Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

The transmission of information
As the major and most complex technique we have of
communicating information, spoken language allows us to
produce a sequence of vocal sounds in such a way that
another person can reconstruct from those sounds a useful
approximation to our original meaning. In very simple terms,
the sender starts with a thought and puts it into language.
The receiver perceives the language and thus understands the
thought.
The sender has to encode his thought, while the receiver
decodes the language. Most of the time, these processes are
so fast that one could say that both sender and receiver
perform them instantaneously and virtually simultaneously.
When thoughts are very complex, the process takes longer.
Likewise, when an unfamiliar language, or dialect, is being
used, the process is slow enough for the distinction between
thought and language to be quite clearly observed.
Language and thought
The best way to regard the relationship is to say that
‘language is a tool in the way an arm with its hand is a tool,
something to work with like any other tool and at the same
time part of the mechanism that drives tools, part of us.
Language is not only necessary for the formulation of
thought, but is part of the thinking process itself’ (Bolinger,
1975, p. 236).
Language is related to reality and thought by the intricate
relationships we call meaning. For language to be able to
convey meaning the reality which it has to represent must be
segmented. We abstract things from their environment so
Figure 2

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that we can name them (the wind, a wave), even though in
many cases we would find great difficulty in defining, as
objects with definite boundaries, the things which we have
abstracted. When we isolate parts of reality through our
language, we necessarily leave out considerable detail. Thus,
whether we are responding to the sound of a cry, or the
appearance of a small hand among the pram covers, we can
use the word baby and expect our hearer to supply his
knowledge of the whole complex of perceptions really
involved in the thought of a baby.
Language presents reality in chunks which can be referred
to by chunks of language. The continuum of time, for
example, can be seen metaphorically as a dimension along
which events move in a straight line. Language, however,
imposes divisions on that line, in order to be able to refer to