Language Impact

The Language Impact on English students

I am going to begin this little dissertation on English Language Teaching by telling you a little about my own experience as a learner of English. So let’s move far back to 1988 when I first went to an English speaking country. The idea was to practice my English language in a natural environment, so I made arrangements to spend two weeks in L.A.

At that time I had studied English in different schools achieving the highest grades in my groups and finishing all the levels they offered. I had even taken the first months of a Teacher’s diploma course. So my expectations, regarding my English proficiency, when getting there were very high.

However, since my crossing the USA border to my arrival at my aunt’s house I realized that I, undoubtedly, knew English, that is I knew how to ask questions, how to explain things, that I knew how to read (signs, documents, and so on), and that a I knew English grammar, but I did not understand spoken English.

My first hours in proved that my listening skills were somehow nonexistent. I didn’t understand anybody speaking English. I remember very vividly when I entered a McDonald’s restaurant and the clerk on the other side of the counter asked me something that sounded like Ma a hep sa? It took him four repetitions and a smile to make me realize he was saying May I help you, sir?

And asking a Greyhound bus driver the best way to get to my aunt’s house, where to get off the bus and what direction to walk was an awful experience. I just watched his lips whistling words and then when he finished I muttered a thank you and got to my seat to check on my city map to find myself the best route.

I was terrified, either for realizing that people in L.A. did not speak English but a different language or that my English teachers had cheated on me for the past five years.

So, in that moment, I made two crucial decisions in my life: spend the rest of the year there and enroll at a public high school to have full exposure to the language.

The first two weeks were very difficult: I didn’t understand my teachers and I didn’t understand my classmates insults (remember I was a spanic –how I hated that word at that time- at an almost all white high school). But I didn’t give up: at the third week I understood every single insult from my classmates and eventually, I got to understand my teachers and became a very good student.

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 phenomenon 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 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.

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

Recommendations to avoid the LI

For teachers:

Do not speak slow and with pauses between words. Speak as you always do.

If English is not your native language:

Be fluent (it is not necesarry to speak as a native speaker -remember the wide variety of immigrants there are in USA, Canada, Australia or England, they are fluent but their pronunciation keeps a lot from their native tongues). Don’t be afraid of speaking like Speedy Gonzalez, just remember he was a very fluent mouse.

There is not correct or better English. There is formal and informal. Of course, there is what is called Standard English (a selection made out of the English varieties taught at schools, used by T.V. anchors, and news broadcasters, for instance). Real life shows that Standard English exists only in classroom environments where English is taught and in very limited real life situations (like those mentioned above).

Provide your students with actual interviews from TV or radio programs.

Include movies in class with a detailed viewing-listening program (make clear you’ll have to stop the movie in specific moments to review listening). In movies they represent different kind of people with different backgrounds. That's very useful. And even though they are just movies, most of the characters nowadays are very realistic.

For students:

If your teachers speak like What...is...your...name? (dots meaning pause) get rid of them.

Watch American an British TV programs, not only news. Watch videos at Youtube (a famous cheff cooking, for example to learn kitchen and cooking vocabulary).

Watch films at home with captions in English or without them (never in Spanish)

Listen to radio programs in English (you can enter BBC radio on internet, or other radio stations). This is very important since radio means you are not watching people speak. One of the things students tend to do when speaking to a native speaker is watch lips movements, something like lip reading. When surrounded by two or three native speaker the student has no time to read everybody’s lips and then comes the failure.

Watch videos from The New York Times or other american or british newspapers (on internet again). In this videos you can see interviews with common people: homeless, sportsmen, police officers, car dealers, etc.

And of course, save money to travel to an English-speaking country as soon as possible to practice what you have learned.

The idea is to provide –both, students and teachers- an atmosphere of authentic English, as students will find when they travel to an English speaking country, taking into account that English teaching has to be oriented towards competitive and useful communicative skills.

Probably there are more recommendations and features regarding Language Impact. I am quite sure that those who have suffered LI could feed this dissertation with more personal experiences.

If so, you are very welcome.

Regards,

Norberto Morales

March 2007