6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

 
Assessing productive and interactive skills 
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receptionist indicates to the guest that he is ready to engage in a 
transaction, but could also do this by saying ‘
Next
’ or ‘
Yes?
’ or ‘
Hi 
there
’. Or he could choose to say nothing at all and simply wait for the 
guest to approach the desk and open the interaction. In each case, 
something different would be conveyed about the kind of relationship 
the receptionist expects to establish with the guest. The impacts of 
these kinds of choices upon the addressee are culturally loaded and 
often very diffi cult for language learners to gauge.
Task 6.1
Jakobson (1960) suggested that every utterance, however banal, has 
several levels of meaning. It conveys something about the identity of 
the addresser, their feelings or opinions, their relationship with the 
addressee, and their place in the world more generally. 
An advertising slogan such as ‘
Go to work on an egg!
’ illustrates the 
point. This single sentence has meanings connected with the addressee 
– it attracts our attention and casts us in the role of productive, hard-
working consumers. It has meanings connected with the message 
itself and how it is expressed – the clever word play of the pun on the 
literal, metaphorical and idiomatic implications of ‘
go to work on
’: 
compare ‘
I went to work on a bike
’, ‘
I went to work on an empty 
stomach
’, ‘
The cops went to work on the suspect
.’ 
It has meanings connected with the qualities of the product as a 
healthy and energy-giving food. A message is conveyed about the 
quality of the advertising agency as a skilled communicator, establishing 
rapport by sharing a witty idea with the addressee, and as a competent 
agency, appealing to other businesses. And there is the unstated 
message that we should buy and consume eggs. 
This call to buy eggs may be the central message, but it is conveyed 
largely by the nature of the genre, not by the propositional meaning of 
the sentence. We understand this meaning because we know from the 
context rather than from the linguistic content that the sentence is an 
advertising slogan. 
How would you assess a language learner’s understanding of the 
meaning of this slogan?
How (and why) might you assess a language learner on their ability to 
produce an effective advertising slogan?
Fulcher (2003) and Luoma (2004) cited ‘rules’ of speech put forward 
by Grice (1975) and by Leech (1983) to explain how we signal to each 
other which meanings are intended. Grice proposed that such decisions 
are facilitated by what he termed the cooperative principle of 
conversation. In interpreting speech (or writing), he suggested that we 
have in mind four conversational maxims or rules of thumb which 
include the following:

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