UNIT 4 FUNCTIONS

In the classrooom and in the language teaching process, according to the authors Mary Spratt, Alan Pulverness, and Melanie Williams  who defined in the book The TKT Course Modules 1, 2, 3 (2011) to the functions as the specific reasons why people communicate, or a way to describe how people uses the language. It means that when somebody is speaking or writing, it is being done for a reason, and almost everything of what we are saying has a reason or a purpose. The authors also mentioned in the same book that examples of functions could be apologising, greeting, clarifiying, inviting, advising, agreeing, disagreeing, refusing, thanking, interrupting, etc. In functions, we use a specific language to express each function, for example somebody might say Good morning to everyone, My name is Camila Cabello and I am a student. The function here is introducing and the expression or language that this person used to introduce herself is called exponent. According to David Wilkins, in his article Functions of Language (2009) Functions of Language consist in everything what we say for a specefic purpose. Whether if we apologise, express a wish or ask for permission, we use a specefic language to express a purpose, and that purpose is a function.

I work as an English language teacher and I find this information very helpful. I can recognise when my students are greeting, asking a question, giving an opinion according the exponent that they use and they can also recognise the function that I use in class according to the exponent. What I must do first is to teach my students to express each function according to the purpose and to recognise their classmates function. After that I will teach them how be accurate and fluent in their functions.

References:

Spratt, M; Pulverness, A; Williams, M. (2011) The TKT Course Modules 1, 2, 3.

Wilkins, D. (2009) Functions of Language.

Hebbert, L. (2013) The Functions of the Language.

http://www.signosemio.com/jakobson/functions-of-language.asp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakobson%27s_functions_of_language