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
