TOPIC 1. LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION: SPOKEN LANGUAGE AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE. FACTORS THAT DEFINE A COMMUNICATIVE SITUATION: SENDER, RECEIVER, FUNCTIONALITY AND CONTEXT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Legal and conceptual framework: from the communicative to the action-oriented approach
3. Language, langue and parole: Saussure's legacy
4. Spoken language and written language: distinguishing features and pedagogy in the EFL classroom
5. Factors that define a communicative situation
6. Functions of language: from Jakobson to Halliday
7. Dell Hymes's SPEAKING model and its usefulness for the English classroom
8. Didactic application in the English classroom of Primary Education
9. Saussure, Jakobson, Halliday, Hymes and the CEFR: five keys to understanding language as communication
10. Conclusion
11. Bibliography and legislative references

1. INTRODUCTION

Language exists because human beings need to do things with it: to ask, to narrate, to promise, to soothe, to persuade, to play, to learn. This is a truth that any English teacher encounters every morning in the classroom when a six-year-old student combines two words and a gesture to make themselves understood in a language they barely know. It is the starting point of the present topic and, in a sense, of the whole of English language teaching in Primary Education. If language were not communication, there would be no point in teaching it; and if communication were not a complex phenomenon, governed by rules, functions and contexts, a grammar book and a dictionary would suffice to guarantee successful learning.

The pages that follow address four major questions that a teacher of Foreign Language: English must be able to answer competently before an examination board. What do we mean by language when we assert that it is communication, and how does that idea relate to the classical distinction between language (langage), langue and parole (habla)? In what ways does spoken language differ from written language, and what didactic consequences follow from that difference in an English class? What factors are involved in any communicative situation and why do they matter for teaching a foreign language? And, finally, how does all of this translate into concrete classroom decisions at a stage when children are simultaneously discovering their mother tongue and a foreign language that many schools already use as a second vehicular language in their bilingual programmes?

The approach adopted combines three complementary perspectives. The linguistic perspective, which grounds the discussion in the classical authors without whom the communicative conception of language cannot be understood: Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Michael Halliday and Dell Hymes. The legal perspective, which frames the content within the Ley Orgánica 3/2020, de 29 de diciembre (LOMLOE), the Real Decreto 157/2022, de 1 de marzo, the Decreto 101/2023, de 9 de mayo, which establishes the organisation and curriculum of Primary Education in Andalucía, and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) together with its 2020 Companion Volume. And the didactic perspective, without which no examination topic can stand on its own: concrete examples from the EFL classroom, connections with the learning situations of the area, and credible proposals for all three cycles of Primary Education, with particular attention to the bilingual schools regulated by the Orden de 28 de junio de 2011, where English is also the vehicle for non-linguistic content.

2. LEGAL AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: FROM THE COMMUNICATIVE TO THE ACTION-ORIENTED APPROACH

The conception of language as communication is not simply one more methodological option among others: it is the horizon from which the whole of the foreign language curriculum is written today. But the label «communicative approach» has become so widely used that it has lost its edge, and a candidate should be able to draw the distinction that matters. The communicative approach, which took shape in the nineteen-seventies, replaced the mastery of structures with the ability to convey meaning in a situation. The action-oriented approach, which the curriculum now adopts explicitly, goes one step further: it regards the learner not as a student who practises but as a social agent who accomplishes tasks — some of them linguistic, most of them not — within a specific setting. The difference is not academic. Under a communicative approach, asking children to role-play a shopkeeper and a customer is already an achievement; under an action-oriented approach, the question is what the children are actually doing: preparing the price list for a real school market, deciding among themselves who says what, and needing English because a genuine audience will use it. Language becomes the means, and the task the end.

From that principle follows the architecture of the area, which is the same everywhere and which should be recited without hesitation, because it is the skeleton on which every other topic of this syllabus hangs. The exit profile of the stage sets out what a pupil should be capable of at the end of Primary Education; the key competences — among them plurilingual competence — break that profile down into eight broad capacities; the specific competences of the area translate them into what a pupil does with English, in terms of comprehension, production, interaction and mediation; the assessment criteria state how far each specific competence has been attained, and are the only referent for assessment; the basic knowledge — phonetics, lexis, morphosyntax, discourse conventions, sociocultural elements — provides the substance that makes those performances possible; and the learning situations are the device that puts all of the above to work in a context worth communicating in. Two features of the area deserve emphasis: it is defined from the outset as plurilingual —the pupil's repertoire is one and indivisible, so Spanish, English and any other language in the classroom support each other instead of competing— and it is inseparably intercultural, since learning a language without learning to interpret the culture that shapes it produces speakers who are grammatically correct and pragmatically inept.

That architecture is not a doctrinal construction: it is written law, and the candidate should be able to say where. At state level, the Ley Orgánica 3/2020, de 29 de diciembre, por la que se modifica la Ley Orgánica 2/2006, de 3 de mayo, de Educación (LOMLOE) places plurilingual competence among the principles of the system, and the Real Decreto 157/2022, de 1 de marzo, por el que se establecen la ordenación y las enseñanzas mínimas de la Educación Primaria defines the foreign language area from a communicative and action-oriented approach explicitly aligned with the CEFR. In Andalucía that common core is developed by the Decreto 101/2023, de 9 de mayo, por el que se establece la ordenación y el currículo de la etapa de Educación Primaria en la Comunidad Autónoma de Andalucía, which lists Primera Lengua Extranjera among the areas of the stage (art. 8.1.e) and adds Segunda Lengua Extranjera in the third cycle (art. 8.1.g), and by the Orden de 30 de mayo de 2023, por la que se desarrolla el currículo correspondiente a la etapa de Educación Primaria en la Comunidad Autónoma de Andalucía, se regulan determinados aspectos de la atención a la diversidad y a las diferencias individuales, se establece la ordenación de la evaluación del proceso de aprendizaje del alumnado y se determina el proceso de tránsito entre las diferentes etapas educativas, whose Anexo II contains the specific competences, the assessment criteria and the basic knowledge of the area, whose Anexo IV gathers the orientations for designing learning situations and whose Anexo I fixes the weekly timetable of twenty-five sessions. Both norms are read against the framework Act of the Andalusian system, the Ley 17/2007, de 10 de diciembre, de Educación de Andalucía.

The distinctive feature of the Andalusian setting, and the one an examination board expects a candidate for English to master, is the density of its bilingual network, regulated by the Orden de 28 de junio de 2011, por la que se regula la enseñanza bilingüe en los centros docentes de la Comunidad Autónoma de Andalucía, amended by the Orden de 18 de febrero de 2013 and the Orden de 1 de agosto de 2016. A centro bilingüe is one that teaches non-linguistic areas, subjects or modules «en, al menos, el cincuenta por ciento en una lengua extranjera» (art. 3), and a centro plurilingüe is the bilingual school that adds a third language (art. 4); in Primary Education, art. 13 requires Conocimiento del medio natural, social y cultural to be taught in the L2 in every year, and allows Educación artística and Educación física to follow where staffing permits. Teachers holding one of those posts must have an accredited level B2, C1 or C2 of the CEFR (art. 7), an accreditation channelled through the Orden de 19 de mayo de 2015, por la que se regula el procedimiento para el reconocimiento de acreditación de los niveles de competencia lingüística en lenguas extranjeras, de acuerdo con el Marco Común Europeo de Referencia para las Lenguas, para el profesorado de enseñanza bilingüe en el ámbito de la Comunidad Autónoma de Andalucía, and each bilingual state school is entitled to at least one auxiliar de conversación (art. 23). System-wide planning was set out in the Acuerdo de 24 de enero de 2017, del Consejo de Gobierno, por el que se aprueba el Plan Estratégico de Desarrollo de las Lenguas en Andalucía Horizonte 2020, whose horizon has already expired: it is therefore cited as a statement of direction, not as a programme currently in force.

Figure 1. The architecture of the area: what each level answers and how one feeds the next.

The framework is completed by two instruments of the Council of Europe that the teacher must handle with confidence, and which are not legislation but description: they say what a speaker can do at each stage, and leave to each system the decision of what to require. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), published in 2001, defines six levels of competence (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2), describes linguistic performance through can-do descriptors formulated in the affirmative — I can introduce myself, never cannot yet use the past tense — and organises teaching around communicative activities of comprehension, production and interaction. The CEFR Companion Volume with New Descriptors, in its revised edition of 2018/2020, extends and refines that framework with new dimensions, including mediation and online interaction, and reorganises the conception of skills — a matter to which we shall return in Topic 3. Alongside these, the European Language Portfolio (ELP) offers a self-assessment instrument that pupils can use from Primary Education onwards: a language biography, a dossier of their own work and a checklist of descriptors which turns assessment into something the child also does, and not only something done to the child.

Conceptually, the framework rests on a handful of terms that must be clarified from the outset. By communication we mean any process of intentional exchange of meaning between two or more participants, through a shared code, in a given context. Language (langage) designates the general and abstract human capacity to symbolise and communicate; langue refers to the concrete and conventional system (English, Spanish, Spanish Sign Language) used by each community; parole is the individual and concrete use that each person makes of that langue in a communicative act. A communicative situation is the set of factors surrounding any communicative exchange, which condition both the form and the meaning of the message. Handling this vocabulary with clarity is not an academic luxury: it is what later allows us to justify methodologies, teaching sequences and assessment criteria.

Two consequences of this framework are worth stating plainly, because they are what a board looks for. The first is that the specific competences of the area are defined as capacities to use the language for communicative purposes, with awareness of linguistic diversity and with respect for cultural diversity: the three clauses are inseparable, and a lesson that meets the first while ignoring the other two is not fulfilling the curriculum. The second is that many learning situations in the English classroom carry sensitive content — intercultural conflict, bullying, identity, family arrangements — precisely because authentic communication deals with what matters to the speakers. Handling that material responsibly, protecting the child who recognises their own story in a tale, is part of the teacher's duty of care, not an optional refinement. English language teaching is, in sum, understood today as a communicative, plurilingual and intercultural practice that respects children's rights.

3. LANGUAGE, LANGUE AND PAROLE: SAUSSURE'S LEGACY

The distinction between language (langage), langue and parole comes from the Cours de linguistique générale by Ferdinand de Saussure, published posthumously in 1916 by his disciples Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from lecture notes taken at the University of Geneva. Although it may at first appear to be a debate for specialists, this tripartition has proved decisive for everything that came afterwards in linguistics and, by extension, in language teaching methodology. Without it, neither structuralism, nor generative linguistics, nor the models of communicative competence that dominate today's Primary Education curriculum can be properly understood.

Language (langage), in the Saussurean sense, is the human, biological and psychological faculty of symbolising the world and communicating through signs. It is not exclusively verbal: it includes gesture, image and every shared sign system. Langue, on the other hand, is the concrete and social realisation of that faculty: a system of linguistic signs deposited in the minds of the speakers of a community, which constitutes the proper object of linguistics as a science. English and Spanish are langues in this technical sense. Finally, parole is the individual act through which each speaker actualises the langue: the concrete utterance produced by an eight-year-old girl when she raises her hand and says «Teacher, can I go to the toilet, please?» is parole; the grammatical and lexical system of English that underlies it is langue; the human capacity to acquire that system and produce that utterance is langage.

Saussure added to this model several dichotomies that have become canonical. The opposition between signifier (the acoustic image, the sounds we produce) and signified (the concept evoked) permanently reformulated the notion of the linguistic sign. The arbitrariness of the sign — that is, the absence of any natural link between signifier and signified — explains why the same reality is called house in English and casa in Spanish. The distinction between syntagmatic relations (in the chain, in presence) and paradigmatic relations (in the system, in absence) illuminates how linguistic units are combined and selected. And the opposition between synchronic study (the language at a given moment) and diachronic study (the language in its historical evolution) allows us to delimit research approaches that the teacher reproduces, without necessarily being aware of it, whenever they decide to work on the Present Continuous in Year 6 or explain the origins of words such as breakfast or goodbye.

Figure 2. Saussure: langage, langue and parole, and the arbitrary sign that binds them.

For the teaching of English in Primary Education, this conceptual scaffolding has three practical consequences. First, it reminds us that we are not teaching language in the abstract, but a concrete langue, with its grammar, its vocabulary and its pronunciation, all of them conventional and therefore culturally determined: comparing house and casa allows students to see the arbitrariness of the sign and opens the door to early metalinguistic awareness. Second, it reminds us that what we hear and produce in the classroom is parole, not langue, and that all communicative teaching should prioritise contact with authentic language samples (authentic input) rather than with explicit rules. And, third, it reminds us that the langue exists in the classroom only through the community that sustains it: this is why teaching English is not merely teaching a code but opening students to a community of speakers and its culture — a task that acquires special significance in the Andalusian bilingual schools where, under art. 13 of the Orden de 28 de junio de 2011, English is used as the vehicle for non-linguistic subject areas.

4. SPOKEN LANGUAGE AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE: DISTINGUISHING FEATURES AND PEDAGOGY IN THE EFL CLASSROOM

Once the notion of langue as a communicative system has been established, the next step is to distinguish between its two great modalities: spoken language and written language. This distinction, addressed in detail by authors such as Daniel Cassany (Describir el escribir; Enseñar lengua) and Carlos Lomas (Cómo enseñar a hacer cosas con las palabras), is far from trivial: each modality responds to different communicative needs, requires different cognitive processes and poses specific didactic challenges in the English classroom.

Spoken language is, historically and phylogenetically, prior to written language. All human communities speak, but not all write. Its essential features are: simultaneity between production and reception (sender and receiver typically share time and space); immediacy (spoken messages tend to be ephemeral and are not preserved unless recorded); redundancy (everyday speech repeats, reformulates and returns to what has already been said); context-dependence (deictics, gestures, gaze and intonation complement the message); and an informal structure (unfinished sentences, fillers, topic shifts). The auditory channel also allows for paralinguistic resources — volume, rhythm, intonation, pauses — and kinesic resources — gestures, facial expression, posture — which we shall address in detail in Topic 2.

Written language, by contrast, is a secondary code, derived from spoken language but with an identity of its own. Its essential features are: deferred timing between production and reception (the writer is usually not present when the text is read); permanence (the message is fixed and can be reread); contextual autonomy (the text must make explicit what speech leaves implicit, because there is no shared context); economy and planning (the writer revises, reorganises and refines); and a formal structure (greater lexical density, subordinated syntax, explicit connectives). In Cassany's terms, writing is a recursive process of planning, drafting and revision, not a single act.

Figure 3. Spoken and written language: paired features and the continuum real texts sit on.

For the teaching of English in Primary Education, this distinction has clear consequences. In the first cycle (Years 1 and 2) the emphasis should fall overwhelmingly on spoken language. Students aged six to eight have barely mastered writing in their mother tongue; expecting them to write in English would be counterproductive. The teacher will work with routines, songs, chants, games, instructions (TPR-style) and short dialogues, supported by images and flashcards. Reading will appear in a global way (sight reading of key words) and writing, if it arises, will be minimal and model-based. In the second cycle (Years 3 and 4) written language is introduced progressively as a support for spoken language: short descriptive or narrative texts, templates for producing simple sentences, shared reading with guided questions. In the third cycle (Years 5 and 6) both modalities are worked with in a more balanced way, including full text genres such as letters, recipes, instructions, descriptions, short narratives and reasoned opinions.

It is also worth noting that spoken and written language are not watertight compartments: there are planned spoken texts (a speech, a presentation, a speaking exam) and spontaneous written texts (a chat message, a note to a friend). The current curriculum explicitly incorporates this hybridisation through digital texts and online communication, included in the 2020 CEFR Companion Volume under the category of online interaction. In the English classroom, this translates into proposals such as video presentations recorded by students, voice messages, class blogs or written exchanges with partner classes in other countries via platforms such as eTwinning — a resource within reach of any school through the Erasmus+ Programme, and one that costs nothing but the will to look for a partner school.

One final point: traditional language teaching prioritised grammar and translation over oral communication for decades, with poor results in terms of real communicative ability. The communicative turn of the 1970s and 1980s, now normatively enshrined, restores spoken language to the central place it deserves and understands writing not as a formal exercise but as a social practice. This does not mean abandoning linguistic accuracy, but integrating it within authentic communicative purposes.

5. FACTORS THAT DEFINE A COMMUNICATIVE SITUATION

Every communicative situation, whether spoken or written, in the mother tongue or a foreign language, involves a series of factors that shape it. The classical framework, proposed by Roman Jakobson in his article Linguistics and Poetics (1960), building on Karl Bühler's earlier work, identifies six constitutive factors of the communicative act: sender, receiver, message, code, channel and context (or referent). To these, functionality or purpose is commonly added today, in a pragmatic key.

The sender is the one who produces the message. In the English classroom the sender may be the teacher, a student, a recording or a text written by a real author. Knowing the sender matters because it conditions the register, the linguistic variety and the legitimacy of the discourse. The same utterance may sound natural or contrived depending on who produces it: a seven-year-old girl will not say «Should I venture an opinion?», but she will say «Can I say something?». The sender must be competent in the code, have communicative intention and have access to the means to produce the message.

The receiver is the one who receives and interprets the message. The receiver may be single or multiple, present or absent, known or unknown. In the classroom, the usual receiver is the class group or a specific classmate, but the receiver may also be an external addressee (a partner class, families, a virtual audience). Knowing the receiver is essential for adapting the message: vocabulary, length, register, non-verbal resources. Audience awareness is one of the assessment criteria that the Andalusian curriculum sets out explicitly for the foreign language area in Anexo II of the Orden de 30 de mayo de 2023 of Primary Education.

The message is the content that is conveyed, encoded in a concrete linguistic form. The code is the system of signs shared by sender and receiver: in our case, English, but this may also be English supported by gestures, images or language alternation (translanguaging). The channel is the physical medium through which the message travels: sound waves in face-to-face oral communication, paper in reading, a screen in digital communication, video in a virtual class. Each channel imposes its own conditions: the oral channel does not allow revision, the written channel does; the digital channel allows multimodality (text, image, sound, video).

The context or referent is the reality being talked about and, in the broader sense, the entire environment surrounding the communication. Here it is useful to distinguish, following Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni and the CEFR itself, between situational context (place, time, participants), linguistic context or co-text (what has been said before and after in the same discourse) and socio-cultural context (norms, customs and values of the community). Without context, messages are ambiguous: «It's hot in here» may be a neutral observation, a veiled complaint or an indirect request to open the window.

To these six factors, the communicative approach (CLT) adds a seventh, decisive one: functionality or purpose. All communication is for something: to request, to inform, to narrate, to persuade, to play, to promise, to express emotions. The current curriculum for the foreign language area is organised precisely around communicative purposes: students learn English to introduce themselves, to describe their families, to talk about their likes and dislikes, to give and follow instructions, to express opinions, to recount experiences, to maintain digital conversations and to mediate between languages. Functionality is what connects the preceding factors with action: teaching English from a communicative and action-oriented approach means designing tasks with a recognisable and socially valid purpose.

Figure 4. What a communicative situation is made of, and the question each factor answers.

Jakobson associated a function of language with each of these factors, which we shall address in the next section. Before doing so, it is worth highlighting one practical consequence: any English teaching sequence should be able to answer these seven questions. Who is speaking (sender)? To whom (receiver)? About what (referent)? In what code (language, register)? By what channel (spoken, written, digital)? For what purpose (communicative function)? In what context (place, time, culture)? If an activity cannot answer these seven questions clearly, it is probably not a communicative activity but a decontextualised exercise.

6. FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE: FROM JAKOBSON TO HALLIDAY

Roman Jakobson associated a specific function of language with each factor of the communicative situation in 1960, giving rise to the most widely known model of linguistic functions. Understanding it is indispensable for designing varied communicative tasks in the English classroom.

The referential or representational function centres on the referent: it communicates information about the world. It is the dominant function in descriptive, expository or informative texts: «London is the capital of the United Kingdom». The emotive or expressive function centres on the sender: it expresses feelings, states of mind and attitudes. «I love this song!» is a clear example. The conative or appellative function centres on the receiver: it seeks to influence their behaviour through orders, requests or questions. «Open your book, please» is a daily classroom example. The phatic function centres on the channel: it opens, maintains or closes communicative contact. Greetings, farewells and fillers such as «Hello», «You know?», «See you tomorrow» perform this function. The metalinguistic function centres on the code: it uses language to talk about language. «What does gorgeous mean?» is a perfect example and, incidentally, an extremely valuable question in the EFL classroom. And the poetic function centres on the message itself, on its form: it works with rhyme, rhythm and rhetorical figures, and appears in songs, poems, tongue twisters and word games.

To this model is added, from a more sociolinguistic and applied perspective, the contribution of Michael Halliday, the British linguist whose work Learning how to Mean: explorations in the development of language (1975) is a key reference in language teaching methodology. Halliday identifies seven functions of language based on a longitudinal study of the linguistic development of his own son Nigel. These are the functions that a child progressively discovers and masters as tools for meaning-making and acting in the world:

1. Instrumental function («I want»): language serves to satisfy material needs. «Water, please».
2. Regulatory function («Do as I tell you»): language regulates the behaviour of others. «Don't touch that».
3. Interactive or interactional function («Me and you»): language creates and maintains social relationships. «Hi, how are you?».
4. Personal function («Here I come»): language expresses the individuality and identity of the speaker. «My name is María, and I love football».
5. Heuristic function («Tell me why»): language serves to explore and understand the world. «Why is the sky blue?».
6. Imaginative function («Let's pretend»): language creates possible worlds, fiction and symbolic play. «Let's pretend we are pirates!».
7. Informative or representational function («I've got something to tell you»): language communicates new information. «My grandfather lives in Manchester».

Halliday's contribution has an enormous didactic advantage over Jakobson's: it is conceived from the perspective of child development and from the point of view of how children discover what language is for. This makes it a directly operational tool for the Primary classroom. When an English teacher designs a teaching sequence, they can ask themselves explicitly which of Halliday's functions they are going to activate: if only the informative function is worked on («My favourite colour is red»), the communicative experience is being impoverished; if all seven functions are combined across the course, a rich and complete experience is provided.

Figure 5. Jakobson's six functions and Halliday's seven, side by side with classroom examples.

Combining Jakobson and Halliday allows the teacher to argue convincingly before an examination board for the functional diversity of the proposed learning situations. A good example: a teaching unit on food and drinks in Year 3 can activate the instrumental function (ordering food in a simulated restaurant), the regulatory function (giving recipe instructions), the interactional function (conversing with a classmate), the personal function (saying what we like and dislike), the heuristic function (researching which countries certain foods come from), the imaginative function (inventing a menu for aliens) and the informative function (presenting the food pyramid). All seven functions are covered in a single teaching unit.

7. DELL HYMES'S SPEAKING MODEL AND ITS USEFULNESS FOR THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM

The decisive step from a purely linguistic conception towards a communicative conception was taken by Dell Hymes, an American anthropologist and sociolinguist, in his celebrated article On Communicative Competence (1972). In contrast to Noam Chomsky's model of linguistic competence — centred on the ideal speaker's capacity to produce and interpret grammatically correct sentences — Hymes coined the concept of communicative competence, which we shall address in detail in Topic 3 and which includes, beyond knowledge of the code, knowledge of when, how, to whom and why to say what one says. The difference is decisive for English language teaching: teaching the grammar of English without teaching the norms of use is teaching students to produce well-formed sentences that are communicatively inappropriate.

To operationalise this notion, Hymes proposed an ethnographic model for analysing communicative events known as the SPEAKING model, an acronym in English for the eight dimensions that make up any communicative situation. Each letter refers to a dimension:

• S — Setting and Scene: the physical setting (where, when, in what environment) and the psychological or cultural scene (formal, informal, festive, solemn). The classroom is one setting; a school trip, another; a video call with a partner class in Brighton, yet another.
• P — Participants: the participants and their roles — not only sender and receiver but also audiences, observers and mediators. In a classroom assembly there are those who speak, those who listen, those who observe and those who moderate.
• E — Ends: the purposes of the exchange, both explicit (what one is trying to achieve) and implicit (what is actually obtained). Asking for water, showing affection, demonstrating knowledge, winning a game.
• A — Act sequence: the sequence of communicative acts that makes up the event: turns, discourse organisation, text genres deployed. A telephone dialogue has a different sequence from a debate or a narrative.
• K — Key: the tone, key or register: serious, humorous, ironic, formal, intimate. The same information may be conveyed in a humorous key or in a tone of protest.
• I — Instrumentalities: the instruments: the channel (spoken, written, digital), the code (language, dialect, register) and the concrete forms (syntax, vocabulary, prosody).
• N — Norms: the norms of interaction (who speaks when, how interruptions are made, how the floor is requested) and of interpretation (what silence means, what is considered polite, what is considered rude). These norms vary between cultures and are often a source of intercultural misunderstanding: the silence between conversational turns in a Japanese exchange signals respect, but among Mediterranean speakers it may be read as lack of interest.
• G — Genre: the discourse genre: joke, prayer, debate, lesson, recipe, advertisement. Each genre has its own grammar, its own vocabulary and its own rules.

The SPEAKING model is an extraordinary tool for the English classroom because it compels the teacher to think about communicative situations with a depth that goes well beyond the sender-receiver pair. Designing a learning situation using the SPEAKING model means asking oneself, before proposing any task, in what setting it takes place, who participates, with what purpose, with what sequence, in what key, with what instruments, under what norms and in what genre. If any one of these dimensions remains unanswered, the situation is probably artificial.

Figure 6. Hymes's SPEAKING model: the eight questions to ask before designing a task.

A concrete example: instead of proposing a decontextualised exercise of the type «Make sentences with like and don't like and food vocabulary», a complete SPEAKING learning situation would be: «You are going to organise an International Food Festival for the school families. In groups of four, you will prepare a stand representing the gastronomy of an English-speaking country. You will write a menu in English (genre: menu; key: formal-festive; instrument: written), prepare an oral presentation for the families (genre: presentation; key: informative; instrument: spoken) and attend to visitors in English during the festival (genre: service encounter; key: friendly; norm: short turns and courtesy)». Every SPEAKING dimension is activated and the task acquires full meaning.

8. DIDACTIC APPLICATION IN THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM OF PRIMARY EDUCATION

The entire theoretical framework set out above only has value for the examination if it translates into real didactic decisions. It is therefore worth tracing how the conception of language as communication is made concrete across the three cycles of Primary Education, bearing in mind that a growing percentage of state schools now teach part of the curriculum in English.

In the first cycle (Years 1 and 2, ages 6–8), the teaching of English must be predominantly oral, playful and multisensory. The predominant functions are the instrumental, regulatory and interactional ones (following Halliday), with abundant support from the imaginative function (symbolic play, storytelling) and the personal function (introduction routines, basic likes and dislikes). The most frequent communicative situations are classroom routines (Hello, how are you today? What's the weather like?), cooperative games, songs, short dramatisations with flashcards, chants and TPR (Total Physical Response) activities, which we shall examine in Topic 2. The teacher prioritises comprehensible input (following Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis), tolerates the so-called silent period and celebrates any attempt at production. In the bilingual schools regulated by the Orden de 28 de junio de 2011, students in the first cycle already receive Conocimiento del medio natural, social y cultural in English and, where staffing permits, Educación artística or Educación física as well (art. 13), which multiplies opportunities for authentic exposure.

A concrete example from the first cycle: the daily Daily Routines Circle at the start of the lesson. The teacher greets the class (phatic function, interactional function), asks about the day and the weather (referential function), asks students to stand up and mime an action (conative function, TPR) and closes with a song of the day (poetic function, imaginative function). In ten minutes, six language functions have been activated and three dimensions of the SPEAKING model have been engaged (setting, participants, key).

In the second cycle (Years 3 and 4, ages 8–10), students consolidate oral skills and written language is introduced in a systematic way. The first tasks of guided reading comprehension appear, along with the first controlled written productions (image descriptions, personal introductions, lists, simple instructions) and the first short collaborative projects. Simple text genres are worked on: the postcard, the list, the recipe, the comic strip, the short story. Functions expand to include the heuristic (adapted research projects: Wild animals around the world) and the informative. The SPEAKING model begins to become explicit in class: students learn to identify the addressee, the purpose and the genre of each text. In bilingual schools, this is the point at which many pupils begin to prepare for external certifications awarded by international bodies such as Trinity College London or Cambridge English.

A concrete example from the second cycle: the Postcards from around the world project. Students simulate travelling to an English-speaking city (setting), choose the recipient of the postcard (participants: a classmate, a family member), define the purpose (ends: to recount what they have seen and enjoyed), choose a key (key: friendly, enthusiastic), produce a written text with greeting, body and farewell (genre: informal postcard), respecting the conventional norms of the genre (norms: polite greeting and farewell, brevity, first person). A single task activates all the SPEAKING dimensions.

In the third cycle (Years 5 and 6, ages 10–12), students should reach level A2 of the CEFR by the end of the stage — and, in schools with a bilingual programme, approach A2+/initial B1. Communicative situations are now more complex: short debates, prepared oral presentations, multi-paragraph written pieces, digital exchanges with partner classes through eTwinning or similar platforms, mediation between languages (summarising an English text in Spanish, explaining a school rule to a newly arrived classmate). New text genres appear: the formal letter, the email, the blog, the interview, the short news report, the questionnaire, the survey. All seven of Halliday's functions and all six of Jakobson's are activated frequently, and students begin to develop explicit metalinguistic awareness: «That's the present continuous*»*, «We use please to be polite».

Figure 7. How the oral-written balance, the genres and the functions shift across the three cycles.

Throughout all three cycles, the teacher must also attend to the diversity of the classroom. For students with specific educational support needs (NEAE) — students with hearing impairment, with ASD, with dyslexia, with limited knowledge of the language of instruction who have recently joined the school, attended where they are of migrant origin through the Aulas Temporales de Adaptación Lingüística regulated by the Orden de 15 de enero de 2007, por la que se regulan las medidas y actuaciones a desarrollar para la atención del alumnado inmigrante y, especialmente, las Aulas Temporales de Adaptación Lingüística — the communicative approach is not an obstacle but an asset: it allows for multiple entry and exit routes (oral, written, visual, gestural, digital), multiple levels of demand (gradation of input and output) and multiple forms of participation. Universal Design for Learning (UDL), the guiding principle of every framework for attention to diversity and inclusive education — and the reason why art. 8.8 of the Decreto 101/2023 expressly favours methodological flexibility in the Primera Lengua Extranjera for students with specific educational support needs —, fits perfectly with the communicative conception of language: what the approach needs — several ways in, several ways out, several levels of demand — is precisely what UDL prescribes.

9. SAUSSURE, JAKOBSON, HALLIDAY, HYMES AND THE CEFR: FIVE KEYS TO UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION

The survey of the great twentieth-century linguists who have underpinned the communicative conception of language can be summarised in five contributions that the English teacher must be able to articulate with confidence during an oral defence. Each of them answers a different question and, taken together, they offer a complete picture of the communicative phenomenon.

Ferdinand de Saussure (Cours de linguistique générale, 1916) answers the question «What is a langue?» by distinguishing langage, langue and parole, and proposing the model of the linguistic sign as the arbitrary union of signifier and signified. His legacy reminds us that, when we teach English, we are teaching a conventional, social and arbitrary system; and that the concrete parole produced by our students in the classroom is the only means of access to that system. His distinction between synchrony and diachrony justifies working primarily with contemporary English in Primary Education, without losing occasional opportunities to show students the history of the language through curious words (goodbye comes from God be with you, breakfast from break + fast).

Roman Jakobson (Linguistics and Poetics, 1960) answers the question «What do we do with language?» through his model of six factors (sender, receiver, message, code, channel, context) and the six associated functions (emotive, conative, poetic, metalinguistic, phatic, referential). His framework remains the backbone of communicative analysis and translates directly to the classroom: when we design any English task, we can ask which function predominates and which ones complement it, thus ensuring functional variety.

Michael Halliday (Learning how to Mean, 1975) answers the question «What is language for in real life?» through his seven functions (instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative, informative). His perspective, rooted in child development, offers the Primary teacher an unrivalled operational guide: if in an English teaching sequence we activate all seven functions throughout the unit, we can ensure that the communicative experience is rich and complete.

Dell Hymes (On Communicative Competence, 1972) answers the question «What does one need to know in order to communicate well?» by introducing the concept of communicative competence — which we shall address in Topic 3 — and the SPEAKING model as an ethnographic tool for describing any communicative event. His contribution is decisive because it shifts the focus from linguistic correctness (knowing grammar) to pragmatic appropriacy (knowing what to say, to whom, when, how and why). The SPEAKING model is arguably the most useful tool available to the teacher for designing genuinely communicative learning situations.

Finally, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) of the Council of Europe, published in 2001 and complemented by the Companion Volume (Companion Volume with New Descriptors) in 2018/2020, answers the question «How do we measure and plan communicative competence in foreign languages?». Its contribution is threefold: it defines six reference levels (A1 to C2), describes linguistic performance through can-do descriptors, and organises teaching around communicative language activities (comprehension, production, interaction and, from 2020, mediation and online interaction). The didactic translation of the CEFR to the Primary classroom is direct: the curriculum sets A2 as the target at the end of Year 6, and the Andalusian development of the area, in Anexo II of the Orden de 30 de mayo de 2023, frames learning situations precisely in terms of communicative activities, with the orientations for designing them gathered in its Anexo IV.

Figure 8. Five authors, the question each one answers and its consequence in the classroom.

Articulating these five contributions allows the examination candidate to present to the board a coherent and professional picture of language as communication: a social and conventional system (Saussure), with plural functions (Jakobson, Halliday), realised in complex situations (Hymes) and teachable and assessable through a common European framework (CEFR). That synthesis is also the foundation on which the following topics are built, especially those dedicated to non-verbal communication (Topic 2) and to skills and communicative competence (Topic 3).

10. CONCLUSION

Understanding language as communication is not one theoretical stance among others, but the epistemological choice that the Spanish and European curriculum has made its own since the reform of 1990 and that the LOMLOE, the Real Decreto 157/2022 and the Decreto 101/2023 have consolidated in Andalucía for the coming decade. This choice has immediate practical consequences for the English teacher in Primary Education: it means that we teach students to use the language, not to describe it; that we start from authentic communicative situations, not from lists of grammatical structures; that we assess what students are capable of doing with the language, not what they are capable of reciting; and that we understand the classroom as a communicative microcosm in which the skills needed to participate in a plurilingual and multicultural society are practised. In the bilingual schools regulated by the Orden de 28 de junio de 2011, this communicative conception acquires an additional dimension: English ceases to be merely a subject and becomes a vehicle for learning disciplinary content.

The theoretical framework — Saussure, Jakobson, Halliday, Hymes, CEFR — is not academic decoration. It is the guarantee that everyday classroom decisions are well-founded: the choice of a song for Year 1, the design of a role-play for Year 4, the marking of a written composition from Year 6, the support given to a newly arrived girl who does not yet share the classroom's language. Each of these decisions is better justified if the teacher can explain which language function it activates, which factor of the communicative situation it prioritises, which SPEAKING dimension it mobilises and which CEFR level it targets.

Working on language as communication in the English classroom means, ultimately, offering Primary students a rich, varied and meaningful experience with a language that will open doors throughout their personal and professional lives. It also means respecting their right to express themselves — recognised by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child — and preparing them to participate in a plurilingual Europe in which English coexists with dozens of official languages and thousands of dialectal varieties. The communicative conception of language, in sum, is not merely a didactic framework: it is a way of understanding language education as education for citizenship.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND LEGISLATIVE REFERENCES

Legislation

1. Ley Orgánica 3/2020, de 29 de diciembre, por la que se modifica la Ley Orgánica 2/2006, de 3 de mayo, de Educación (LOMLOE). BOE núm. 340, de 30 de diciembre de 2020.
2. Real Decreto 157/2022, de 1 de marzo, por el que se establecen la ordenación y las enseñanzas mínimas de la Educación Primaria. BOE núm. 52, de 2 de marzo de 2022.
3. Ley 17/2007, de 10 de diciembre, de Educación de Andalucía. BOJA núm. 252, de 26 de diciembre de 2007.
4. Decreto 101/2023, de 9 de mayo, por el que se establece la ordenación y el currículo de la etapa de Educación Primaria en la Comunidad Autónoma de Andalucía. BOJA núm. 90, de 15 de mayo de 2023.
5. Orden de 30 de mayo de 2023, por la que se desarrolla el currículo correspondiente a la etapa de Educación Primaria en la Comunidad Autónoma de Andalucía, se regulan determinados aspectos de la atención a la diversidad y a las diferencias individuales, se establece la ordenación de la evaluación del proceso de aprendizaje del alumnado y se determina el proceso de tránsito entre las diferentes etapas educativas. BOJA núm. 104, de 2 de junio de 2023.
6. Orden de 28 de junio de 2011, por la que se regula la enseñanza bilingüe en los centros docentes de la Comunidad Autónoma de Andalucía. BOJA núm. 135, de 12 de julio de 2011 (modificada por la Orden de 18 de febrero de 2013, BOJA núm. 44, de 5 de marzo de 2013, y por la Orden de 1 de agosto de 2016, BOJA núm. 150, de 5 de agosto de 2016).
7. Orden de 19 de mayo de 2015, por la que se regula el procedimiento para el reconocimiento de acreditación de los niveles de competencia lingüística en lenguas extranjeras, de acuerdo con el Marco Común Europeo de Referencia para las Lenguas, para el profesorado de enseñanza bilingüe en el ámbito de la Comunidad Autónoma de Andalucía. BOJA núm. 109, de 9 de junio de 2015.
8. Orden de 15 de enero de 2007, por la que se regulan las medidas y actuaciones a desarrollar para la atención del alumnado inmigrante y, especialmente, las Aulas Temporales de Adaptación Lingüística. BOJA núm. 33, de 14 de febrero de 2007.
9. Acuerdo de 24 de enero de 2017, del Consejo de Gobierno, por el que se aprueba el Plan Estratégico de Desarrollo de las Lenguas en Andalucía Horizonte 2020. BOJA núm. 24, de 6 de febrero de 2017 (horizonte temporal ya vencido).

Reference documents and frameworks

1. Council of Europe (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge University Press.
2. Council of Europe (2020). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages — Companion Volume. Council of Europe Publishing.
3. Council of Europe. European Language Portfolio (ELP).
4. Recommendation of the Council of the European Union of 22 May 2018 on key competences for lifelong learning.
5. United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 20 November 1989 (articles 12, 13 and 30).
6. CAST (2018). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines, version 2.2. Wakefield, MA.

Bibliographic references

1. Saussure, F. de (1945). Curso de lingüística general (A. Alonso, trad.). Losada. (Original publicado en 1916).
2. Jakobson, R. (1981). Lingüística y poética. Cátedra. (Original publicado en 1960).
3. Halliday, M. A. K. (1975). Learning how to Mean: explorations in the development of language. Edward Arnold.
4. Hymes, D. (1972). On Communicative Competence. En J. B. Pride y J. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics (pp. 269-293). Penguin.
5. Cassany, D. (1989). Describir el escribir: cómo se aprende a escribir. Paidós.
6. Cassany, D., Luna, M. y Sanz, G. (1994). Enseñar lengua. Graó.
7. Lomas, C. (1999). Cómo enseñar a hacer cosas con las palabras: teoría y práctica de la educación lingüística. Paidós.
8. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press.