Communication for Specific Purposes: Establishing the communicative event as the focus of attention in ESP

Tim Boswood

Abstract English for Specific Purposes (ESP) practitioners are increasingly aware of the role played by discourse community norms in shaping the communicative demands made on their students. To apply this understanding, however, it is necessary to develop techniques for investigating and analysing both community practice and beliefs. Traditional needs analysis methods in ESP, with their emphasis on texts rather than social action, fail to provide sufficient information about contexts of communication in specific discourse communities to inform communicationoriented teaching. This paper proposes that ESP should evolve into a wider ranging field which may be called Communication for Specific Purposes. Through ethnographic needs analysis, detailed information about interaction in target discourse communities can be obtained and translated into instructional programmes. The communicative event, seen as a context in which text is generated, will be the main focus of this kind of analysis and teaching. There are, however, theoretical problems involved in operationalising the concept of the communicative event for pedagogic purposes. The paper outlines a model of events derived from Hymes and presents a working position on the relationship of texts to their contexts, on the semiotic structures within events, and on questions relating to the practical description of events. Important pedagogic advantages may be expected from further developing this approach. These include new types of achievable objectives, more realistic learning activities, improvedmotivation, anew sensitivity to culturalcommunication patterns, and the potential to transform ESPs passive attitude to authentic texts into a proactive engagement in developin, g the effectiveness of communication practices in industry.

Introduction
A widening gap between ESP theory and practice This paper arises out of the need to analyse communicative behaviour in order to specify what learners should be able to do to fulfil the requirements of their studies or their profession. Communication needs analysis is an established procedure in programme planning in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and is characteristic of courses offered in tertiary institutions and corporate training programmes. In recent years, however, ESP practice has been developing faster than its theoretical foundations.

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older text-oriented approaches cannot fully incorporate the concept of communicative competence or exploit the potentials of the communicative approach in mainstream language teaching. Analysis of texts as product is yielding to an emphasis on processes of text construction and interpretation, matched by beliefs (still largely anecdotal) that simulations, case studies, project- and task-based activities yield better results than traditional language-oriented activities in many ESP contexts (Crookall and Saunders, 1989). At the same time there is a growing interest in the kinds of rich description of communication context an ethnographic approach can yield (Coleman, 1988: Ramani et al., 1988; Johns 1988).
The

This tendency towards the (re)placement of ESP texts in their full social context brings with it the need for a consistent theoretical base; in turn, this requires ESP practitioners to assimilate insights from other disciplines, among them ethnolinguistics, intercultural communication, and pragmatics. This paper argues that the concept of the communicative event canserve as a structure which can unify insights from these disparate fields, a structure on which practitioners can base a new, and wider ranging, conception of Specific Purposes Teachin g. We may term this approach Communication for Specific Purposes (CSP). At the heart of this extended approach must be anew kind of needs analysis which takes the communicative event as its focus of attention. This paper also, therefore, argues for the further development of techniques for communication needs analysis with a broadly ethnographic approach to supplement language- or text-oriented analyses. This proposed orientation towards communicative events has specific pedagogic advantages which are presented in the final section of the paper. However, to achieve these benefits, the concept must be operationalised. This involves both clarification of theoretical aspects and development of appropriate investigative methods. This paper is primarily concerned with the former, and attempts to outline the key aspects of a theoretical framework which will help ESP practitioners to apply a rich notion of context in their investigative, course writing and teaching work. Relevant fields and dichotomous approaches In operationalising the concept of the communicative event we have to reassessthe contributions that linguistic researchers can offer to language pedagogy. This is a new situation in several ways. Not so long ago it was possible for language teachers to broadly disregard work in mainstream linguistics as being largely irrelevant to their work, a disregard echoed heartily by many linguistic practitioners themselves. With the weakening of confidence in the Chomskyan paradigm, and the continuing productivity of soft approaches to linguistics, a converse situation has arisen. There seems now to be a multiplicity of analytical schemes investigating real rather than idealised language behaviour, involving conflicting terminology and arguments over levels of analysis, all of which have insights of potential importance for the ESP teacher and course writer. In a quick survey we may identify the following approaches all of which impact on the work carried out in language classrooms. 1. 3 I. 3. 4. The ethnography of speaking (including work by Malinowski, Firth, Hymes, Frake, Gumperz, Ardener, Saville-Troike and many others). The philosophy of language and speech act theory (e.g., Austin, Searle, Grice). Pragmatics (e.g., Levinson, van Dijks text grammar, Cole). Conversational analysis and work on the dynamics of spoken interaction, kinesics, etc. (e.g., Goffman, Sacks, Hall).
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5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Quantitative sociolinguistics (e.g., Labov, Milroy). Interdiscourse (including intercultural) communication, and its social and organisational implications (e.g., Gudykunst, Ting-Toomey, Hofstede, the Scollons, Gee). The Birmingham approach to discourse and genre analysis (e.g., Swales, Dudley-Evans, following on from the work of Sinclair and Coulthard). The Sydney approach to register and genre analysis (e.g., Martin, Ventola, working within the systemic linguistics of Halliday and Hasan). Cross-cultural rhetoric and discourse analysis (deriving from Kaplan).

Besides the insights from these fields, an expanded conception of ESP will force practitioners to reconcile several dichotomous approaches already present in the language teaching literature. These dichotomies are essentially clines, or differences in focus, as follows. Focus on 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 language individuals cognitive thought texts product etic (form) learning communication groups skills social skills action communicative events process emic (significance) acquisition

Over the past ten years, ESP has been steadily moving towards the right of this table, approaching more closely the communication studiesparadigm, and enriching itself in the process. It is precisely this movement which has generated the intense interest in the areas of linguistic research listed above. Dichotomies 1 and 6 have already been the subject of collections of articles in the ELT documents series (Williams et al., 1984; Robinson, 1988) and these contrasting positions provide a degree of creative tension, to the discussion which follows. It is part of the argument of this paper that through a focus on communicative events, these dichotomies can be reconciled, therefore contributing to the development of a unified discourse of ESP (Boswood and Marriott, 1994, after Freeman, 1992: 15).

Ethnolinguistic

origins

of the concept

of communicative

events

The concept of communicative events derives from ethnolinguistics, particularly from the work of Hymes, and it is well worth reviewing work in this discipline to elucidate its origins. Communicative competence revisited Language teachers are familiar with Hymes ideas from his seminal work on communicative * competence (Hymes 1971) but a re-reading of this influential essay reveals that ELT, despite the communicative movement of the 1970s, has never fully come to terms with the idea. The achievements of communicative methodology, though not insignificant, seem faint when faced with the challenges of really learning to communicate.

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Significantly, Hymes introduced the concept of communicative competence in the context of language development among disadvantaged children. It was a poignant appeal that the concept of linguistic competence with its emphasis on coding and decoding was insufficient to address their educational needs and a wider reaching conception was required. He specified four questions, covering linguistic, pragmatic, cognitive and social aspects of communication, that must be asked when investigating competence: Whether (and to what degree) something is formally possible; Whether(and to whatdegree) something isfeasible in virtue of the means of implementation available; Whether (and to what degree) something is appropriate (adequate, happy, successful) in relation to a context in which it is used and evaluated; Whether (and to what degree) something is in fact done, actually performed, and what its doing entails. (197 1:281) Hymes notes that these questions can be asked in relation to both system and persons, i.e., they have both social and cognitive aspects, and concludes by saying: In sum, the goal of a broad theory of competence can be said to be to show the ways in which the systemically possible, the feasible, and the appropriate are linked to produce and interpret actually occurring cultural behavior (Hymes, 1971:286). Over twenty years later, it would be difficult to construct a more precise definition of what ESP practitioners should be aiming to achieve in communication needs analysis. This application to pedagogic purposes is not surprising. Ethnolinguists, on the basis of their own fieldwork experiences, often reveal a deep concern for education and a sensitivity to the social problems of outsiders working in a new culture and language. Frake puts the point directly at the end of his exposition of Subanun drinking practice: In instructing our stranger to Subanun society how to ask for a drink, we have at the same time instructed him how to get ahead socially (Frake, 1964/1972:265). There is more in Hymes paper, however, than the concept of communicative competence. Two further ideas are specially important in terms of CSP: linguistic routines and sociolinguistic interference. Hymes describes some texts as having sequential organisation beyond the sentence, either as activities of one person, or as the interaction of two or more. Literary genres provide obvious examples ... (Hymes, 1971:290). In the intervening period, discourse analysis and genre analysis have elucidated much about these structures in written texts, but Hymes also notes that spoken interactions have structures analysable partly in terms of paralinguistics, gesture, etc. Conversation and interaction analysis in their turn have shed light on how these structures, these linguistic routines, are realised in everyday speech. Sociolinguistic interference, Hymes notes, arises during contacts between cultures with differing systems of communicative competence (Hymes, 1971:287), including differently structured linguistic routines. Our understanding of the mechanics of this interference has been developed by work in contrastive rhetoric and cross-cultural communication generally, but only recently have some of these insights found their way into the ESP classroom,

Hymes analysis of communicative events Hymes developed his notion of communicative competence within the broad context of ethnographic work where a model of linguistic behaviour is essential in order to systematically investigate the relations between speech and its social and cultural context. For ESP, the most important concepts are components of speech, genres and rules of speaking. We also need to clarify what we mean by speech itself. In two earlier papers Hymes analyses Jakobsons notion of the speech event and identifies the following functional parameters as inherent in the concept of message: the senders (intended, intermediate and unintended), the receivers (intended, intermediary and unintended), the channel, the message-form, the code, the topic (explicit and implicit), and the context or scene (physical and psychological) (Hymes, 1964:215-6 and 1964/1972:22-3). A more fully realised framework for ethnolinguistic descriptions can be found in Hymes (1972/l 986). He defines some basic social units (speech community, speech situation, speech event, speech act, styles of speech) and extends the components of speech into the following list of parameters, described neatly by the acronym SPEAKING, the intention being that these parameters should provide a framework allowing researchers to characterise speech behaviour in any culture. Settings Participants Ends Act sequences Keys Instrumentalities temporal, physical and psychological speaker or sender, addressor, hearer or receiver or audience, addressee outcomes (social purposes) and goals (personal purposes) message form, message content tone, manner or spirit in which an act is done the channels or media of transmission, the forms of speech, and the codes (languages, dialects, varieties and registers) available norms of interaction (proprieties) and norms of interpretation (meanings attached to behaviour) classes of speech events

Norms Genres

The notion of genre deserves discussion, since it has acquired a wider currency recently in the context of genre analysis. From his examples it is clear that Hymes is referring to genres of events, rather than genres of texts. This reflects anthropologists concern to discover structures of cultural knowledge which have broad application. They seek to discover parallels in semiotic organisation between what may seem, on the surface, to be disparate events. It is necessary, therefore, when using the termgenre to distinguish between text-genres, as studied by genre analysis and text-based ESP, and event-genres revealed through ethnolinguistic enquiries. This distinction will be further discussed below. Assuming that it is possible to describe speech in terms of a finite set of parameters as listed above, it is also possible to investigate relationships between the parameters. Such relationships are g. presented by Hymes as rules (or relations) of speakin,. These rules essentially consist of statements describing co-occurrence restrictions between the various parameters and are expressions of the norms governing communication within the community.

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These parameters, and the rules governing their use, are commonly presented in terms of speech, a term which implies a focus on the spoken language. This is partly due to its origins in an ethnography mainly directed towards oral interactions often in non-literate cultures. In transferring the insights of ethnolinguistics into studies of industrial societies we have to be clear that speech is a generic term for all forms of communication. Hymes makes this point when he states Speech is here taken as a surrogate for all forms of language, including writing, song and speech-derived whistling, drumming, horn-calling, and the like. (Hymes, 1972/1986:53-4). For the sake of clarity, then, I will refer to communication rather than speech, and to communication parameters (or components of communication) and rules of communication when describing the interactional resources of a discourse community.

An operational

concept of communicative

events

Hymes analysis of communicative events can be adapted to meet the needs of ESP practitioners. This section summarises a view of what events are, and outlines a set of components to provide a framework for ethnographic needs analysis, CSP course writing and teaching. Segmentation of the stream of social activity As preliminary remarks, we can say that communicative events are a subset of events in general, which are the stuff of the social anthropologists object of enquiry. As a concomitant, linguistic behaviour is a subset of communicative behaviour which in turn is a subset of behaviour in general. No communication occurs in isolation; any communicative act takes place in an event which constitutes its context. The concept of social action that I would like to present here is that of, at base, a continuous stream of activity segmented by the application of sociocultural concepts. This view parallels aphilosophical position which posits an undifferentiated perceptual stream organised by the application of cognitive and linguistic categories in order to create the familiar objects of the physical world. Thus, de Saussure: It is the point of view which creates the object (quoted in Corder, 1973:137). In constructing the physical world we apply categories such as dimension, colour. distance, texture, mass and so on. Likewise, in segmenting the world of social action we need also a set of dimensions, a set of parameters, specific values of which will constitute the entities, the events, making up this social world. In the work of the ethnolinguists and of Hymes in particular, we have available a set of parameters to accomplish this segmentation, the components of communication outlined above. Before presenting a version of these for application in CSP, it is worth considering two questions about their status. First we should ask, to what extent are these parameters culturally specific, or are we dealing with cultural universals? In turn, there are two aspects to this question. The parameters are clearly not cultural universals in the sense that they are not present in all cultures as a means of describing social reality. We should not expect to find, say, equivalent words in all languages to express these concepts. On the other hand, the parameters are presented as being universal in the sense that the ethnolinguist, or the ESP practitioner, can employ them as a framework to guide the initial stages of any investigation.
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Secondly, are the parameters a case of Gods truth or mumbo-jumbo? For any but naive realists, the latter. Descriptive parameters must be developed in terms of the practical insights they give us for the particular purposes, in our case pedagogic, that we have in mind. For this reason we should have no hesitation in redefining the parameters in whatever way we feel appropriate. An operational version is presented in the following section. Components of communication The set of parameters I propose as a starting point are derived from, but slightly different from, those presented above. They are a combination of ideas derived from Hymes, Saville-Troike (1982: 1378) and Munby (1978). They are presented in detail in a previous paper (Boswood, 1992) so I will present them only briefly here. The major components are as follows: participants . . purposes channel and related technology . . mode topics and subject matter . spatial setting . temporal setting . psychosocial setting . act sequence . rules for interaction . norms of interpretation . non-verbal media . language variation . Each of these main categories can be further analysed to provide a comprehensive framework which, it is intended, can store descriptive information on key aspects of any kind of communicative event that learners will need to participate in. In a pedagogic context, however, we also need to move from description to prescription, from is to ought. Any full needs analysis model therefore must include objective and subjective information about students and other stakeholders in learning and, in terms of communicative events, the following extra components: . . . critical importance (in terms of training needs) the training gap (between intake and target ability) text analysis (which may be on the basis of grammatical, discourse, lexical or skills features, or a combination of these, whichever best informs the training programme for a given communicative event).

The full model is printed as part of Boswood (1992) and is available as a word-processable file on disk.

What constitutes an event? Given a set of communication components, it is possible to characterise communicative events in terms of variables and values, i.e., the components are treated as variables which are realised in terms of actual values in specific real cases. Idealised events, or event genres, may be described in terms of ranges of such values. Aparticularclass of event, therefore, will be defined in terms of certain kinds of participants, in certain role relationships, having certain conventional personal purposes, using certain channels and codes within a framework of conventional acts, and so on. Such conventional combinations of values form a construct which has recognised social salience within the community. In fact, each aspect of the event is socially salient and it is the social significance involved in their variation which is expressed in norms of interpretation and rules for interaction. Events with similar values on certain key parameters can be grouped together as genres of events. Comparable act-structures are likely to be the most important point of similarity, but we may also find it useful to illustrate communication universals for a given community by grouping events according to other criteria. Speech, writing and communicative acts It has been noted above how the term speech in ethnolinguistics applies to all forms of communication. Within the present model, it is clear that speaking and writing are functionally equivalent in terms of communicative analysis. Pursuing this idea leads to further implications indicating how terminology can affect our approaches to investigation. The dynamics of spoken interaction are intrinsically observable. Spoken interactions tend to have a unity in time and space despite the ability of communications technology to allow increasing separation of participants. In consequence they are commonly analysed as socialphenomena using ethnolinguistic methods. There has been less investigation of the cognitive aspects of oral interaction or production, rather more perhaps in the area of listening. Oral interactions are also more likely to have natural language terms indicating social recognition of them as identifiable events. Thus in English we can easily conceive of a court hearing, a church service, a class, or a shareholders meeting = as being communicative events. In some cases we may also have available terms which refer to both the text and the event in which the text is generated, e.g., a lecture. In contrast, interactions in writing are usually treated as if they were intrinsically non-observable. They commonly lack unity in both time and space and in consequence they have been extensively investigated in terms of cognitiveprocesses. There has been comparatively little social or ethnographic investigation of interaction through writing. We also have few natural terms in English for the events comprising the unity of written interaction. Rather, we have words for the texts themselves. Thus we easily conceive of a letter from a friend (as a text) but find it less easy to refer to the event which consists of the processes of writing and reading such a letter. Nevertheless, in terms of communication in context, the written interaction has just as muchintrinsic unity as a phone-call from the same friend, a unity which can be characterised by just the same parameters, even though a convenient nominalisation may be lacking. This lack of a natural language terminology should not hinder us from investigating all communicative events, involving both speaking and writin g, using all the analytical resources at our disposal. There

is much to be gained from the cognitive analysis of speaking and listening. But much too will be gained from ethnographic observation of people writing and reading. Too often we forget that writing and reading are also communicative acts with interdependent act-structures comparable to those involved in oral interaction, often with culturally salient aspects which teachers would do well to recognise (Odell, 1985; Faigley, 1985). We must therefore be careful to employ terms which both distinguish the text from the event and from the activity of any participant in it. These points, and the relationship between the text and its context, are developed below.

Text and context

Texts and events The main advantage to be gained from operationalising the concept of the communicative event as outlined above is that it enables spoken and written texts to be considered within their full context of use. However, before defining the kinds of relationship which hold between a text and its context, it is necessary to distinguish clearly between them and to develop some conventions for referring to them. A text is a linguistic unit generated within a communicative event. The communicative event is a sociocultural unit the components of which serve to define salient elements of context within which the text becomes significant. Text-genres are not event-genres, and organisational components of text are not organisational components of events, though research may reveal regular relations between them. The text does not reflect the whole of the event and the nature of the event is not deducible in whole from the text alone. In consequence, analyses based solely on transcriptions, though revealing, are insufficient for communications analysis and teaching. Texts and events are not necessarily coterminous. An event may generate one or more texts, or on occasion no text at all. A single text may be generated over a succession of events. As Sager et al note in their extensive discussion of English special language texts:
. . . any message which is sent and received as a unit of intention can be called a text. It

may, therefore, consist of a dialogue, an exchange of letters, a meeting, an essay written at one sitting or a book written over several years. The time factor is only incidental as is the place. Minutes of adjournedmeetings in different venuesare considered as a single text unit because the unity of intention is of overriding importance. Thus a meeting which has to take a number of decisions or make recommendations ends after several sessions with a single report which accomplishes the original task. (Sager et al., 1980:58) These points underline the need, already noted, to distinguish carefully the terms we employ for describing texts and events. Thus narrative is not an event category, neither is argumentation nor description. These are textual categories, not culturally salient types of communicative interaction. In themselves they predicate no particular social goal or personal aim, no specific participants or roles. They are aspects of text organisation, components in a rhetorical tool kit, which may be employed in a variety of events. One kind of verb-noun combination, activity and content, is proposed by Gumperz (1982: 166) as an appropriate way of referring to events (in his terminology, speech activities); he gives the examples of discussing politics, chatting about the weather and lecturing on linguistics. Unfortunately, this

convention focuses attention on the activity of particular participants in the interaction and obscures the unity of productive and receptive processes in the event. For instance, referring to an event as lecturing on linguistics obscures the role of the audience in the event. A more appropriate terminology would be to devise a nominalisation, easy in this case, such as a lecture on Linguistics. A further example may help to illustrate this separation of event and text. We may like to propose a claim for damaged goods as an event type and take writing and reading of a claim letter as potential key activities within this event. An authentic claim letter, then, is not, in itself, an event. It is a text, or (when generalised) an example of a text-genre, which may contain a variety of discourse structures such as those mentioned above. As such, it may feature in a variety of events besides the original claim in which it was first generated, e.g., it may be handed to an employee with instructions for solving the problem, it may be used as an example in a classroom, it may be the subject itself of a complaint or a refutation, it may be used as evidence in a court of law or quoted in the punch-line of a joke. Any given text may be a focal, or a peripheral, part of many kinds of communicative event, commercial, pedagogic, political, or personal. Language and other behaviour in events as rule-governed Given that it is possible to separate the text from the communicative event in which it occurs, we can go on to explore the relationships between them and attempt to define regular co-occurrences between text features and components of events. These can be described in terms of rules, norms or, following Grices terminology, maxims. Characterising the common features of texts generated within similar contexts has always been at the heart of the ESP approach. Thus Sager et al. note that communicative activities constitute . . . a sequenceof mutually conditioned and increasingly restricted choices ( 1980:87). Without overstressing the constraints on participants, it is clear that space-time loci, organisational context, conventional forms of messages, preceding communications, in fact all components of communicative events, serve to increasingly restrict the range of available choices. An engineer sent to discuss a contract with a client has no significant pragmatic choices, a limited range of semantic choices according to the nature of the contract and slightly greater freedom within the social norm of his special language to pattern his sentences. (Sager et al., 1980:88). This understanding, however, has not been fully exploited in ESP. Analysis has focused on linguistic and discourse features of conventionally organised texts rather than on the contextual components which explain and give meaning to these preferred organisations. In effect, this involves analysing the effect of the rules rather than the rules themselves or their operation. This focus on etic rather than emic analysis results in a lack of explanatory power in ESP analysis which limits its pedagogic value. Looking at text rather than the interaction between text and context has also caused ESP to shy away from situations which do not generate clearly structured texts. For this reason ESP is particularly weak in dealing with social conversation, with smalltalk, with daily office interaction, with small group meetings, and with less formal kinds of interaction in general. These situations may, nonetheless, be highly significant and challenging parts of our students lives and the frequent demands for this kind of instruction leads to a certain feeling of helplessness, uneasily rationalised on occasion by ESP practitioners in terms of lack of time or materials.

There is increasing evidence, however, that informal interactions are rule-governed in significant ways, even though the operation of these rules may not reveal themselves so clearly in the texts they help to generate. Thus Gumperz remarks, Conversational analysis over the last few years has demonstrated that not only formally distinct speech events but all kinds of casual talk are rule governed (Gumperz, 1982: 159). The CSP approach has the advantage that it is possible to take these rules fully into account in planning learning. The analysis of communicative events must include due consideration of rules for interaction and norms of interpretation which allow application of the techniques and insights developed by conversation and interaction analysis. It is clear that such rules operate at several levels of generality. We may wish to specify rules for interaction operating globally over wide cultural systems (e.g., Chinese culture), over social subgroups (e.g., tertiary level students in Hong Kong), over specific professional communities (e.g., construction engineers), within specific communicative events (e.g., staff evaluation interviews), and even within specific stages or acts of an event (e.g., openings of presentations). Clearly we are dealing here with a further aspect of the much-debated difference between general and specific language or communication skills. In an ideal world, we may like to see the more global rules for oeneral language programmes, leaving rules specific to interaction learned (or acquired) in initial, g professional sub-cultures, to events, or to units below the event, for consideration in specific purpose Oiven the textual rather than the communicative bias of most secondary school programmes. In fact, g syllabi, CSP programmes will probably have to start from scratch in this area. ESP practitioners should be prepared to approach all aspects of communicative behaviour in terms of such rules or maxims. Communicative behaviour is not limited to the creation of texts. We should also expect to find regular correspondences concerning paralinguistics, kinesics and proxemics in oral interaction, and correspondin, g norms relating to typography, layout and graphic design in writing. But rules of this kind relate to more than the social acceptability of the forms of communication; they also underlie the ease or difficulty of cognitive processing. The cognitive aspects are considered in the following section. Processing of text in context The social nature of the rules for interaction mentioned above allow a certain level of interpretation of the text in so far as it performs certain social functions. An understanding of how meaning is generated within the context is, however, the domain of cognitive psychology, semantics and ggest an approach which may allow us to explain how pragmatics. Here, I would only like to su,, understanding of the communicative event as context contributes to understanding of a text. The approach involves postulatin, g macrostructures and superstructures of events similar to those described by Van Dijk as mediating understanding of texts. Van Dijks text grammar conceives of the propositional content of sentencesforming macrostructures (or macropropositions) through the operation of semantic mapping rules (Van Dijk and Kitsch, 1983: 189-196). These macrostructures encode global text structures such as topic continuity and textual coherence and help communicators perform management tasks while processing text and when planning, leamin, g or recalling complex semantic sequences. Their nature is dual, in that they are perceived as both of the text and generated by the individual who processes the text. In other words, these structures exist in both the textual and the cognitive dimensions and the division between the two is blurred.

Semantic macrostructures are unique to a particular text (or a processing instance) and thus are distinguished fromcognitive knowledge structures, superstructures in van Dijks terminology, such as frames or scripts which are stereotypical. The notion of superstructures recalls the structures of classical rhetoric (e.g., Aristotles analysis of tragedy, or syllogism structure in logic) which underwent a structuralist rebirth in the 1960s a notable analysis being in Barthes ( 1966) and a more recent example being the situation-problem-solution-evaluation structure exemplified in everyday English texts by Jordan (1984). Superstructures are hierarchical, and are found in relation to metre, prosody, semantics, pragmatics, varying in their scope of application from a single sentence to a whole text. cognitive elements, superstructures act as schemata to aid creation, processing and recall of texts. They are involved in both bottom-up and top-down processin g. In bottom-up processing, textual information, particularly semantic content, is used to assign the text to a particular genre with a certain superstructure. In top-down processing the superstructure aids interpretation and prediction, by generating expectations regarding the global content of the text as a whole and of specific subsequent episodes.
As

It is revealing to attempt a transfer of this analysis from text to action. Thus we may postulate that events as well as texts are processed by means of macrostructures and superstructures which we may term scripts or, in Ardeners term, templates (Ardener, 1973/1989: passim). This is suggested implicitly in Van Dijk as he remarks When we understand a text, we no longer have access to all previous sentences we have read, and the same holds for the everyday understanding of events and actions, of which the multiple details can only be partially retrieved. (Van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983: 195, my emphasis). We can then conceive of how a participants understanding of interaction within an event develops. As interaction is initiated, participants refer to a superstructure in order to guide them through appropriate behaviour patterns relevant to their goals. This superstructure in effect encodes cultural norms common to the community. It acts as a script to aid the initiation of action and enables participants to interpret the behaviour of others within the event through top-down and bottom-up processing. As the event develops, a cognitive macrostructure specific to the event encodes global information enabling participation, processing and recall, not only of textual information but of all aspects of the interaction as summarised in the components of communication presented previously. At this stage we need not speculate whether text and context are represented as separate structures or as a unified structure containing features of both kinds of element. This is a matter for empirical research into discourse processing. For pedagogic purposes we need only bear in mind that interpretation of text = will depend on some form of encoding of cultural norms relating to action and to the context as a whole.

Further issues involved

in defining

communicative

events

Significance - communicative events as social signs The preceding discussion has made it clear that any comprehensive theory of communicative events

36

must incorporate dimensions of both social and cognitive analysis. This does not, however, how actions acquire social significance; for this we need a theory of meaning.

explain

We should not take a naive view that the cognitive templates which participants have constitute meanings of social actions. Rather, we can adopt a structuralist approach and analyse the significance of social action semiotically. Communicative events in any given social group combine to form global structures in both their social andcognitive aspects.Within these structures, events demonstrate paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships. Similarly within specific kinds of events, the possibilities of action may be analysed along both dimensions (Gumperz and Hymes, 1972/1986: 17) and it is from these relationships that social actions derive their significance. Hymes reminds us that sociolinguistic features, like linguistic features, are signs in the classic Saussurean sense, comprising both a form and a meaning (signifiant and signifie) (1971:291). Sociolinguistic signs may be as complex as a whole language, or as minimal as a single phonetic feature. Communicative events, as socio-cultural constructs, can also be treated as complex signs and are susceptible to semiotic analysis. Any value on any of the parameters of communication can also be seen as a sign with a social significance. The structuralist position locates meaning in difference, thus in Saussures famous dicta, In language there are only differences (19 16/1974: 120) and Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others (Saussure 1916/1974:114). So too, events are what they are not, in the sense that the social significance of an event is defined by the other events in the paradigm. In their social aspect, the series ofpotential events taken as a whole can be seen as a totality comprising a groups communication matrix (Hymes, 1964:386). It comprises one aspect of the repertoire of communication tools available to community members. The cognitive equivalent of this global, social structure may be called, in Ardeners phrase, a world-structure (1973/1989: 100-103; 1975/ 1989: passim). This idea recalls Whorfian cultural relativism. Culturally defined concepts or schemata are encoded in the language, more or less restricting interaction, and are matched by parallel encoding of situations, events and acts. A communitys world-structure thus comprises the totality of possible communicative events viewed as scripts or templates. This analysis helps to explain how, on entering a new culture, a mismatch between worldviews can lead to a feeling of the unreality or exoticism of what we observe. We may adjust our concepts and schemata, or develop new ones (particularly through learning a language), or force our perceptions into our existing concepts like a foot into an ill-fitting shoe. Ardener (1975/1989: 144) provides an interesting discussion of how European explorers in the Age of Discovery packaged the (literally) fabulous new sights and scenes in the concepts of their more limited world until, gradually, through increasing familiarity and an adjustment of worldviews, he notes in a memorable phrase, the glory . . . departed from the coconut (1975/1989: 149). Learners attempting to communicate in a second language may well face a similar mismatch of world-structures; this is Hymes sociolinguistic interference as previously mentioned. The ESP practitioner hoping to take this problem on board, will however, find little help in most current
47

language teaching practice. ESL and foreign language courses in the United States and Britain frequently make a conscious attempt to teach the culture alon g with the language, which may help to reduce this mismatch. Unfortunately, this attempt is often restricted by a limited view which locates cultural difference in surface features such as dress, food and politeness strategies. In EFL teaching, and even more strongly in ESP, language use is most commonly taught in isolation from culture. This is partly because of a narrow conception of culture which sees English as a world language divorced from, or transferable to, any national or ethnic environment. It may also be, I suspect, part of a liberal attitude which distrusts the imperialist overtones of earlier EFL work. This is a loss for our learners which can be remedied by introducing a wider-ranging, critical notion of culture which will include, besides ethnic and national cultures, aspects such as corporate culture, the culture of social sub-groups and the related notions of literacy and ideology (Gee 1990). The question of culture will be further discussed in the final section of this paper. Synchronic and diachronic investigation sign-systems, events and their constitutive components can be analysed in both synchronic and diachronic terms. Synchronic investigation allows the ESP practitioner to perceive the current organisation of a communitys world-structure. Diachronic investigation allows the description of changes in world-structure over time. Both approaches are important when, as in Hong Kong, practitioners are working within a fluid situation of accelerated political, social and linguistic change.
As

Changes in event structures occur since participants both apply an idea of the world and recreate it at every moment of communication. The dynamic tension between an idea and its realisation causes cognitive structures to be constantly modified and redefined. Each encounter develops the schemata of the participants, both during and, through reflection, after the encounter. This of course leads to the possibility of learning. Thus we learn to communicate, to operate socially, precisely by communicating and reflecting on the process. Diachronic and synchronic investigation can be directed to both global relationships between events and towards constituent structures of individual events. Therefore one of our most important tasks in ethnographic needs analysis is to characterise the structural possibilities existing within events, i.e. to analyse events into constituent units. Units within the event Act-structure will be our main focus when we seek to identify the internal organisation of events. Given that communicative events demonstrate both paradigmatic and syntagmatic patterning we have to investigate both the temporal ordering of sub-units and sets of alternates within a discovered frame. The broad theory informin, 0 this description will be the theory of action; there is a useful introduction to this field in Van Dijk (1977: 167- 188). In this kind of investigation, we will be concerned with three inter-related issues: the representation of act-structures, the number and kinds of sub-units we use, and the criteria by which these sub-units may be defined. Existin, g work in both ethnolinguistics and genre analysis can help us define a principled approach. In ethnolinguistic analysis, the main constituent of communicative events is the speech act. In line with the move from speech to communication stated previously, I would prefer to refer to

communicative acts; we can then explicitly include the processes ofcomposing and decoding written texts in a framework equivalent to that used for oral interactions. However the simple analysis of events into a string of communication acts will not be sophisticated enough for most CSP purposes. Act-structure has been deeply analysed in the Sydney school of genre analysis and is well typified by Ventola (1987) in her extensive account of service encounters in English. Ventola portrays the dynamic structuring0 of this genre of oral interaction by means of an extended flowchart listing actions, choices and information flow. Her technique builds on an early article by Ehlich and Rehbein (1972) who represented restaurant interaction by means of what they called apraxeogram. This was a graphic portrayal of a hyperpragmeme (in essence the act-structure of an event) consisting of pragmemes (actions and interactions) and decision-points in a canonical order. The rather arcane terminology should not obscure the sense of the underlyin g concept which simply attempts to represent the essential elements comprising interactions within this genre. Ventolas analysis is made within the context of Hallidayan systemic grammar in which the variables of Field, Tenor and Mode combine to realise the situational context determining the register used. Ventola treats genre as a semiotic organisation being realised by register. Register is manifested by successive choices of Field, Tenor and Mode throughout the interaction. Each structural element within the genre (each episode, transaction or act) may allow for different register choices. That is, there is a continuity of register within each structural element but discontinuities are possible across element boundaries. We can employ a similar kind of description using the components of communication presented above. Like values of Field, Tenor and Mode, these components characterise elements of communication at all levels. Not only communicative events as wholes, but each element or act within an event, can be described using the same framework of components. The unity of elements, whether at the event level or at subordinate levels, arises then through the continuity of values on certain key parameters. At the event level, values on these key parameters would have to be maintained throughout the event for the interaction to be deemed successful. For example, the unity of an event such as a sales presentation may arise particularly from a continuity of intention (in terms of corporate goals or personal purposes) and from unity of participants roles. Other parameters, such as psychosocial setting (tone or atmosphere), topic, etc., will vary according to the acts, or other sub-units, taking place. Unity of sub-units within the event will also arise from continuity of values on the specific components of communication. Intention and role will be important, but we may also expect to find more detailed continuity in terms of topic, mode or tone. Generally speaking, as we define finer and more detailed structural elements within an event we may expect to find continuity on an increasing number of parameters. As a summary of this analytical approach, we can say that an event consists of a finite set of parameters constantly changing over time, certain combinations of which have cultural salience at sub-event levels. These significant combinations give the appearance of a rank-ordered act-structure, consisting of nested sub-units, which will be more or less clearly defined depending on the extent to which the event is ritualised. We then have to define a terminology to describe the sub-units.
49

We may be tempted to define a generally applicable rank-ordered set of sub-units, such as event episode - transaction - act. Unfortunately the advantages given by a consistent descriptive framework are likely to be overcome by the inflexibility of the system. Here we must bear in mind the purposes of the analysis. The number of levels for a given event should be decided according to pedagogic and explanatory necessity. If an event can be described simply in terms of speech acts then so be it. If intervening elements seem to be required then we may use them. We may find that superordinate elements above the event level may also be useful. For example, given the task of teaching company secretaries how to interact in a shareholders meeting, we have several choices of analysis of the target event. We may treat the meeting as a unitary event comprising several different episodes (opening the meeting, chairpersons report, questions from the floor, etc.). Alternatively, we may decide to describe the meeting as amacro-unit, a situation, during which several events take place. The most powerful advantages recommending either approach are those arising from informant intuitions and pedagogic effectiveness. This implies that our analysis of events will be guided to some extent by our pedagogic orientation. This is appropriate and reflects the difference between strict ethnography and ethnographic needs analysis. Definition of boundaries Besides defining the internal structure of communicative events we will also have to define the boundaries between them. How do participants signal the boundaries of events? Successful communication depends on mutual negotiation towards agreement on the type of event being created and a commonality of expectations and norms for its progress and conduct. Once this has been achieved, the event continues, with meaning being interpreted in terms of the (partially) shared scripts or templates, until the participants signal a change or transition to another event. It appears to be the case that in some events (possibly all) certain preliminary goals must be achieved before the event can continue happily. Examples may include, in the oral-aural channel, the formal opening of a meeting or the conventional aspects of phone call openings as described by Schegloff (1968/1986). In approaching written text, we may also be able to identify initial social or cognitive acts contributing to effective productive or receptive processing (e.g., signposting the structure of the text to come). Achieving this initial success may require anything from a single communicative act to a series of negotiations, however once it is accomplished the event flows on towards completion. If, for some reason, the opening episode or transaction is not happily achieved, the event may still continue though participants will have a feeling of discomfort, the impression of an unhappy event. We may easily recall examples from our own experience such as the embarrassment caused by uneasy smalltalk at the start of meetings or the uncomfortable openings to some student consultations. Boundaries between sub-units inside events may be marked by both verbal and non-verbal signals. Goffman mentions a class of specific, conventional utterances with diverse functions such as blaming, praising, thanking, supportin g, greeting, showing affection, sympathy, etc. which have a bracketing function. . . a special role in the episoding of conversation. (198 1:20-21). One of our tasks in needs analysis for CSP must then be to identify which kinds of utterance (spoken or written) conventionally have delimiting functions in the events we are studying.

In the context of a rank-ordered structure, we may predict that the boundaries of units will be marked by transition-marking units at a subordinate level. In other words, given an event analysed into a series ofepisodes, each of which is analysed into a series of communication acts, then specific kinds . . of acts will form boundaries to episodes, and certain episodes will signal the boundaries to the event. The definition of such boundary units will also be an important element in understanding target events for CSP learners. This kind of analysis can also yield interesting insights into the teaching situation itself, i.e., the class considered as a communicative event. Consider the example of the beginning boundary of an level English language class where the students are in the room before the teacher and come to that room for the class meeting. Let us consider three boundaries which could feasibly mark the beginning of the language class: 1. 2. 3. when the students enter the room when the teacher enters the room when the teacher calls the class to order

Language teachers frequently exhort their students to start speaking the target language (TL) as soon as they (the students) enter the classroom. In effect, they are setting the boundary to the language class to be at 1. Failing this, they may encourage the students at least to speak the TL whenever the teacher is present, i.e., they wish to establish boundary 2. Some students may resist this, even though they may well be perfectly content to speak the TL durin,g class activities. For them the boundary of the lesson, any lesson, may be 3 rather than 1 or 2, and the attempt to change this community norm is likely to be fruitless so long as this boundary holds for the other lessons which the students attend. To achieve the target behaviour, the students are in effect required to change not just their behaviour in a language class, or their view of what a language class is, but their whole view of what any class is. What this example underlines is that an attempt to change an apparently minor aspect of language behaviour may require learners to reassessa wider, and possibly very basic, template or superstructure, possibly even one crucial to their own notions of self and identity. A class is, of course, a clearly defined event with fixed boundaries, recognised norms of interaction * and rules of speaking Many events are less ritualistic, less amenable to ethnographic analysis; our analytical system must be able to deal equally with these. Kinds of unclear definition We should not expect that, for a given community, all salient events will be equally easy to define. As Gumperz says, Events differ in the extent to which they are isolable (1982: 165). There is a cline between ritualised events, such as the language class above, and less clearly structured interaction such as a casual conversations. We have already seen that the unity of an event, or any sub-unit in an event, arises from a unity in the values of certain key parameters over the course of the event. Ritualised activities (e.g., hearings in a court of law) are clearly defined in two ways: 1. certain parameters are of key importance in understanding the event; they define the event, and, in a sense, are constitutive of the event;

2.

the ranges of values on these parameters are relatively narrow, and may be explicitly articulated.

Thus in a court-hearing, values on the parameters relating to participants are highly restricted in terms of roles and relationships, they have specific names (witnesses, plaintiffs, etc.), specific duties, and rules of speaking which are explicitly defined in rules of procedure. Similarly clearly defined are social goals, personal purposes, the psychosocial and physical settings, and act-structure. Other events have less well defined parameters. This ill-definition may be either in the subset of constitutive parameters (1 above) or the range of acceptable values of these parameters (2 above}. For example, we may ask what constitutes a party? There seems to be no subset of constitutive parameters which can be taken as essential for definition of this certainly identifiable event-genre. At the same time there are no clearly set values for any of the parameters, which may vary widely in range. This is very similar to Wittgensteins analysis of the concept of game (1945/1968:31-5). Certain combinations of features are seen as typical of games and, provided a certain number of these are present, then the activity may be so classed (see also Gumperz, 1982: 166). Discontinuous events Communicative events are not necessarily continuous either in time or in space. Temporally they may be interrupted, or intrinsically periodic. Geographically they may occur contemporaneously though separated by great distances. Events may be interrupted by other events, e.g., the telephone call that comes in the middle of a meeting. In this case one event is put on hold for a period, then restarted. The situation of participants in the original event, who are not drawn into the interrupting event, is most interesting. They too may be placed on hold and find themselves in a kind of communicationless limbo which they may fill with surrogate activity or with spontaneous time-filling events such as chatter or doodling. Other events may be intrinsically discontinuous, such as a series of meetings, an exchange of letters or an academic paper which may be written (and read) in stages. Geographically, an event may be mobile, moving through different places at the same time. Trivially, this only implies that the participants are in motion during the event. Less trivially, we can see that it is possible for an event to take place at different places at the same time, e.g., a political protest, a general strike, a satellite conference or a day of meditation, with the locus of control shifting geographically at different stages. Embedding and recursion It will also be possible to identify a number of ways in which events can be nested inside one another, allowing the possibility of recursion. In one non-trivial sense, events can be embedded in others through reporting. The novel of course is a reconstruction of events within a complex event of its own, a deeply nested structure limited only by the creativity of the author. Minutes of meetings and reports of decisions also have this same quality of recursion or self-reference. Ventola (1987:3) also notes generic embedding whereby participants operating within one genre of event generate structural elements characteristic of other genres. This kind of mismatch is often deliberately humorous, or, when unintended, an occasion for embarrassment or ridicule. Examples may include an ill-timed joke or the adoption of an overly-formal tone in a conversation between friends.

The notion of strategy The idea of strategy brings the concept of event-structure into the evaluative domain. Not all communicative acts achieve their social goals (or the personal purposes of their participants) with equal effectiveness. Through strategy we recognise the freedom of action of participants within the cultural constraints governing their interaction. The potential for strategic action is never absent, even in the most rigorously defined events - consider the creative potentials open to lawyers in the court case mentioned previously. Here too, the parallel analysis of spoken and written interaction is revealing. Writing and reading strategies when dealing with written texts are functionally parallel to social strategies in face-to-face interaction. The salespersons attempts to guide a customer through stages of problem -possibilities -proposal - closure is functionally equivalent to the writers attempt to guide the readers thoughts along predetermined paths of situation -problem - solution - evaluation. Both are purpose-driven and dependent on shared cultural norms for their effectiveness. We may then predict that reading strategies will be to some extent culturally determined. Just as effective techniques of face-to-face salesmanship, or appropriate stages of comforting the bereaved, will reflect communal norms, so too interaction with written texts will be a matter of culture. We cannot assume that the strategies native readers in the native culture employ for dealing with texts are automatically the most appropriate for readers using the language within different cultural communities. Not only will communities have globally contrasting views of the role of the written word (and of literacy), cognitive strategies will vary according to the rhetorical conventions of the communitys texts.

Pedagogic

advantages

of the CSP approach

The paper up to this point has discussed, on a theoretical level, some of the concepts that have to be accounted for by ESP practitioners seeking to adopt an ethnographic stance in investigating the communication practices of their students discourse communities. This final section presents some of the positive effects on teaching that the CSP approach can support. Allows achievable aims and objectives It is frequently remarked that ESP courses allow insufficient time to effect measurable changes in participants global command of the language. If this is true, the ESP practitioners aim must be to identify the areas where measurable improvements can be achieved within the constraints of the situation. There is no doubt that we do have time to increase our students ability to communicate using the language ability they already have. Event analysis provides a theoretical foundation for planning this kind of learning but will need to be translated into action through carefully constructed aims and objectives. ESP programme aims and learning objectives are often couched in vague terms, e.g., students should be able to write letters of complaint, take part in meetings , give presentations on technical topics and so on. Few of these statements act as real guides for either learning or assessment, largely because standards of achievement and conditions of performance are unspecified. They are not, however, unspecifiable. On the basis of ethnographic needs analysis, it is possible to establish community norms as well as real-world performance conditions. On this basis objectives can be reviewed and rewritten as truly achievable learning targets.

Extends ESP outside closely defined text-types It was mentioned previously that a text-oriented ESP finds itself limited to situations which generate clearly analysable text types. By analysin g events communicatively, however, we can make meaningful generalisations about casual, non-ritualistic situations, and extend our teaching into these areas. We can develop activities focusing on interactional norms, on boundary and transition markers, on manipulation of atmosphere (psychosocial setting) and approach teaching conversation with a degree of conceptual rigour, putting it on a new, and theoretically sound, footing in ESP environments. Encourages focus on process Ethnographic needs analysis encourages course writers and teachers to focus more clearly on the processes involved in communication. It extends the product-oriented approach of Munby-type instruments in order to support process-oriented syllabus planning and learning methodology. We have seen that communication involves both social and cognitive processes. CSP is able to take full account of both. Social processes include the generation of appropriate act-structures through which events develop as well as the interactional dynamics which govern spoken discourse. Using CSP we should be able to truly teach interactional skills rather than the ESL/EFL abstractions speaking and listening. These social, interactional skills naturally involve cognitive processing whatever channels are involved. CSP provides a more realistic framework for approaching these processes by reaching beyond structural and semantic processing into the pragmatics of the situation. In many communication classes this approach is applied to the process of text creation when learners are introduced to techniques of communication task analysis. Rather than providing text models for emulation, learners may be given a model of the process of text planning, a model which directs the attention 0 of writers in a conscious way to key elements of context such as goals, audience characteristics, community norms and conventional event structures so that they may make principled decisions as to communication strategy. Ethnographic needs analysis can provide practitioners with the information needed to guide learners performance in this process by reference to a reliable knowledge of the target discourse community. Supports acquisition as well as learning Many courses are moving towards the integration of skills through extended simulations, case studies or projects. During these activities students are allowed ample time to speak and write freely in order to accomplish the communicative tasks generated by the internal dynamics of the activity. In effect, we are trying to encourage acquisition through use rather than learning through practice. The CSP approach characterises the acquisition of communication skills as the gradual modification of scripts and superstructures through participation in, and reflection on, real communicative tasks. If necessity is the mother of invention, so need seems to be the precursor of acquisition. (Bloor and St. John, 1988:90). How can we mould this process of acquisition save by creating appropriate needs in the classroom, needs that are modelled on those for which the learner is preparing? These needs have to be discovered through ethnographic needs analysis. Thus in acquisition- rather than learningbased pedagogy, communication needs analysis provides the necessary background knowledge to validate the tasks we set the students and the instruments through which we measure their ability.
54!

Encourages truly communicative teaching and learning methods CSP must also take as its target the intervention of the language teacher with the learner during participation in real communicative events, during performance of the target task itself. This points us along the way to a truly communicative methodology. Besides creating a surrogate reality in the classroom through simulation and case-study, we should also be alert to seize all opportunities to catch the learners in authentic communication tasks, and insert our contributions and guidance at these significant moments. Thus whenever possible the CSP practitioner should not set assignments - rather, assignments can be drawn from the learners academic or professional life. In academic environments, clinic type activities can be offered to students along the lines of the Writing Labs found in many first language environments. Team teachin g with subject lecturers and doublemarking by subject and communication specialists are further moves in this direction. Emphasises significance not form We have already noted how in a text-based approach the investigation of text-genres provides us with etic information. The pedagogic danger, and a very real one in the Chinese educational context, is that this will lead to modelling. If we want our learners to understand the significance of the forms they are trying to create, and attain creativity and freedom from models, then they have to acquire sensitivity to the emit aspects. They have to feel the cultural significance of the forms they are manipulating. This requires us either to create classroom conditions which match those in real life (and foster acquisition) or teach the emit aspects in other ways (to encourage learning). Both methods rely on ethnographic analyses to identify the communicative events that the text-genres are generated in, and elucidate the components of these events and the event-genres which are the meaning-providing context of these texts. This way the why of ESP can be investigated, not just the what. Increases motivation and involvement This understanding of the broader context of communicating in English acts as a potent motivating force. The success of simulations and case studies partly lies in the way the language becomes real to the users; the users feel really themselves in the language. Whole person response is achievable. Of course this is why three months in the target culture can make more difference than an extra year of classroom teaching. We can tap some of this motivational force firstly by intervening in authentic communicative events. Otherwise, we have to recreate as much as possible of the whole cultural environment in the classroom. To do this we have to be able to conceptualise what we are trying to create and then investigate it in order to understand it and recreate it. Ethnographic needs analysis provides the approach for this investigation; CSP provides the way to implement it. Gives new insights into intercultural communication problems It is clear that we can get significant explanations of intercultural communication problems from analysis at both world-structure and event-structure level. Difficulties in communication may arise when events appear to match across cultures but have different act structures. We may identify certain kinds of mismatch, e.g., leaving out compulsory stages such as greetings, leave-takings or transitions, misreading the cultural salience of stages or adding extra stages. Analysis will reveal the extent of isomorphism across cultures and the degree to which behaviour outside cultural norms is tolerated.

Ventola (1987:34-5) cites an example which will be interesting, and familiar, to us working in Hong Kong. Mak (1984) has analysed Cantonese buying behaviour and notes that criticism of the goods for sale acts as a sign of willingness to start bargaining, a kind of pre-bargaining stage in the transaction. The attempt to transfer this behaviour to many English speaking environments could be interpreted as showing lack of interest in concluding a purchase or even as rudeness. Conversely, the use of this transactional stage may be a productive strategy for foreign visitors to Hong Kong unused to bargaining! Analysis of events will also reveal the extent to which members of a culture tolerate departures from the communicative norms of the group. Learners need to acquire a sense of participant tolerance levels regarding linguistic behaviour (e.g., tolerance of accent, grammatical error, etc.) and communicative strategy (e.g., tolerance of inappropriate act-structure) which will enable them to evaluate their own ability and set targets for themselves. These tolerance levels are likely to vary according to the different cultural groups with which our learners interact. It is important, though, that we adopt a broad view of culture to inform our teaching, The need for a broad definition of culture was mentioned above in the discussion of world-structure. In the Hong Kong context, the importance of English as a lingua franca for dealing with non-Chinese and nonnative speakers of English is clear. Those of our students who will be involved in such dealings have to be aware of the communicative presuppositions that visitors from other cultures bring with them. Thus instruction in Japanese communication norms, e.g., the ringit system for achieving corporate consensus on new proposals described by White (1993), would be by no means out of place in our business communication programmes. The same kind of analysis of events can be used to clarify communication problems between members of narrower cultural groups. These include professional sub-groups (e.g., architects, computer programmers, etc.) or companies with contrasting corporate cultures. Analysing the communication matrix of groups such as these will enable learners to surpass the limited ESP aim of using language suitable to the domain of use. We can expect them to aim for appropriacy and an approach to real communicative competence. Allows a proactive approach to workplace communication ESP has typically taken a passive role in relation to the texts it studies. The aim has been to train students to produce the kinds of text that are found in the target situation. These texts, written or spoken, are generally notjudged for their effectiveness or ideological content but are taken as given. This is in contrast to the approach of communications teaching which typically takes a proactive position (Williams et al., 1984). Communications teachers are more willing to judge authentic texts as effective or not; they will assessinteraction in terms of efficiency in achieving goals. A practical example of this kind of position is in technical communications where research is being carried out into the usability of texts, particularly in the area of instructional manuals and on-screen tutorials (Doheny-Farina, 1988). In a dynamic sociolinguistic context like Hong Kon g, where questions of language planning loom large over the language classroom, ESP practitioners cannot be content with a passive posture. We should be aware of the opportunities and responsibilities we have to affect workplace communication
56

practices through our teaching and other professional activities. However, any attempts we make to guide the development of communications will demand a clear analytical framework. Ethnographic approaches, with their ability to model both synchronic and diachronic patterning, give us the potential to see beyond the still image to the moving picture. Using them we in the tertiary institutions and in corporate training can try to mould the future communication practices of Hong Kong industry.

Conclusion
The goal of Communication for Specific Purposes is to transcend the limitations of ESP while retaining its two greatest strengths: its accountability to client communities and its reliance on close analysis of student needs. Through ethnographic needs analysis we can broaden the scope of our teaching to address systematically the problems of achieving communicative competence in specific discourse communities with their special cultural characteristics. This will require us to adopt a workable model of the communicative events which form the contexts in which texts are generated. Studies of linguistic interference, error analysis and interlanguage enlightened the work of ESP practitioners in the 1970s and 80s when the new field of Applied Linguistics strove to apply linguistic theory to corpora of utterances in order to generate data usable for various processes, especially those involved in language teaching (Corder, 1973: 137-9.) What is needed now, however, is a field of Applied Communications, applying theories and models of communication to corpora of observations, in order to generate data usable for the teaching of communication skills. ESP practitioners concerned with the theoretical foundations of their field must be prepared to develop the concepts of communicative interference, communicative error analysis, cross-cultural and intercommunication studies for the 1990s and beyond. The thesis of this paper is that a focus on communicative events will enable us to integrate these studies into acoherent, and theoretically wellfounded, pedagogic approach. The intention in this paper has, therefore, been to present a working interpretation of the concept of communicative events which can serve as a guide for action. The ideas presented here are intended to contribute to research and development projects focusing on community language needs, specific purpose course design and programme evaluation. Through such close engagement with the contexts of communication, ESP practitioners can further develop their ability to contribute positively and directly to the development of their students abilities and to the development of their client communities.

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Acknowledgements My thanks are due to Valerie Arndt, Graham Lock, Steve Walters and Martha Pennington for their help in reviewing drafts and for their substantial contribution in clarifying the argument in this paper.

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