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...
