A Study on Factors That Affect the learners’ Communication

Deng Qiu-ping

Abstracts:This article is based on the background of Chinese traditional teaching in which we teachers feel it really necessary to do something to improve our teaching. My article will involve the survey and analysis of some factors which I am about to deal with later.

Key wordsage, sex, needs, educational background, interests, motivation, attitudes, characters, personality

As far as we know, language is a means of communication, it is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbol; it is , in essence, a system of symbols designed for the purpose of human communication. Language still has a specific characteristic－creativity, that is, people may use whatever knowledge they have of a language to express their meaning in an infinite variety of ways, and produce many new infinite sentences by using finite means; it serves for the expression of content and the development of our own personality. It is used no matter what situations it would be. We can say where there is life, there is language use, and there are always communicative activities. We live in a world of words. It is the possession of language that distinguishes humans from other animals. That is the basic difference between humans and animals. Humans have no difficulty in acquiring and mastering a language as long as they have the motivation; while animals cant. Humans can also express the same meanings in different settings.

Different people may communicate differently, because they think differently, and their communicative competence is not all the same, their knowledge and experience may vary too. But people can understand each other, for they can use para-linguistics to convey meanings, such as signs, symbols, gestures, postures, facial expressions and so on, all these can communicate meanings. However, some factors may affect learners communication consciously or unconsciously in the course of both teaching and learning. These factors include learners age, sex, needs, educational background, interests, motivation, attitudes, characters, personality and so forth. All these should be taken into consideration when we are talking about language teaching and learning as well as communication. Now let us look at those factors mentioned above.

First, learners age and sex may affect their communicative activities. For example, primary school students may behave quite differently from the secondary school students, we find students from the primary school are easy-going, they act actively and play together happily; on the other hand, they are not mature enough to know much about the difference between males and females, they dont even know what sex is about. But things are different for the secondary school students, there seems to be a great distance between male students and females, they dont like to play together, female students tend to be very nervous and even the male students, though “thickly- faced”, dont feel natural in front of the female students. This may possibly result from their physiological changes, they are beginning to become sensitive to sex at this age. Adult learners seem to behave quite more differently, they tend to be more interested in sex, and like to talk about it, but secretly; The distance between them is growing narrow, one reason is probably that they think they have been grown-ups, they appear to find it necessary to establish friendship and wish to make best friends of their own through their close relationship. So to attract the attention, males often act more actively and always try to find chance to show off themselves. On the contrary, females will not act so actively as males. Their main focus is on sports and love affairs, so when they are together, they wish to talk about them while the older people prefer to talk about health, diet, or political affairs. They show much care for their health and foodstuffs, and spend a lot of time reading to get to know more about national or world situations.

Secondly, learners attitudes and interests are also the important elements which can affect communication. We can take language learning as example. Suppose learners are not interested in our teaching or even growing bored with what we teach, or suppose they just dont like learning English, they feel they are being forced to learn, then it is difficult to arouse their motivation and motivate their interests, they will not be so active as they should be, when learners are not ready or willing to cooperate with us, we can imagine what will possibly happen. We will have much trouble carrying on our teaching. Learners attitudes determine their success. Therefore, if they have a strong desire or need for the mastery of English, we will find it easy to motivate learners interests, especially when they realize the importance of English, and learners will communicate well with us teachers.

Thirdly, learners character or personality is also a factor that can affect their communication. As we know, introverts tend to be unsociable and not to be easy-going, they are inclined to keep silent and not fond of talking with others. So in language classroom, introvert students react slowly and often very passively, they are not talkative, and dislike answering teachers questions. In contrast, extrovert students are active and willing to cooperate. In fact, character or personality has a lot of effects on a persons career and the development of his/her intelligence, including capacity.

Besides those factors mentioned above, we, in fact, still have some other factors which may possibly affect learners communication, such as motivation, knowledge, etc. Speaker-learners experience may also affect communicative competence. Therefore, to learn to be a better communicator, one should have not only good communicative competence, but also good communicative performance and better interpretation, negotiation. The reality still tells us that better communication may cause us to better understand ourselves and others, lead us to great success both in our private and public lives; on the other hand, we may suffer less isolation from those around us. Communication is so important that we should learn it well.

Because opportunities for communication are infinite and include systems of signs and symbols, of which language is only a part; it takes place in an infinite variety of situations, and the success of the communication strategy depends on our understanding of the context and willingness of others to understand our meaning; But in different situations, communicative contexts will also be different, and people will perform differently. From these we can come to the definition for communication, that is, communication is the activity in which language is introduced, new sentences are produced, skills and knowledge practiced and experience obtained and accumulated. Another definition is that communication is the production of language skills and their application in social activities.

It is not difficult for us to find that communication has close relationship with competence and performance. When communicating with others, we usually need competence together with skill in performance. Lacking any one of skills, our communication will be a failure. As a matter of fact, competence is dependent upon both knowledge and abilities, its acquisition is seen as essentially independent of socio-cultural features, while performance constitutes a concurrently ordered selection from two sets of acoustic signals－in brief, codes－language and music, performance is the actual use of language in concrete situations. To perform well, we must communicate well. Competence deals with what we know while performance deals with what we do, it is through performance that competence can be developed, maintained, and evaluated.

In a word, we cannot live in a world without communication. Better communication may create a happier life for us and bring about a lot of success in our work. We can also make many friends by communicating with people around us.

Reference Books:

[1]Pride, J. B. & Holmes, Janet: Sociolinguistics, Great Britain: Hazell Watson & Viney Limited, Member of the BPCC Group, 1972

[2]Ellis, R : Understanding Second Language Acquisition, Oxford University Press, 1985

[3]Savignon, Sandra J: Communicative Competence, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1983

[4]McDonough, Steven H: Psychology in Foreign Language Teaching, Allen & Unwin （ New Zealang ） Ltd in association with the Port Nicholson Press Ltd. 1981

[5]桂诗春：应用语言学；湖南教育出版社，1987