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

CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Legal and conceptual framework for the teaching of English in Primary Education
3. Language, tongue and speech: Saussure's legacy
4. Oral language and written language: differential characteristics and didactics 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 in 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 people need to do things with it: ask, narrate, promise, soothe, persuade, play, learn. This is self-evident to any English teacher who observes, day after day, a six-year-old student using two words and a gesture to make themselves understood in a language they barely know. It is the starting point of this topic and, in a sense, of the entire didactics of English 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 be sufficient to guarantee success.

The pages that follow address four major questions that a Foreign Language: English teacher must be capable of answering with confidence before an examining panel. What do we mean by language when we say it is communication, and how does that idea relate to the classical distinction between language, tongue and speech? In what ways does oral language differ from written language, and what didactic consequences does that difference have in an English class? What factors are involved in any communicative situation, and why do they matter when 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, a second official language and a foreign language?

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 situates the content within the LOMLOE (LO 3/2020, de 29 de diciembre), the Real Decreto 157/2022, de 1 de marzo, the Decreto 106/2022, de 5 de agosto, del Consell, and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) with its 2020 Companion Volume. And the didactic perspective, without which no competition topic can stand: concrete examples from the EFL classroom, connections with the learning situations of the Valencian curriculum, and plausible proposals for all three cycles of Primary Education.

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

The conception of language as communication is not merely one methodological option among others: it is the ethical, legal and pedagogical horizon from which Spanish and European legislation approaches the learning of foreign languages today. At the national level, the Ley Orgánica 3/2020, de 29 de diciembre (LOMLOE) places among the principles of the educational system the development of plurilingual competence 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 content of Primary Education, defines the Foreign Language area 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 Comunitat Valenciana, curricular development is set out in the Decreto 106/2022, de 5 de agosto, del Consell, which establishes the organisation and curriculum of the Primary Education stage. This decree incorporates three elements particularly relevant to this topic into the teaching of English: recognition of the plurilingual reality of the Valencian classroom (Valencian, Spanish and English coexist in the curriculum), the methodological principle of the competence-based and communicative approach, and the incorporation of so-called learning situations as the preferred didactic device for activating authentic communication. Added to this legislation are the Ley 4/2018, de 21 de febrero, of the Generalitat, which regulates and promotes plurilingualism in the Valencian educational system (PEPLI, Programa d'Educació Plurilingüe i Intercultural), and the regional decree that governs plurilingualism in the current stage. The Recommendation of the Council of the European Union of 22 May 2018 on key competences for lifelong learning underpins the whole by including plurilingual competence among the eight European key competences.

The framework is completed by two instruments from 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 we shall return to in Topic 3. Alongside them, 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 defined from the outset. By communication we mean every process of intentional exchange of meanings 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; a tongue (langue), the specific and conventional system (English, Valencian, Spanish, Spanish Sign Language) used by each community; speech (parole), the individual and concrete use that each person makes of that tongue in a communicative act. A communicative situation is the set of factors surrounding any communicative exchange that condition both the form and the meaning of the message. Handling this vocabulary with clarity is not a pedantic concern: it is what subsequently 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 of children and adolescents from 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. The teaching of English, in short, is understood today as a communicative, plurilingual, intercultural practice that respects the rights of the child.

3. LANGUAGE, TONGUE AND SPEECH: SAUSSURE'S LEGACY

The distinction between language, tongue and speech derives from the Cours de linguistique générale by Ferdinand de Saussure, published posthumously in 1916 by his students Bally and Sechehaye from notes taken in his lectures 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 followed in linguistics and, by extension, in language didactics. Without it, structuralism, generative linguistics and the models of communicative competence that dominate today's Primary curriculum cannot be 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 also includes gesture, image and any shared system of signs. A tongue (langue), by contrast, 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, Valencian and Spanish are tongues in this technical sense. Finally, speech (parole) is the individual act through which each speaker actualises that tongue: the specific utterance pronounced by an eight-year-old girl when she raises her hand and says "Teacher, can I go to the toilet, please?" is speech; the grammatical and lexical system of English that underlies it is tongue; the human capacity to learn that system and produce that utterance is language.

Saussure added to this model several dichotomies that have become canonical. The opposition between signifier (the acoustic image, the sounds we pronounce) and signified (the concept evoked) reformulated the notion of the linguistic sign for ever. The arbitrariness of the sign — that is, the absence of any natural motivation between signifier and signified — explains why the same reality is called house in English, casa in Spanish or casa in Valencian. The distinction between syntagmatic relations (in the chain, in the presence of other signs) and paradigmatic relations (in the system, in the absence of other signs) illuminates how linguistic units are combined and selected. And the opposition between synchronic study (tongue at a given moment) and diachronic study (tongue in its historical evolution) allows the delimitation of research approaches that the teacher reproduces, unknowingly, every time they decide to work with the Present Continuous in Year 6 or to explain the origins of words such as breakfast or goodbye.

For the didactics of English in Primary Education, this conceptual scaffolding has three practical consequences. First, it reminds us that we do not teach language in the abstract, but a specific tongue, with its grammar, its vocabulary and its pronunciation, all of which are conventional and therefore culturally determined: comparing house, casa 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 speech, not tongue, and that all communicative teaching must prioritise contact with real samples of use (authentic input) before explicit rules. And third, it reminds us that the tongue exists in the classroom thanks to the community that sustains it: teaching English is therefore not merely teaching a code, but opening students to a community of speakers and its culture.

4. ORAL LANGUAGE AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE: DIFFERENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS AND DIDACTICS IN THE EFL CLASSROOM

Once the notion of tongue as a communicative system has been established, the next step is to distinguish its two main modalities: oral 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 not trivial: each modality responds to different communicative needs, requires different cognitive processes and poses specific didactic challenges in the English classroom.

Oral 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 usually share time and space); immediacy (oral messages tend to be ephemeral, not preserved unless recorded); redundancy (everyday speech repeats, reformulates, returns to what has been said); context-dependency (deictics, gestures, eye contact and intonation complement the message); and an informal structure (unfinished sentences, filler words, topic shifts). The sound channel also allows paralinguistic resources — volume, rhythm, intonation, pauses — and kinesic resources — gestures, facial expressions, posture — which we shall examine in detail in Topic 2.

Written language, by contrast, is a secondary code, derived from the oral but with its own identity. Its essential features are: the deferral 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 in speech remains implicit, because there is no shared context); economy and planning (the writer revises, reorganises, refines); and a formal structure (greater lexical density, subordinate syntax, explicit connectors). In Cassany's words, writing is a recursive process of planning, textualisation and revision, not a single act.

For the didactics of English in Primary Education, this distinction has clear consequences. In the first cycle (Years 1 and 2), the emphasis must fall overwhelmingly on oral language. Students aged six to eight have barely mastered the writing of their mother tongue; expecting them to write in English would be counterproductive. The teacher works on routines, songs, chants, games, instructions (TPR-style) and short dialogues, with the support of images and flashcards. Reading appears in a global manner (sight reading of key words) and writing, if it arises, is minimal and model-based. In the second cycle (Years 3 and 4), written language is gradually introduced as a support for the oral: 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 balance, including complete text genres such as letters, recipes, instructions, descriptions, short narratives and reasoned opinions.

It is also worth remembering that oral and written are not watertight compartments: there are planned oral 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 that hybridisation through digital texts and online communication, covered in the 2020 CEFR Companion Volume under the category of online interaction. In the English classroom, this translates into proposals such as presentation videos recorded by students, voice messages, class blogs or written exchanges with partner classes in other countries through platforms such as eTwinning.

One final point: traditional teaching prioritised grammar and translation over oralcy for decades, with poor results with regard to real communication. The communicative turn of the 1970s and 1980s, now enshrined in legislation, restores to oralcy 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 oral or written, in a mother tongue or a foreign language, involves a series of factors that shape it. The classical schema, proposed by Roman Jakobson in his article Linguistics and Poetics (1960), building on the earlier work of Karl Bühler, 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, from a pragmatic perspective.

The sender is the person who produces the message. In the English classroom it 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 child will not say "Should I venture an opinion?", but will say "Can I say something?". The sender must be competent in the code, have a communicative intention and have the means to produce the message.

The receiver is the person who receives and interprets the message. The receiver may be one person or many, present or absent, known or unknown. In the classroom, the usual receiver is the whole class or a specific classmate, but it may also be an external addressee (a partner class, families, a virtual audience). Knowing the receiver is essential in order to adjust the message: vocabulary, length, register, non-verbal resources. Appropriacy to the addressee is one of the assessment criteria that the Primary curriculum explicitly includes in the Foreign Language area.

The message is the content that is transmitted, encoded in a specific linguistic form. The code is the system of signs shared by sender and receiver: in our case, English, but it may also be English supported by gestures, images or language switches (translanguaging). The channel is the physical medium through which the message travels: sound waves in face-to-face oralcy, 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 for revision, the written one does; the digital channel allows multimodality (text, image, sound, video).

The context or referent is the reality that is spoken about and, in the broader sense, the entire environment surrounding 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 sociocultural context (norms, customs, 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 adds a seventh decisive one: functionality or purpose. All communication is done for something: to ask, inform, narrate, persuade, play, promise, express emotions. The current curriculum for the Foreign Language area is organised precisely around communicative purposes: students learn English to introduce themselves, describe their family, talk about their likes, give and follow instructions, express opinions, recount experiences, hold digital conversations and mediate between languages. Functionality is what connects the preceding factors with action: teaching English from a communicative and action-oriented approach means designing tasks that have a recognisable and socially valid purpose.

Jakobson associated a function of language with each of these factors, which we shall address in the next section. First, a practical consequence is worth highlighting: 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)? Through what channel (oral, written, digital)? For what purpose (communicative function)? In what context (place, time, culture)? If an activity does not allow these seven questions to be answered 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 best-known model of linguistic functions. Understanding it is essential for designing varied communicative tasks in the English classroom.

The referential or representative function focuses 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 focuses on the sender: it expresses feelings, states of mind and attitudes. "I love this song!" is a clear example. The conative or appellative function focuses on the receiver: it seeks to influence their behaviour through commands, requests or questions. "Open your book, please" is an everyday classroom example. The phatic function focuses on the channel: it opens, maintains or closes communicative contact. Greetings, farewells and expressions such as "Hello", "You know?" and "See you tomorrow" fulfil this function. The metalinguistic function focuses on the code: it uses language to talk about language. "What does gorgeous mean?" is a perfect example and, incidentally, a highly valuable question in the EFL classroom. And the poetic function focuses on the message itself, on its form: it works with rhyme, rhythm and rhetorical figures, and appears in songs, poems, tongue twisters and wordplay.

To this model is added, from a more sociolinguistic and applied perspective, the contribution of Michael Halliday, a British linguist whose work Learning how to Mean: explorations in the development of language (1975) is an obligatory reference in language didactics. Halliday identifies seven functions of language based on a longitudinal study of his own son Nigel's linguistic development. These are the functions that a child progressively discovers and masters as tools for making meaning 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 others' behaviour. "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 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 explicitly ask themselves which of Halliday's functions they are going to activate: if only the informative function is worked ("My favourite colour is red"), the communicative experience is impoverished; if all seven functions are combined throughout the course, a rich and complete experience is offered.

Combining Jakobson and Halliday allows the teacher to argue confidently before an examining panel for the functional diversity of the proposed learning situations. A good example: a teaching sequence on food and drinks in Year 3 of Primary Education can activate the instrumental function (ordering food in a simulated restaurant), the regulatory function (giving recipe instructions), the interactive function (conversing with a classmate), the personal function (saying what we like and dislike), the heuristic function (researching which countries different 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 definitive step from a purely linguistic conception towards a communicative one 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 examine in detail in Topic 3 and which includes, beyond knowledge of the code, the knowledge of when, how, to whom and why to say what one says. The difference is decisive for the didactics of English: teaching English grammar without teaching the rules of use means teaching students to produce well-formed but communicatively inappropriate sentences.

To operationalise this notion, Hymes proposed an ethnographic model for analysing communicative events known as the SPEAKING model, an English acronym 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 setting (formal, informal, festive, solemn). The classroom is one setting; a school trip, another; a video call with a partner class, yet another.
• P — Participants: the participants and their roles — not merely sender and receiver but also audiences, bystanders and mediators. In a class assembly there is someone who speaks, someone who listens, someone who observes, someone who moderates.
• E — Ends: the purposes of the exchange, both explicit (what one seeks 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 mobilised. 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 can be conveyed in a humorous key or in a denunciatory one.
• I — Instrumentalities: the instruments: the channel (oral, written, digital), the code (language, dialect, register) and the specific forms (syntax, vocabulary, prosody).
• N — Norms: the norms of interaction (who speaks when, how to interrupt, how to take the floor) 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: silence between turns in a Japanese conversation signals respect, but between Mediterranean speakers it may be read as lack of interest.
• G — Genre: the discursive 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 beyond the sender-receiver pair. Designing a learning situation using the SPEAKING framework means asking, before proposing any task, what setting it takes place in, who participates, to what end, with what sequence, in what key, with what instruments, under what norms and in what genre. If any one of these dimensions goes unanswered, the situation is probably artificial.

A concrete example: instead of proposing a decontextualised exercise such as "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 families of the school. In groups of four, you will prepare a stand representing the gastronomy of an English-speaking country. You will need to write a menu in English (genre: menu; key: formal-festive; instrument: written), prepare an oral presentation for the families (genre: presentation; key: popular informative; instrument: oral), and attend to visitors in English during the festival (genre: service conversation; key: friendly; norm: short turns and courtesy)." Every SPEAKING dimension is activated and the task acquires its full meaning.

8. DIDACTIC APPLICATION IN THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM IN PRIMARY EDUCATION

All the theoretical framework set out above only has value for the competition if it translates into real didactic decisions. It is therefore useful to trace how the conception of language as communication takes concrete form across the three cycles of Primary Education in the Valencian curriculum.

In the first cycle (Years 1 and 2, ages 6–8), the teaching of English must be eminently oral, playful and multisensory. The predominant functions are the instrumental, regulatory and interactive (following Halliday), with abundant support from the imaginative (symbolic play, storytelling) and the personal (introductory routines, basic likes). 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 every attempt at production.

A concrete example in the first cycle: the daily Daily Routines Circle at the start of the lesson. The teacher greets the class (phatic function, interactive 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 the song of the day (poetic function, imaginative function). In ten minutes, six functions of language and three dimensions of the SPEAKING model (setting, participants, key) have been activated.

In the second cycle (Years 3 and 4, ages 8–10), students consolidate their oral skills and written language is introduced in a systematic way. The first guided reading comprehension tasks appear, the first controlled written productions (image descriptions, personal presentations, lists, simple instructions) and the first short collaborative projects. Simple text genres are worked on: the postcard, the list, the recipe, the comic, 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 be made explicit in class: students learn to identify the addressee, the purpose and the genre of each text.

A concrete example in the second cycle: the Postcards from around the world project. Students simulate travelling to an English-speaking city (setting), choose the addressee of the postcard (participants: a classmate, a family member), define the purpose (ends: to say what they have seen and enjoyed), choose a key (key: friendly, enthusiastic), produce a written text with a greeting, a body and a closing (genre: informal postcard), respecting the conventional norms of the genre (norms: polite greeting and closing, 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. Communicative situations are now more complex: short debates, prepared oral presentations, multi-paragraph written compositions, digital exchanges with partner classes via eTwinning or similar platforms, mediation between languages (summarising in English a text written in Spanish, explaining a school rule to a recently arrived classmate). New text genres appear: the formal letter, the email, the blog, the interview, the short news article, the questionnaire, the survey. Halliday's seven functions and Jakobson's six are activated frequently and students begin to develop explicit metalinguistic awareness: "That's the present continuous*"*, "We use please to be polite."

Throughout all three cycles, the teacher must also attend to diversity in the classroom. For students with specific educational support needs (NEAE) — students with hearing impairments, with ASD, with dyslexia, with no knowledge of the language of instruction upon recent arrival — the communicative approach is not an obstacle but an advantage: it allows for multiple entry and exit points (oral, written, visual, gestural, digital), multiple levels of demand (gradation of input and output) and multiple forms of participation. Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which the Valencian curriculum explicitly includes as a methodological principle, fits perfectly with the communicative conception of language.

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

The journey through the great linguists of the twentieth century 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 in an oral examination. Each of them answers a different question and, together, they offer a complete picture of the communicative phenomenon.

Ferdinand de Saussure (Cours de linguistique générale, 1916) answers the question "What is a tongue?" by distinguishing language, tongue and speech, 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 speech our students produce 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 missing occasional opportunities to reveal 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 the model of the six factors (sender, receiver, message, code, channel, context) and the six associated functions (emotive, conative, poetic, metalinguistic, phatic, referential). His schema remains the backbone of communicative analysis and translates directly into the classroom: when designing any English task, we can ask ourselves which function predominates and which complement it, thereby 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, interactive, personal, heuristic, imaginative, informative). His perspective, rooted in child development, provides the Primary teacher with an unbeatable operational guide: if all seven functions are activated in a teaching sequence across the unit, we can guarantee that the communicative experience is rich and complete.

Dell Hymes (On Communicative Competence, 1972) answers the question "What must one know in order to communicate well?" by introducing the concept of communicative competence — which we shall examine 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) towards pragmatic appropriacy (knowing what to say, to whom, when, how and why). The SPEAKING model is probably 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 completed 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 Valencian curriculum sets level A2 as the target by the end of Year 6 and frames learning situations precisely as communicative language activities.

Articulating these five contributions allows the candidate to present to the examining panel 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). This synthesis is also the foundation on which the subsequent topics are built, especially those devoted 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 106/2022 del Consell have consolidated for the coming decade. This choice has immediate practical consequences for the English teacher in Primary Education: it means we teach how to use the language, not how to describe it; that we start from authentic communicative situations, not from lists of grammatical structures; that we assess what students are able to do with the language, not what they are able to recite; 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 composition in Year 6, the attention given to a recently arrived student who does not yet share the language of the classroom. Each of these decisions is better justified if the teacher can explain which function of language it activates, which factor of the communicative situation it prioritises, which SPEAKING dimension it mobilises and which CEFR level it pursues.

Working with 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 self-expression — 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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND LEGISLATIVE REFERENCES

Legislation and regulations

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 106/2022, de 5 de agosto, del Consell, de ordenación y currículo de la etapa de Educación Primaria. DOGV núm. 9402, de 10 de agosto de 2022.
5. Ley 4/2018, de 21 de febrero, de la Generalitat, por la que se regula y promueve el plurilingüismo en el sistema educativo valenciano (PEPLI). DOGV núm. 8240, de 22 de febrero de 2018.
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. (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.

STUDY GUIDANCE

1. Memorise the legislative chain with precision before tackling any author: LOMLOE (LO 3/2020), Real Decreto 157/2022, Decreto 106/2022 del Consell, Ley 4/2018 PEPLI, CEFR 2001 and Companion Volume 2020. Knowing how to cite the number and date demonstrates professional solidity to the panel from the very first page.
2. Master the Saussurean tripartition language-tongue-speech and its didactic implications. This is core vocabulary that will appear in at least five topics across 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 at least one example in English from the Primary classroom with each. That pair of models is probably the most profitable element of this topic: you will be able to recycle it in topics on skills, assessment, planning and children's literature.
4. Memorise Hymes's SPEAKING acronym and be able to apply it to a specific learning situation. If, in the oral examination, you manage to analyse a didactic proposal through the SPEAKING framework in under two minutes, you demonstrate an analytical capacity that separates notable from outstanding results.
5. Prepare examples per cycle (Years 1–2, 3–4, 5–6) of activities that illustrate the communicative conception of language. A candidate who only cites authors without grounding the discussion in the classroom gives the impression of never having set foot in a school; the panel values dual technical and didactic competence.
6. Review the distinction between oral and written language drawing on Cassany, with its implications of planning-textualisation-revision. That same structure will serve you in the topics devoted to written expression (Topics 12–13 of the traditional syllabus).
7. Practise the oral examination of this topic whilst timing yourself. For a written development of approximately 5,500–6,000 words, the oral presentation is between 40 and 50 minutes: practise cutting sections 4 and 8 without losing the overall framework, as these are the densest sections and the first you will sacrifice if you are running short of time.