6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

 Part 
II
At the textual level, writers pay attention to the sequencing of ideas 
and to the conventions of the type of writing they are engaged in. Readers 
expect to fi nd certain kinds of information expressed and ordered in 
established ways in a business report and this will be rather different from 
what they expect to fi nd in a newspaper or in an informal email. Just as 
written texts tend to be organised in familiar ways, so 
speech events
(Hymes, 1974) – such as booking a hotel room over the telephone, having 
conversations with friends or family, or participating in an employment 
interview – tend to follow common patterns of interaction. A greeting is 
typically answered with a greeting, a question by an answer, an offer by 
acceptance or refusal. Each turn in the conversation fulfi ls a social function 
and these functions combine in predictable ways to make up speech 
events. Learners need to gain awareness of how communicative language 
functions are typically realised in different contexts and of the sequences 
that are followed in familiar speech events in the target language.
In writing (or in the prepared speech of presentations and lectures), 
there is usually greater opportunity to plan. Longer planning time 
allows for more grammatically complex language involving features 
such as subordinate clauses. Because they are not usually under 
pressure to contribute to an ongoing interaction, writers generally 
have greater scope than speakers to organise their sentences – and 
their paragraphs and texts – before committing to them. Textual 
organisation may be given a preliminary physical shape through notes 
or outlines, or it may simply be held in the addresser’s memory. 
In contrast, the burden of organising and developing spoken 
interaction is shared between the participants and depends on their 
ability to take turns, recognising when it is appropriate for them to 
speak and their awareness of the kinds of contribution they are 
expected to make as the interaction progresses.
With limited planning time, spoken interaction is often grammatically 
relatively simple and its vocabulary relatively vague. People do not 
generally talk to each other in well-formed sentences of the kind found 
in language text books (this is why some applied linguistics refer to 
‘speech units’ or ‘utterances’ rather than sentences in spoken interaction). 
Spoken grammar tends to involve more coordination: strings of speech 
units connected by (and often beginning with) 
and 
or 
then
.
Like grammar, the vocabulary of spoken interaction is also 
constrained by the limitations on planning time. Equally, communication 
is facilitated when speakers are together and are able to use their shared 
knowledge of objects around them. Refl ecting these facts, Luoma 
(2004) points out that the vocabulary of spoken interaction tends to be 
relatively generic (‘
book
’ rather than ‘
historical novel
’ or ‘
monograph
’;
 
‘
give
’
 
rather than
 
‘
donate
’,
 
‘
impart
’
 
or
 
‘
allocate’)
and vague (‘
round 
thing
’, ‘
powdery stuff 
’). Informal speech is often marked by references 
to the immediate physical environment. For example, the instructions 

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