The Language Teacher and the Rules of Speaking

Knowledge of a second language should include more than just grammatical competence. Communication can only be effective when student is also sensitive to social and cultural aspects of language use and how these differ between his first and second language. Expectations and interpretations are likely to differ on role of silence, speaking volume and intonation, situations requiring set formulas, conventions of politeness, and how information is organized and shared. This knowledge, which is seldom explicitly verbalized, constitutes of It is important for language teacher to become aware of these cultural differences in language use, to recognize which points are likely to prove difficult for a particular student, and to guide student accordingly. The ways people use language to communicate can differ radically from society to society. A knowledge of some of these cultural differences in use of language will enable language teacher to help his students avoid many potential misunderstandings. The student is quite conscious of certain kinds of problems in learning a second language: new sounds, new vocabulary, and new grammatical patterns. But even if student can pronounce his second language correctly and put words together in proper order, he still has to use language like a native. He must know when to talk and when to keep silent, how loud to talk and with what intonation, what constitutes a polite request and what a refusal, how to initiate a conversation and how to end one, when to interpret an utterance literally and when to take it as a formulaic convention, and so on. Knowledge of this sort constitutes what sociolinguist calls the rules of Our knowledge of rules of speaking is only partly conscious even in our native language. We learned some of these rules explicitly as children when our parents told us to say please when we ask for something or not to interrupt when adults are speaking. But most of rules of speaking