
  tone of voice, a style of speech, and ... a
  certain subjective experience. (Bourdieu, 1977
  87)

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• Relevant to our interest in language is
  Bourdieus observation about the sense of
  acceptability which orients linguistic
  practices.
• This sense is said to be inscribed in the most
  deep-rooted of bodily dispositions (Bourdieu,
  1991 86) in that it is the whole body which
  responds by its posture ... (Bourdieu, 1991
  86).
• language is a body technique (Bourdieu,
  1991 86).

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Identity as broadly poststructuralist

• structuralism involves the search for
  universal and invariant laws of social activity
  that operate at all levels of human life
• poststructuralism involves a recognition of
  the limitations of structuralism and an emphasis
  on the emergent in localised, diverse and
  variable social activity.

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• for many social scientists today, identities
  are socially constructed, self-conscious, ongoing
  narratives that individuals perform, interpret
  and project in dress, bodily movements, actions
  and language. Identity work occurs in the company
  of others - either face-to-face or in an
  electronically mediated mode- with whom to
  varying degrees individuals share beliefs,
  motives, values, activities and practices.
  Identities are about negotiating new subject
  positions at the crossroads of the past, present
  and future. ... There are unequal power relations
  to deal with, around the different capitals-
  economic, cultural and social that both
  facilitate and constrain interactions with others
  in the different communities of practice with
  which individuals engage in their lifetimes.
  Finally, identities are related to different
  traditionally demographic categories such as
  ethnicity, race, nationality, migration, gender,
  social class and language. (Block, 2007 27)

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• A multimodal approach to identity means the study
  of a more complex repertoire of identity
  resources, which in turn allows us to identify
  and examine microscopic shifts in ongoing subject
  positioning.
• Attention to resources other than speech brings
  all kinds of new elements into the equation, such
  as when it allows researchers to focus on
  individuals involved in an interaction who do not
  happen to be speaking at a particular point in
  time.
• The result is a richer, more diverse and more
  finely grained capture of the moment-by-moment
  subject positioning that individuals engage in as
  an essential part of their ongoing social
  conduct.

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David Beckham as footballer

•  

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David Beckham as metrosexual man
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Nelly and Tim McGraw.
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(No Transcript)
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The multimodal nature of face-to-face
communication

• The interplay between the semiotic resources
  provides in language on the one hand, and tools,
  documents, and artefacts on the other constitute
  a most important future direction for the
  analysis of participation. However, their
  multi-modal framework should not be seen as
  something new but instead recognition of the rich
  contextual configurations created by the
  availability of multiple semiotic resources that
  has always characterized human interaction.
  (Goodwin and Goodwin, 2004 239)

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Back to communicative competence with a
multimodal lens

• A couple of my experiences
• Déu nhi do!
• Me cago en Déu!

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Déu nhi do!

• Déu nhi do com plou!
• A Quin fred que fa!
• B Déu nhi do!
• Catalan Porta una camisa que déu n'hi do!
• Spanish Lleva una camisa que no veas!

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Me cago en Déu!

• Me cago en dios! (S)
• Me cago en déu! (C)
• Me cago en diez! (S)
• Me cago en dena! (C)
• Me cago en la llet! (C)
• Me cago en la leche! (S)
• Me cachis ... (SC)

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Back to communicative competence in (EFL)
language teaching

• CLT has over the past three decades been obsessed
  with replicating the real world inside the
  classroom.
• In effect, tasks have taken precedent over
  embodiment and multimodality
• Taking on board embodiment and multimodality in a
  sense is to question the teaching of languages
  completely.
• Language teaching materials cosmopolitanism and
  commodification.
• What about global readiness?