Hymes SPEAKING

It’s not easy to summarise this brief Wikipedia entry but basically, it outlines the American linguist and anthropologist Dell Hymes’ tool created in 1974 to help analysts label and identify components of interaction. In fact, he identified sixteen components which were synthesised into the helpful mnemonic S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G.

Here are a couple of videos which explain the SPEAKING model (the one on the right is in Spanish):

         

As well as coming up with helpful (and easy-to-remember) ways to analyse discourse, Hymes developed the ethnography of communication, a linguistic approach concerned with linguistic resources used in context. Hymes also coined the term “communicative competence” in response to Chomsky’s initial introduction of the term “competence” (versus “performance”). Communicative competence refers to the ability to use grammatical competence in different communicative situations (sociolinguistic perspective). For further reading about communicative competence, this is a good article.



Foreign language teaching was changed forever with the shift to communication and at last, students (and teachers) of foreign language were allowed and encouraged to speak in the language classroom, and not just memorise grammar rules and vocabulary lists.

And you thought “DELL” was just the name of a well-known computer brand!  😆

Jackie Robbins