Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

participants. The age, sex, social status and educational level
of the speaker (or writer) and listener (or reader), all affect

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the mode of expression used. It is relatively easy for a native
speaker to tell, even from a snatch of conversation, who is
speaking to whom. Just hearing the sentences, ‘Excuse me,
please, do you have the time?’, ‘Find out what time it is,
would you?’, or ‘Try to tell the time for Mummy, dear’ is
quite sufficient to conjure up a vision of two people who
could possibly be involved in each exchange.
The next two factors are closely connected with each other.
They are the actual situation in which the language occurs and
the kind of contact between the participants. The importance
of the situation itself has always been recognised, and is
heavily emphasised in ‘situational’ language courses, as well as
in travellers’ phrase books, where it becomes clear that the
language varies according to whether one is shopping, or
asking for directions, or booking a hotel room, etc. Depending
on the situation, the contact between the participants could be
either in speech or in writing, and at any point on the range of
proximity, i.e. face-to-face (close or distant), not face-to-face
(two-way contact by telephone or correspondence), or one-
way contact (radio, TV, advertisement, notice). Once again, it
is relatively simple to suggest appropriate contexts for random
items like ‘Time?’, ‘My watch has stopped’, ‘Have you the
time, please?’, ‘Is there a clock here? I need to know the right
time.’ Simply by observing the choice of expression, one can
postulate circumstances in which one or the other would be
likely to be written rather than spoken, used in one place
rather than another.
Another parameter that deserves more recognition than it
has had in language teaching is the nature of the subject matter
or topic or field of discourse. Its influence has been recognised
for extreme cases of English for Special Purposes such as
technical usage, international aviation English, legal
terminology, and the like. But even in very minor and
apparently trivial domestic contexts, the topic quite manifestly
influences the language. ‘He’ll come down in 60 seconds’ and
‘He’ll come down in a minute’, though they appear to have
identical time-reference, are obviously not connected with the
same subject matter, any more than are ‘The parties agree to
abide by the terms hereinafter stated’ and ‘Let’s shake on it.’
All these factors determined by the context are external to
the participant, and are universal only in the sense that they

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operate in all languages. But just how they operate differs
very widely indeed, not only between language, but between
different speech communities using the same language.
Different languages have different techniques for indicating
social status for example. It can be done by special terms like
‘Sir’, or the use or avoidance of first names, or by special
pronouns or verb forms. In English itself, speakers in
Southern England may signal the social class they wish to be
associated with by using certain accent features in their
speech, while in Australia accent is less significant than the
vocabulary used.