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 for the teaching of English in Primary Education
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 in the Canary Islands
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 Canarian children are simultaneously discovering their mother tongue — enriched by the Canarian variety of Spanish — and a foreign language of global reach?

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 LOMLOE (LO 3/2020, de 29 de diciembre), the Real Decreto 157/2022, de 1 de marzo, the Decreto 211/2022, de 10 de noviembre, del Gobierno de Canarias, 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 Canarian curriculum, and credible proposals for all three cycles of Primary Education, attentive to the island reality and to the importance of English-speaking tourism in the archipelago.

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

2. LEGAL AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH IN PRIMARY EDUCATION

The conception of language as communication is not simply one more methodological option among others: it is the ethical, legal and pedagogical horizon from which Spanish and European legislation today approaches the learning of foreign languages. At the national level, the Ley Orgánica 3/2020, de 29 de diciembre (LOMLOE) places the development of plurilingual competence among the principles of the educational system and reformulates the curriculum around key competences, specific competences, assessment criteria and basic knowledge. The Real Decreto 157/2022, de 1 de marzo, which establishes the organisation and minimum requirements for Primary Education, defines the area of foreign language from a communicative and action-oriented approach, in explicit alignment with the CEFR: students learn English by doing things with the language, not by accumulating decontextualised structures.

In the Comunidad Autónoma de Canarias, curricular development is set out in the Decreto 211/2022, de 10 de noviembre, which establishes the organisation and the curriculum of Primary Education in the Comunidad Autónoma de Canarias, published in the Boletín Oficial de Canarias (BOC). This decree brings to the teaching of English three elements that are especially relevant to the present topic: the recognition of the plurilingual and intercultural reality of the Canarian classroom — where English coexists with the Canarian variety of Spanish and, in many schools, with the presence of students of foreign origin and of resident families connected with tourism —, the methodological principle of the competence-based and communicative approach, and the incorporation of so-called learning situations as the privileged didactic device for activating authentic communication. To this legislation is added the Programa CLIL/AICLE de Canarias, promoted by the Consejería de Educación, Universidades, Cultura y Deportes del Gobierno de Canarias, which articulates the integrated teaching of content and language in numerous schools across the archipelago and constitutes a hallmark of the Canarian educational system. The Recommendation of the Council of the European Union of 22 May 2018 on key competences for lifelong learning underpins the whole framework by including plurilingual competence among the eight European key competences.

The framework is completed by two instruments of the Council of Europe that the teacher must handle with confidence. 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 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 students can use from Primary Education onwards.

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.

Finally, the LOMLOE itself, in keeping with the spirit of the CEFR, redefines the specific competences of the foreign language area as capacities to use the language for communicative purposes, with awareness of linguistic diversity and with respect for cultural diversity. The LOPIVI (LO 8/2021, de 4 de junio), which regulates comprehensive protection for children and adolescents against violence, has implications for the English classroom insofar as many learning situations incorporate sensitive content (intercultural conflicts, bullying, identities) that the teacher must address responsibly. All English language teaching is, in sum, understood today as a communicative, plurilingual, 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 Bally and 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 — in its Canarian variety or in any other — 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 — something of particular significance in the Canary Islands, given the fluid everyday relationship with English-speaking tourists and residents on many of the islands.

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 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, which prove particularly fruitful in Canarian schools taking part in European mobility and school twinning programmes.

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, purpose or functionality 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 in the United Kingdom or Ireland, 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 Primary Education curriculum sets out explicitly in the foreign language area.

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. In the Canary Islands, where everyday contact with English-speaking tourists and residents is part of the socio-cultural landscape, the communicative contexts available for the teaching of English are extraordinarily rich.

To these six factors, the communicative approach 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 Maria, 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 sequence on food and drinks in Year 3 can activate the instrumental function (ordering food in a simulated restaurant, of the kind that abounds in Canarian tourist municipalities), the regulatory function (giving instructions in English for a recipe of papas arrugadas con mojo), 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 visit to the harbour of a Canarian coastal town, another; a video call with a partner class, 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, and one that is especially productive in the Canarian context: 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 set up an International Tourist Information Point at the school entrance during the open day. In groups of four, you will prepare an information stand about your town or island in English. You will have to write a leaflet (genre: tourist leaflet; key: informative and welcoming; instrument: written) with the places of interest and the local gastronomy; prepare an oral presentation for the families (genre: presentation; key: informative; instrument: spoken); and attend to simulated visitors in English (genre: service encounter; key: friendly; norm: short turns and courtesy)». Every SPEAKING dimension is activated and the task acquires full meaning, anchored moreover in an immediate social reality of the archipelago.

8. DIDACTIC APPLICATION IN THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM OF PRIMARY EDUCATION IN THE CANARY ISLANDS

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 in the Canarian curriculum.

In the first cycle (Years 1 and 2 of Primary Education, 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.

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 — a particularly lively topic in the Canary Islands, where the calima, the trade winds and the mild temperatures offer plenty of scope («Is it windy today? Is there calima?») —, 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 in the Canary Islands, with the many endemic species of the archipelago) 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.

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. An interesting variant in the Canary Islands consists of writing postcards from the islands to imaginary addressees, which connects directly with the family and community experience of tourism.

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. 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 a Spanish text in English, 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 — 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), embodied in the Decreto 25/2018, de 26 de febrero, which regulates attention to diversity within non-university education in the Comunidad Autónoma de Canarias, fits perfectly with the communicative conception of language. It is also worth recalling the reality of the aulas enclave and of the geographical dispersion of the archipelago, served by the network of Centros del Profesorado (CEP) that advise teachers on all the islands.

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 Canarian curriculum sets A2 as the target at the end of Year 6 and frames learning situations precisely in terms of communicative activities.

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 Spanish and European legislation has made its own since the LOGSE and that the LOMLOE, the Real Decreto 157/2022 and the Decreto 211/2022 del Gobierno de Canarias have consolidated 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.

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 Canarian Primary students a rich, varied and meaningful experience with a language that will open doors throughout their personal and professional lives — especially in an archipelago so closely tied to the English-speaking world through tourism and cultural exchange. It also means respecting their right to express themselves — recognised by the United Nations Convention and by the LOPIVI — 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.

11. 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. Ley Orgánica 8/2021, de 4 de junio, de protección integral a la infancia y la adolescencia frente a la violencia (LOPIVI). BOE núm. 134, de 5 de junio de 2021.
3. 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.
4. Decreto 211/2022, de 10 de noviembre, por el que se establece la ordenación y el currículo de la educación primaria en la Comunidad Autónoma de Canarias. BOC.
5. Decreto 25/2018, de 26 de febrero, por el que se regula la atención a la diversidad en el ámbito de las enseñanzas no universitarias de la Comunidad Autónoma de Canarias. BOC.
6. Recomendación del Consejo de la Unión Europea, de 22 de mayo de 2018, relativa a las competencias clave para el aprendizaje permanente. DOUE C 189, de 4 de junio de 2018.
7. Council of Europe (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge University Press.
8. Council of Europe (2020). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment — Companion Volume. Council of Europe Publishing.
9. Portfolio Europeo de las Lenguas (PEL). Consejo de Europa.

Bibliographic references

1. Saussure, F. de (1945). Curso de lingüística general (A. Alonso, trad.). Losada. (Originally published in 1916).
2. Jakobson, R. (1981). Lingüística y poética. Cátedra. (Originally published in 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. In J. B. Pride & 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.

STUDY GUIDANCE

1. Memorise the chain of legislation precisely, before any author: LOMLOE (LO 3/2020), Real Decreto 157/2022, Decreto 211/2022 del Gobierno de Canarias, the CEFR of 2001 and the Companion Volume of 2020. Being able to cite the number and the date shows the board a professional command of the subject from the very first page.
2. Master the Saussurean tripartition langage–langue–parole and its didactic implications. It is core vocabulary that will reappear in at least five topics of the syllabus; confusing these terms raises doubts about your basic linguistic training.
3. Learn by heart Jakobson's six functions and Halliday's seven functions, associating each one with at least one English example from the Primary classroom. That pair of models is probably the most profitable content in the topic: you will be able to recycle it in the topics on skills, on assessment, on curriculum planning and on children's literature.
4. Memorise Hymes's SPEAKING acronym and be able to apply it to a specific learning situation. If in the oral defence you manage to analyse a didactic proposal in SPEAKING terms in under two minutes, you demonstrate an analytical capacity that separates a good mark from an outstanding one.
5. Prepare examples by cycle (Years 1–2, 3–4, 5–6) of activities that illustrate the communicative conception of language, anchored in the Canarian reality (tourism, calima, endemic species, local gastronomy). A candidate who merely cites authors without landing in the classroom gives the impression of never having set foot in a school; the board values the twofold command of theory and practice.
6. Revise the distinction between spoken and written language following Cassany, with its implications of planning–drafting–revision. That same structure will serve you in the topics devoted to written expression.
7. Rehearse the oral defence of the topic against the clock. For a written development of some 5,500–6,000 words, the oral presentation takes between 40 and 50 minutes: rehearse cutting back sections 4 and 8 without losing the overall framework, since they are the densest and the first you will sacrifice if you are short of time.