Communicative functions: Talking about experience

Who or what is involved?

Introduction

When we use language to talk about our everyday lives, we generally refer to:

	the activities taking place (doing, thinking, feeling, saying, being)
	the participants involved in those activities (people, animals, places, things)
	the circumstances surrounding the activities (when? where? how? why?)

'What's happening?' (reading)
'Who/what is involved?' (Dotty; a book)		'When?' (late at night) 'Where?' (in bed) 'How?' (by torchlight)
Dotty is reading a book in bed late at night by torchlight.

Here we will focus on who or what is involved ie, the participants in the activities.

In talking about the participants, we first need to name (or identify) them.

Who? (Dotty)
What? (book; torch; bed)

Then we often describe them in some way:

Which? (the book; this story)
Whose? (her bed; Dotty's eyes)
How many? (five pages; several yawns)
What like? (a huge, loud yawn; a book with scary pictures)

When students want to talk about themselves, label a picture, describe their best friend, present a biography of a sports star, write a report on whales, compare the characters in a story, or compose a poem about their favourite place, they need to use such communicative functions as:

In learning to use these communicative functions, children are also learning to use language for important thinking skills:

In the sections below, you will find information about how we use language to name and describe the world. You will also find links to relevant grammatical resources so that you can see how the grammar enables us to name and describe. In addition, you will find links to text types where you can see these grammatical resources being used in context. (To return to this page, use the back button on your browser.) 

Text types

For more information see: Particular Descriptions (eg describing people and things; describing places) General Descriptions (eg identifying and describing; describing people and things) Recounts (eg expressing feelings and opinions) Instructions (eg talking about materials and tools) Stories (eg creating characters) Reviews (eg identifying and describing the characters; expressing opinions and evaluating) Explanations (eg identifying and describing people and things in a process) Arguments (eg expressing opinions, evaluations and judgements) Poems & Rhymes Advertisements Weather reports

Teaching activities