Daily Excerpt: Communicative Focus (Shekhtman): Why is the language performance of native and non-native speakers different?
Excerpt from Communicative Focus:
Why is the language performance of native and non-native speakers
different?
On the face of it
the answer to this question is quite easy. The difference in language
performance between native and non-native speaker can be explained by the
degree of their command of the language. Native speakers have excellent command
of the language and non-native speakers, poor command of it. But why is this
so?
In his book The Native Speaker: Myth and Reality, Alan Davies (2003) defines 6
factors which make a person a native speaker. The most important factor is the
acquisition of language in childhood. Successful acquisition of language
typically happens by the age of four and is
guaranteed for children up to the
age of six. After that, the potential
for native language acquisition is
steadily compromised until shortly after puberty and is rare thereafter.
Maturational changes in the brain, such as the decline in metabolic rate and
number of neurons during the early school age years as well as the bottoming
out of the number of synapses and metabolic rate around puberty, are plausible
causes. (Pinker, 1994, p.293).[1]
There are other
very important factors too, such as “intuition about grammar” (Davies,
2003, p.210), the “unique capacity to
produce fluent spontaneous discourse”,
and “a huge memory stock of complete lexical items“ (Pawley and Syder,
1983 cited in Davies, 2003, p.210).
Unfortunately, Davies’ identifiers of a
native speaker do not help us much in teaching. We cannot change the childhood
of our non-native speaker; we cannot inject him or her with intuition about
grammar; and we cannot put a complete set of lexical items in his or her head.
In answering the question with which we
began this chapter—why does the language performance of native and non-native speakers
differ—understanding the essence of speech itself is as important as, if not
more important than, understanding the traits of native and non-native
speakers. The essence of speech is rooted in the fact that speech
consists of two parts: (1) meaning (i.e. the content of speech) and (2)
language (i.e. the form of the utterance/writing). This corresponds to the what and the how, that is, to the ideational plane and mechanical plane. (Figure
1.1.) For example, in the sentence, “Watch me,” the meaning is a request to pay attention and the form is the verb, to watch,
in the imperative mood, followed by a pronoun in the objective case. Of course,
meaningless speech can be, and sometimes is, also produced, but in such cases,
the purpose is either to make a joke or to make a point related to the
linguistic nonsense.
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