What exactly do you mean?

What exactly do you mean? By Mark Wilson

So one day I walked into my classroom and said to my little Year

Sevens “You know, the subject we call ‘English’ is really about

Communication through Language. And what do I mean by that?”

Remember, I’m talking to eleven year olds here, so don’t expect any

jargon.

Communication is expressing your thoughts and feelings to somebody,

including yourself, and getting through to them.

If you don’t get through to them, then you have not communicated.

However, it’s good that you tried.

Someone might hear, or read your particular combination of words,

but if they don’t understand what you mean, then you haven’t

communicated. Still, they might, by thinking about your words,

communicate something to themselves. That is just fine, as long as they

don’t then blame you for what they think you said….apparently this

happens with religious texts all the time. Therefore, studying any text is

certainly about trying to understand what someone else has to say, and

analysing how they’ve gone about it.

Copyright 2009 Mark Wilson You Are An English Teacher!

How many ways can we communicate?

Typically:

Facial expressions

Music

Speech

Writing

Telepathy

Body Language

Painting

Sculpture

Dancing

Telepathy is what we’re really after with communication. Getting

something directly from your mind into someone else’s mind, and vice

versa.

What’s the difference between Telepathy and all the others?

All the others involve the use of a Medium, to achieve the desired

communication. Language is a medium.

And there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip.

Language: My definition of language is simply the words we use be they in

English, French, Spanish, Punjabi, or Japanese – words, vocabulary, lexis.

So, in ‘communication through language’, we want to get what’s in your

head into my head, through the use of words, spoken or written. And

don’t forget: Question everything! “Your mind is your temple, keep it

beautiful and free, don’t let an egg get laid in it by something you can’t see.”

Bob Dylan.

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But, what is actually involved in ‘Communication through Language’?

For me, it breaks down into three main parts, as follows:

Intention & Expression – Intelligibility & Recognition – Understanding

& Response (where it all starts again at Intention).

Your intention and mode of expression: what you want to say and how you

want to express it, are your own personal choices.

Similarly, the understanding of your intention and the response to what

you have tried to communicate are, ultimately, personal choices for

whoever you are trying to communicate with. People can also, and

regularly do, choose not to make an effort to understand. That’s life.

By personal I mean ‘yours’: How you will choose to express yourself, and

how well you will try to allow someone else to communicate with you, and

how you respond.

But Intelligibility on the part of the communicator, and Recognition on the

part of the communicatee, both depend upon the use of Conventions: that

is, “an agreed way of doing things”. And the conventions of English are

incredibly sturdy and simple, as we shall soon see, but they have been

alternately weakened, and complicated, down the centuries by various

people. Indeed, it has taken me a whole chapter The (Place) of Grammar to

discuss conventions properly, and to rescue them from the grip of various

phoney grammatical rules. Phoney grammatical rules are simply a specific

version of accurate English which someone would prefer you to use, rather

than your own perfectly good version of accurate English. The phoney

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grammatical rules have been responsible for the petty but pernicious

squabbling of the grammar wars over the years and school children have

been caught in the middle, like in a custody battle.

A good example of phony grammatical rules right here would be the

issue of the, now largely forgotten, “Parts of Speech”, which were thrown

out years ago by the curriculum makers in power at the time: subject,

predicate, object and so on, which were offered to us by the previous

incumbents for the parsing of written down sentences. And those ‘parts of

speech’ did need throwing out, because they were not parts of speech at all,

they were much more to do with some pretty sterile analysis of writing.

But, disagreeing with someone’s definition of the ‘parts of speech’ is no

reason for doing away with the entire concept of ‘parts of speech’. After

all, many people throw out the entire concept of a God, just because they

don’t like to think about the old man with a long white beard which their

minds were bathed in as a child, and so on.

But this throwing out of the baby with the bathwater, apart from being

a very careless thing to do, is more about problems with politics and

authority, than with the calm study of theological beliefs, evolution, or

communication through language.

But that’s sociology.

In preparing to teach children, after throwing out the dirty bathwater,

I noticed sitting there the actual parts of speech, which are as follows:

Intention, Vocabulary, Syntax, Phrasing, Pronunciation, Intonation, and

Context; have always been with us, and are far too obvious and integral to

our existence to have been anyone’s invention, or to be replaced, or

discarded.

More about this in chapter five, and in chapter seven I will discuss how

these actual parts of speech have been applied to writing for centuries.

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For the present, we need to know what the main agreements (conventions)

are. We generally agree on the following:

Words/Vocabulary/Lexis

Pronunciation, to a degree

The Alphabet and Punctuation

Letter shapes, within limits

Spelling

To this list of true basics I will now add The Parts of Speech, as outlined

above. The rest: having something to say, and how you say it (Speaking

and Writing) or being interested in what someone else has to say and how

they have said it (Reading and Listening) have more to do with personal

desire, involvement, and personal style, than anything else.

To recap:

Intention: What you want to say.

Expression: Getting your idea out into the world in some form or another.

Intelligibility: Ways of using the conventions of a language which are

recognizable to the person, or people, you want to communicate with.

Recognition is where the other person starts to kick in. They at least have

to recognize the words you are using, although some meaning can certainly

be communicated by tone and context (and to the very young, perhaps

most, or even all meaning, is communicated by tone and context at first);

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Generally, the participants in communication through language have to at

least be speaking the same language. It’s no use me saying to a pupil:

“Donnez moi votre cahier, s’il vous plais,” and getting angry if they don’t

hand me their exercise book. But, if I say, “Please give me your exercise

book,” I can expect to receive it – or an explanation. There is

responsibility for intelligibility on both sides, and that’s what children

readily understand when it is explained to them (see chapter two).

Understanding: this is the trickiest element [and at this point I would like

to welcome all of our deconstructionist friends aboard]. If the person you

are trying to communicate with doesn’t get your meaning, but gets a

meaning, then they are communicating with themselves, even if they are

sitting right in front of you nodding and smiling and making all of the right

noises (a rather disconcerting, but all too relevant thought). What is going

on in their head still is understanding. And all of this is perfectly fine, as

long as they don’t then think that what they understand is necessarily what

you meant, and start getting stroppy, or making wedding plans.

When reading a text, or indeed when hearing words, those words are

very likely to illuminate associations within our own minds depending

upon who we are and what our life experience is, as distinct from the

intentions of their present author. Depending on how much time we are

prepared to spend, and on how much critical analysis of our own responses

to other people’s words (spoken or written) we are prepared, or

encouraged, to do; and depending on where our frame of reference

happens to be at the time; we are quite likely to imagine that we know all

about an author’s, or a speaker’s, intentions the minute we read or hear

their words.

We all start out as deconstructionists, and, with regard to texts, no

writer I’ve ever heard of would deny the reader the right to their own

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personal interpretations whether or not those interpretations agree with

the writer’s original intention. But, on a less ego-centric level, our own

interpretations of texts, priceless in themselves, might also be seen as stages

in a journey towards understanding the intentions of, and thereby really

communicating with, the original author, should we deem that a

worthwhile pursuit.

Communicative results are often much easier to gauge with the spoken

word than with the written, that is, until things become heated, and I

realize that you are simply twisting my words to suit yourself (you

bastard!).

Response: Once someone understands a meaning, they will think or feel

something, and that is their response - which they might then want to

express. This response then becomes their Intention. They will be

responding to their understanding of what you’ve expressed, which may

well coincide with your intention; when this happens, it’s very effective

when the other person is right there with you, and it might be just as

effective if they are twenty four hundred years away in a book, like

Sophocles.

When all of the above come together, it can lead to all night sessions; text

and fax relationships; bitter arguments; pen friends; marriage; diaries;

and the art of conversation. I was tempted to throw in the honest

settlement of the “Middle East Crisis” - but hey.

When I started teaching, the ideas outlined above began to develop and

inform my teaching methods. For a short while, I even attempted to

present these ideas as baldly as this to children, as a theory. But gradually

I was able to allow these ideas to emerge as and when appropriate;

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depending on what area of communication through language we were

studying at the time.

Setting them out like this, twenty years later, these ideas still seem

simple and quite obvious; however, I don’t think I invented these ideas,

but, if I was to develop a coherent syllabus for my teaching, I was left to

discover them and to articulate them for myself. I now realize that these

ideas are natural and direct developments of the true basics. For example:

Often, pupils will tell you that they have no idea what a text is about. But

by resurrecting the concept of ‘conventions’ as agreed ways of doing things,

and good personal style as, simply, an accurate individual application of

conventions, it has always been reasonable to suggest to pupils that our job

is to discover simply how and why a poet has used certain conventional

words. What could Keats possibly mean by “the faery power of

unreflecting love!”? The words of a text are generally words that we know

and use ourselves all the time, with one or two exceptions which we might

need to look up in the dictionary – ‘faery’ for example - thereby naturally

expanding our vocabulary. But you could probably get the intended

meaning of ‘faery’ from the context. Studying a poem requires only that

all participants in this act of communication be well versed in the

conventions, which are few, uncomplicated, and basic. Recognizing the

words on the page should be quite easy, if the text is appropriate; I call it a

responsibility, but, as such this responsibility deserves to be fully explained

to children. Explaining this responsibility motivates pupils to use their

powers of concentration and imagination; motivates them to think, and

perhaps to engage in some research, in order to allow communication to

take place fully.

As a mnemonic for the overall concept behind everything that has gone

before in this chapter, I keep a poster on the wall which looks like this:

C O P N E V R E S N O T N I A O L N S

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Because, you can think and say whatever you want and you can

respond to what you read or hear however you like. But, if you want to

communicate with someone, or be communicated with, you need an agreed

way of doing things in order to achieve intelligibility – and that’s what the

conventions of English are: an agreed way of doing things.

And this brings us quite naturally to my definition and consideration

of the conventional skills of Reading; Writing; Speaking and Listening,

which our one minute old child will need, in order to be able deal on an

equal footing with King Lear when she meets him at age seventeen or

eighteen, and which I will now discuss in the remaining chapters.

***

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What exactly do you mean?

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