Texts in the Fabric of Life

... a great deal of our verbal interaction does involve clearly defined speech events.... We are frequently involved in uses of language in which we only need half a dozen words, and we can tell immediately what the context of situation is. Halliday and Hasan (1985: 38)

Introduction

This chapter outlines the centrality of texts in our lives: how texts are bound up with and constitute meanings for participation in society. We are born into a web of language use in cultural contexts. We are members of social groups or communities and together we take part in social practices, frequently with language. The use of language is vital for our social relationships. The patterned nature of language as texts enables us to participate socially in speech and writing based on familiarity with people, purposes and contexts of use. Our socialisation experiences in daily interactions familiarise us with cultural meanings – a lot of the time with language. Language is one of our significant semiotic systems. In traditional language teaching, language was extracted from people's experience and reduced to objects for analysis. Pedagogies were designed to reassemble language objects for communication. Social theory constructs curricula around learners' familiarity with texts. As language has such a significant role in the mediation of cultural meanings, texts are central to learning. This is the practical reason for building a curriculum around the texts of social practices.

Life with Language: The Texts of Social Practices

Texts are integral to everyday life. We organise our lives and those of others with numerous spoken and written texts – greetings, instructions, news, emails, telephone calls, calendars, timetables and diaries. Invitations, weather forecasts, sporting programmes and television shows influence our decisions, actions and events. We undertake tasks with shopping lists and in response to letters, emails and SMS messages. We share and reflect on experiences in Facebook, letters and postcards, in conversations and telephone calls. Texts are so much part of our routines and actions that most of the time we are not aware of using them or of the language which constitutes them: they are threaded into the social fabric of relationships, work and leisure.

Texts embed information about people, places and events. A telephone message records with brevity a great deal of information. My daughter took a telephone call for me yesterday and left the message shown in Text 1.1. The message carries evidence of our family relationships – child, aunty and sister. It shows the informality of my daughter's relationship with me. It contains expectations of action – to telephone the caller. The contextual information in a telephone message – which might include who called, for what purpose and at what time – can enable recognition of the source, context and purpose of the message, and give instructions on what actions to take. The message displays social function and purpose for those familiar with the use of iPhones and social media in society.

When we hear or read a text like this we attempt to interpret the social information in the text. The transcript in Text 1.2 is from a service encounter, an event which involves purchasing something. This service encounter takes place in a theatre before a performance. The interlocutors are a theatre attendant (A) who is selling programmes for a drama performance and a theatre-goer (B) who is considering buying a programme. The theatre-goer enquires about a programme for the performance. As I read the transcript I reconstruct the situation in which it occurs. A theatre attendant offers a theatre-goer assistance, who responds with a question about price. As it is nine dollars the theatre-goer asks to look at the programme first to see if it warrants that much money. The attendant then asks what the theatre-goer has decided. The theatre-goer expresses the wish to purchase it. Payment is made, change is given and greetings are exchanged. Although the transcript displays the interaction out of context, we are able to reconstruct the action from the text. Text, actions, material objects and space are integrated. The transcript illustrates the alignment of language with human activity and physical space. Language use is integral to the actions of making a purchase. Success in spoken interaction results from participants' understanding of what is going on, anticipation of response and prediction of the nature of the response.

We observe, hear and produce texts which convey meanings about contexts, participants and proceedings. We have learned these in our cultural socialisation. From multiple encounters with language we distinguish meanings in language patterns and develop expectations of how language is used for specific purposes. We respond to greetings, answer questions, email responses and read instructions for buying a ticket from a machine. We observe the texts around us – how people talk together, write to each other, read messages and document work. In conversations we monitor minutely the actions and reactions of speakers and fine-tune our language choices for different purposes. Different domains of human activity have different texts. In workplaces we adopt technical language and subject-specific discourses. In relationships we distinguish socially appropriate terms. For participation in events, we observe and draw upon the texts of others. For the expression and composition of our own texts, we seek advice or help from experienced others. Over time we develop discourses appropriate to our roles, to our relationships and to our goals.

Movement from one domain of social activity to another requires learning new texts – learning the specific functions, the local meanings and wordings for the comprehension of, and contribution to, activities. For example, when children go to school they need to learn language for understanding and taking part in school procedures and in defined classroom activities. They experience and learn to produce new texts: texts for participation, for gaining attention and for responding appropriately to instructions. They learn to use the formal discourses of education for school subjects and for specialised topics which have characteristic ways of organising information with maps, diagrams and graphs. Children's and students' engagement in new practices socialises them into uses of appropriate discourses (Mickan, 2006).

Familiarity with texts is essential for relationships, work and leisure. Texts have a direct influence on our behaviours. A weather report in the daily newspaper influences the clothes we wear, the transport we take, the plans we make with family or friends. We change menus, venues and programmes in response to weather forecasts. A shopping list directs...