Language Impact definition
Language Impact (LI) could be best described as the sense of being smashed, hit or overwhelmed by the rush of words and phrases coming from the native speakers: the impact. This is the result of the uncapability of an English Language Student (ELS) to understand authentic spoken language when traveling to an English-speaking country. It is just like being in the middle of a group of whales trying to decipher their chants. So the sense in the ELS is that of frustration, confusion and isolation.
Who suffers language impact?
Language Impact (LI) is not only suffered by someone who has studied a foreign language and then travels abroad to practice his suppossedly new acquired language skills, but also by anybody traveling to a country in which the language is different from their own. Imagine yourself in barbershop in Russia trying to explain the hairdresser how you want your hair done, with sign language, because you don’t speak russian. It is very likely that you end up with a hair cut different to the one you wanted. Or a tougher case, a tourist in China whose tour guide left him by accident in a small town 300 miles (it has to be miles, this is English) away from his hotel in Beijing. Explain the clerck at the small grocery store down the street you need information on how to return. And if he says something, what is he saying? But if you never went to a russian school or a chinese school, what the heck? What were you expecting?
However, LI affects more to the ones who had already studied a second language than those who hadn’t. Why? Because this latter ones didn’t have any expectations about language proficiency. And because the first ones experience a deeper level of frustration, disappointment, isolation and, most of the times, rejection towards the studied language. Another aspect involved in LI is the speaking level of the student. When a student has a low speaking level the expectations about communicating with native speakers are not really significant. On the contrary, when the student has a very good speaking level the expectations are very significant. Moreover, native speakers (let’s call them locals) are, somehow, aware about the speaking level the student has, without even knowing about their students status. If the student has a poor speaking level the response tends to be, let’s say, comprehensive, kind, gentle and helpful most of the times: in other words, the native speaker speaks slow, uses sign language and if necessary writes directions on a piece of paper to help the student; but if the student speaks very well, the native speakers answer very well, that is with a normal fluency. ¿Why? Simple, because the native speakers don’t think there is something wrong with the other’s language abilities. And that means trouble to the student walking down Grosvenor Road in London.
This could be explained with the following equations:
English Student + low speaking level = Softer Language Impact
English Student + high speaking level = Harder Language Impact
And this other equation explains a misbelief in English learning
English Student + high speaking level is not always = to a high listening
comprehension level
Or otherwise
English Student + high listening comprehension level is not always = to a high
speaking level
to be continued...
sábado, 6 de marzo de 2010
jueves, 25 de febrero de 2010
Brief dissertations 2: the language impact
When I came back to Mexico I decided to continue with my Teacher’s diploma and I enrolled at the Anglomexicano de Cultura (now British Council) for its well known prestige.
I gave my first English class in 1995 and the first reaction of my students was that they did not understand what I was saying. I spoke “too fast” and I didn’t make any “pause” between one word and the next as their previous teachers did. It took a while to convince them that real English had nothing to do with speaking slow and with pauses between words.
Some time later in a teachers development course I talked about my experience in California and the need that English schools teach authentic English. Somebody asked me how I would call the phenomenom I went through and I decided to call it Language Impact.
In my experience as an English teacher I had the opportunity to know many cases like mine. Most of the students had the same need: to learn to understand spoken English in an authentic language enviroment. Their own experience studying at English schools and then traveling abroad proved to be disappointing.
Once speaking to one of the directors of the UNITEC, a fashionable and growing private university in Mexico City, who happened to have studied at the same English school I studied when I was a teenager -with the same teachers, books and method- he asked me if I had really learned English at that school. I learned to speak, I replied, but I didn’t learn to understand. He laughed. The same had happened to him. When he arrived in the USA to study his master degree he realized he didn’t understand anybody.
What had happened then? We both had had american and canadian teachers, not only mexican ones. We both had finished all English levels at that school with excellent grades, excellent knowledge of grammar rules, a large vocabulary and a good selection of idioms and phrasal verbs. Where was the flaw? In the method? The books? The teachers? The students? Not really. The problem was the lack of awareness of the language impact we students would face in case of traveling abroad.
In a natural language enviroment people in the streets don’t speak like teachers tend to do in their attempt to help English language students understand. And people’s backgrounds are very varied. “In English-speaking countries...English is not spoken in an identical manner... Different varieties or dialects of English exist, reflecting such factors as a person’s degree of education, ethnic group, social class, or geographical location.” (Richards, 1985). . So language and speaking, basically, are not that homogeneous as we believe in schools.
Language Impact definition
Language Impact (LI) could be best described as the sense of being smashed, hit or overwhelmed by the rush of words and phrases coming from the native speakers: the impact. This is the result of the uncapability of an English Language Student (ELS) to understand authentic spoken language when traveling to an English-speaking country. It is just like being in the middle of a group of whales trying to decipher their chants. So the sense in the ELS is that of frustration, confusion and isolation.
To be continued...
I gave my first English class in 1995 and the first reaction of my students was that they did not understand what I was saying. I spoke “too fast” and I didn’t make any “pause” between one word and the next as their previous teachers did. It took a while to convince them that real English had nothing to do with speaking slow and with pauses between words.
Some time later in a teachers development course I talked about my experience in California and the need that English schools teach authentic English. Somebody asked me how I would call the phenomenom I went through and I decided to call it Language Impact.
In my experience as an English teacher I had the opportunity to know many cases like mine. Most of the students had the same need: to learn to understand spoken English in an authentic language enviroment. Their own experience studying at English schools and then traveling abroad proved to be disappointing.
Once speaking to one of the directors of the UNITEC, a fashionable and growing private university in Mexico City, who happened to have studied at the same English school I studied when I was a teenager -with the same teachers, books and method- he asked me if I had really learned English at that school. I learned to speak, I replied, but I didn’t learn to understand. He laughed. The same had happened to him. When he arrived in the USA to study his master degree he realized he didn’t understand anybody.
What had happened then? We both had had american and canadian teachers, not only mexican ones. We both had finished all English levels at that school with excellent grades, excellent knowledge of grammar rules, a large vocabulary and a good selection of idioms and phrasal verbs. Where was the flaw? In the method? The books? The teachers? The students? Not really. The problem was the lack of awareness of the language impact we students would face in case of traveling abroad.
In a natural language enviroment people in the streets don’t speak like teachers tend to do in their attempt to help English language students understand. And people’s backgrounds are very varied. “In English-speaking countries...English is not spoken in an identical manner... Different varieties or dialects of English exist, reflecting such factors as a person’s degree of education, ethnic group, social class, or geographical location.” (Richards, 1985). . So language and speaking, basically, are not that homogeneous as we believe in schools.
Language Impact definition
Language Impact (LI) could be best described as the sense of being smashed, hit or overwhelmed by the rush of words and phrases coming from the native speakers: the impact. This is the result of the uncapability of an English Language Student (ELS) to understand authentic spoken language when traveling to an English-speaking country. It is just like being in the middle of a group of whales trying to decipher their chants. So the sense in the ELS is that of frustration, confusion and isolation.
To be continued...
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