A mode, quite simply, is a means of communicating. According to the New London Group, there are five modes of communication: visual, linguistic, spatial, aural, and gestural. When communication occurs, it typically happens in one of three ways: verbal, nonverbal and visual. A language has two primary modes of expression: Spoken and Written. A current debate was proposed about the role of transforming one idea between people. This debate derives from the current phenomenon which shows evidence which is related to learner’s skills in a language. Some learners are able to produce spoken form of language fluently, however, when it comes to writing, it is seen that they find difficulties and get disturbance to put down ideas and elaborate the ideas into an acceptable piece of writing. The relationship between spoken language and written language is complex. Within the field of linguistics, the current consensus is that speech is an innate human capability, and written language is a cultural invention which is nothing but the fruit of long development of the mind. However, some linguists, such as those of the Prague school, argue that written and spoken language possess distinct qualities which would argue against written language being dependent on spoken language for its existence. Spoken texts include oral stories, interviews, dialogues, monologues (e.g. a welcome to country speech, a presentation to the class), phone conversations, discussions, role plays, or any other piece of spoken language.
Spoken and Written Modes
A spoken language is a language produced by articulate sounds, as opposed to a written language. Many languages have no written form and so are only spoken. An oral language or vocal language is a language produced with the vocal tract, as opposed to a sign language, which is produced with the hands and face. While the spoken mode is coded in sounds the written mode is coded in symbols and the two different codings each bring with them significant features. The written form’s most important characteristic is that, unlike the immediacy of speech, there is the opportunity to revise and correct. Writing is long-lasting while speech is ephemeral. Discussions on spoken and written communication modes date back to the1960s. At that time the Chomskian view on linguistics was dominant, and most specialists believed that “ordinary talk could not be the object of study for linguistics since it is too disordered; it is an essentially degenerate realization of linguistics competence” (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998, p. 22). Thus spoken communications were not studied. As recording technology improved, researchers became able to record conversations and analyze them. Schegloff & Sacks (1973) discovered that, contrary to the Chomskian view, oral conversations were not disordered, but rather were systematically organized. Researchers such as Akinnaso (1982) started to study spoken communication as well as written communication. Akinnaso pointed out that there were two prominent views about these communication modes. The traditional view stressed the fact that speech and writing were grammatically the same even though they had slight lexical differences. The second view held that speech and writing were relatively autonomous and the two modes were considered to be quite different. Akinnaso (1982) considers spoken and written language to be different. He notes that his study “has been concerned largely with the nature of these distributions, with how and why spoken and written language differ” (Akinnaso, 1982, p. 119). He mentions the latest studies and states that while some researchers study the differences and similarities between spoken and written language, the main thrust of these studies is nevertheless on the differences between spoken and written language.
The following table would help to understand the basic distinction between written and spoken language.
Speech-Writing
- Pauses -Punctuation (.,;:-)
- Hesitation -Punctuation (- …)
- Fillers -usually omitted but can be expressed in written speech as “er”
- Non-fluency features -usually omitted but can be expressed in written speech as “er” or punctuation (- …)
- Expression of emotions-conventional forms – “aagh!” “grr!” including use of exclamation mark, italics and bold
- Grammatical errors -Fewer
- Irregular suprasegmentals -None
- Incomplete syntax -Rare expressed as “…”
- Overlaps -Expressed as “…” or authorial voice eg
- Bill-interrupted.
- Instant feedback -Long delays in conventional print, faster in newspapers, faster again in online discussion groups and nearly instant in chat rooms
- Phonology -layout, typography
- Pronunciation -Spelling
- Accent -Spelling
- Dialect -Vocabulary
- Discourse features -Rare except as vocabulary
- Redundancy -Rare
- Divergency from topic -Rare
- Serial coordinators -Sentences and more logical coordinators
- Ill-defined sentence structure -Less common. Sentences generally well defined with punctuation defining clauses.
- Inexplicit, great use of pronouns -More explicit. Nouns preferred to pronouns.
- Paralinguistics – gesture and body language -Limited to typography
- Seamless topic change -Topic change by sentence or paragraph
