2. Context
o Extremely meaningul provides information without which
language communication makes little sense.
o Though it is an important concept, its meaning is not clear.
o Halliday and Hassan:
“the joining of realities that make up a context”
Four realities * Linguistic
* Extralinguistic
* Situational
* Extrasituational
4. Linguistic Context
Immediate linguistic environment: grammatical and lexical level within a sentence o
between sentences.
Sentence level: the environment helps to identify the meaning of words.
Eg. I’m gonna hit him with a club
Eg. I’m going to the club.
Intersentential level: relations of semantic meaning between sentences in a text
(Cohesion).
Eg: A: what´s the weather like? A: what´s the weather like?
B: It’s quite warm. B: The dog is outside.
cohesive Not cohesive
A: What happened to the crops?
B: The crops were destroyed by the rain.
A: When were the crops destroyed by the rain? A: When?
B: The crops were destroyed by the rain last week B: Last week.
Not cohesive cohesive
5. Extralinguistic context
Suprasegmental features such as stress, intonation, pitch and key by means
of which participants asses other’s intentions.
1. Who did you give the tickets to?
1a. I gave the tickets to him.
2. What did you give him?
2a. I gave the tickets to him.
6. Situational context
The illocutionary force of the text: WHO, TO WHOM, WHERE, WHEN, HOW.
Dell Hymes: SPEAKING model
S etting
P articipants
E nds
A ct sequence
K ey COHERENCE
I nstrumentalities
N orms
G enre
7. Extrasituational context
Social, cultural, political, and ideological contexts shape meaning.
wider frames of interpretation that vary from culture to culture.
E.g.: “Hello, Margie. How are you? Oh, I see you´ve put on
weight”
A remark with good intentions uttered by a Zambian to an American
friend in a cross-cultural encounter.
It is considered inappropriate since it sounds rude where American
cultural values and expectations operate.
Results in miscommunication and a clash of conventional patterns.
8. Role play
1. The idea is to design a series of communicative scenarios in which learners are
encouraged to roleplay to use and, in using, expand their developing linguistic repertoire.
2. As the group discussion proceeds, move from group to group, monitoring any
communicative or linguistic difficulty the participants may encounter.
3. At the end of the group discussion, ask the designated members (one from each group)
to role-play their parts for the class.
4. After the performance, lead a class discussion on how well the decisions were made,
how well they were articulated, and how the decision-making process and the
presentation could be improved.
5. At this point, you might wish to offer your comments, both positive and negative.
6. Reflection
9. Timeline
Their personal life history
1. Ask them about their life so far and about their future
2. Give them time charts and Ask them to use one copy to take notes about their past,
present, and future, focusing on major areas like school, sports, travel, job, family, etc
3. Form pairs. Have each student find out information about his/her partner and take notes
4. Ask every student to talk about their partner using the notes they took. Encourage them
to talk rather than read.
5. Ask the students to say what surprised or interested them about their classmates.
6. comment on what you heard about your students.
7. Next, you might wish to focus explicitly on the students’ use of time and tenses, and on
any communicative or linguistic difficulties you may have noted during their
conversations.
10. Cloze Procedures
1. First decide which of the discourse grammar items will be your focus and Select a passage
suitable to the proficiency and interest level of your students.
2. delete all the pronouns in that passage and replace them with blanks of equal length. You
may also number the blanks for easy reference.
3. Write clear directions telling your students what you expect them to do.
4. Peer review and feedback
5. Help your learners derive the rule(s) by themselves, wherever appropriate.
6. To make sure they have satisfactorily learned the use of pronouns, you may select another
passage, follow the same deletion procedure, and test what they have learned.
7. Reflection
11. News stories
1. introduce to them contextualized input that connects form and function with
communicative needs and sociocultural contexts. (Newspapers or the Internet)
2. Select a short news story appropriate to the linguistic and communicative level of
learners interesting enough to capture their attention.
3. think about how you can help your learners relate to the text and the context
4. How can you set the stage for your task?
5. How can you help your learners make the connection between different parts of the text
6. Finally, the feedback you get from class performance indicates any need for revising the
content as well as the implementation of your MicroStrategy.
12. Microstrategies for contextualizing
• Role play
• Timeline
• Cloze Procedures
• News stories
In closing…
Successful language communication is a matter of realities coming
together that make up linguistic, extralinguistic, situational and
extrasituational contexts. All of them contribute to the process of
meaning-making.
Then…
Teaching language necessarily demands contextualization of linguistic
input.
