869568783

20

Promońng cmmmity cohesion in English education

setlings on the esample ojBamjield South Academy in Luton

fact, according to Brown and Yule (2007) people only produce language when given such an opportunity with interpersonal use of language prevailing over primarily transactional one and, it needs to be emphasised, the linguistic resources they pos-sess do differ as there are no two human beings able to refer to such resources in the same manner even if they are inhabitants of the same country, bom and bred, and, therefore, able to speak or write the same language at the same level of profi-ciency. In addition to that, it is the same repertoire that might be blamed once mis-understandings between communicating parties occur as they aliant people to deploy certaiti linguistic resources morę or less appropńately in certain contexts⁷. Also, the authors of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claim that categories of language that categorise things grammatically can influence (but do not necessarily determine) the way people con-strue the world with the three key terms in the formulation of the index hypothesis being'language,’ ‘thought,’ and 'realityIt has been captured by Chafe (2008) with the metaphor of a flowing stream; there are, in fact, two streams, each with very differ-ent qualities: the stream of thoughts and sounds:

It is instrucńie to compare the eypeńence of listening to a familiar language with listening to a language one does not know. In the farmer case it is the thoughts, not the sounds, of which one is conscious, but in the latter case only the sounds. Sounds are easier for an analyst to deal with, simply because they arepublicly obserrable. Thoughts are expeńenced within the mind, and for that reason are less tractable to objecttie research. On the other hand, thoughts enjay a pńońty over sounds in the sense that the orgamyation and communication of thoughts is what language is all about. The sounds exist in the sernice of the thoughts, and follow wheneier the thoughts may take them. It is the thoughts that drwe language forward^>.

Having said that, let me add that according to Halliday (1976), language always serves three overarching functions: ideational (representing people, objects, events, and States of affairs in the world), interpersonal (expressing the writer’s or speaker’s attitude to such representations), and textual (arraying the above in a cohesive and appropriate manner).

Blommaert 2007,13. Johnstone 2008, 43. Chafe 2008, 673.