Daily Excerpt: Communicative Focus (Shekhtman) - Communication between Native Speakers and Non-native Speakers and the Essence of Speech
Today's excerpt comes from Communicative Focus by Boris Shekhtman and Dina Kupchanka -
Communication between Native Speakers and Non-native Speakers and the Essence of Speech
We are interested in communication between native and non-native speakers for one very important reason: this is the kind of communication for which all teachers are essentially preparing students. Regardless of the level of our students, whether they are beginners or already near-native speakers, if they want to use their second language, they nolens-volens enter this type of communication. We need to help them to participate in this communication with dignity and power and to close the gap between their language skills and those of native speakers. In order for us to prepare our students in this way, we must be knowledgeable about the specific nuances of verbal communication between native and non-native speakers.
The most obvious
difference between the language performance of native and non-native speakers
is the dramatic difference in levels of language accuracy and fluency. While
native speakers usually talk effortlessly, naturally and correctly, non-native
speakers consistently experience difficulties in expressing their thoughts,
struggle for the right words, and typically lack confidence in their
communication. When trying to speak a foreign language, non-native speakers
think extensively in their own native language and, worse, they often translate
directly from their native language into the foreign language. This frequently
leads them to create utterances that do not make sense to native speakers,
further diminishing their confidence in their speaking ability and often
causing them to dread native speakers’ questions that they are then likely to
answer very abruptly and awkwardly.
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).[2]
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. 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.
The What of Speaking
Just as people can speak without thinking, they also can think without speaking. According to Steven Pinker(1994), “babies can think before they can talk. Cognitive psychology has shown that people think not just in silent words but either in images or in abstract logical propositions” (cited in Lane, 2005, para. 12). Of course, when people think but do not speak, nobody knows what they are thinking. Language is the vehicle for our thoughts, the carrier of what we mean.
Both planes of speech—meaning and language—are analyzed in the works of many respected scholars: Walter Benjamin (1996), Noam Chomsky (1968), Jerry Fodor (1975), Steven Pinker (1994), Lev Vygotsky (1986), Benjamin Whorf (1956), among others.
Nowadays, this concept—the dissection of speech into a meaningful and a formal part—cannot be treated as a hypothesis.
The opinion of scholars about the relationship between mind and language may vary, but they all agree that speech consists of a two-part system. As Vygotsky (1986) noted, “If they [mind and language] are one and the same thing, no relationship between them can arise” (p. 2). Or as Steven Pinker (1995) writes, “When people think about ‘spring,’ surely they are not confused as to whether they are thinking about a season or something that goes ‘boing’ -- and if one word can correspond to two thoughts, thoughts cannot be words” (p. 136).
Walter Benjamin’s (1996) overall understanding of language is based on the notion that language is a form of communication that is not identical with the ideas that it describes and represents. As Kenneth Sayre (1976) put it,
The meaning of a term is the shared intention with which the term is associated in its common use. On the one hand, a meaning is an intention, and hence a purpose, and hence a neural configuration ... On the other hand, a meaning is a formal structure that can be instantiated in the cortexes of different individuals and transmitted to others within the group. (p. 201).
We understand that there is sometimes a crucial difference among the categories of meaning, ideational plane, and what, but none of them coincide with language, which always serves as their form. The same situation can be observed with the other group of categories: language, mechanical plane, and how. These categories may differ from one another as well, but they all are opposite to the first group and exclusive of it.
Realizing that in many regards meaning, thought and mind are not the same, we still use them interchangeably, relying on their shared opposition to form, i.e. language. Robin Allot (2001) writes that meaning as a word has been analyzed as having many definitions. One estimate showed more than 50 distinct definitions of the word, meaning, demonstrating that there are innumerable possible answers to the question “What is meaning?” Many definitions of meaning have a dual nature: one is the linguistic form of the word and the other perception this form reflects. In this book, we use the word, meaning, as a thought, idea and the word language only as combination of linguistic symbols and formulas.
No doubt the relationship between meaning and language is very sophisticated, to the point that often their differences are not distinguishable at all. It is very important to underline that when we deal with native speakers’ speech we notice complete coincidence between meaning and language. As articulated by Vygotsky (1986), “The meaning of a word represents such a close amalgam of thought and language that it is hard to tell whether it is a phenomenon of speech or a phenomenon of thought” (p.212). If we consider this statement in relation to communication then it can also be concluded that, precisely due to this “close amalgam,” we do not really perceive the second, the mechanical, part of the speech but rather we perceive only the first part, meaning. This happens for one reason: the native speakers’ speech is absolutely automatic. We observe simultaneously the total concentration of the native speaker on what he or she is saying and the complete absence of attention to how he or she is saying it. That is to say that, in the case of a native speaker’s speech, what (meaning) and how (form, language) overlap, are unified and do not exist separately.
The How of Speaking
There are of course some instances when a native speaker may pay unusual attention to how he or she speaks, if the native speaker needs to impress listeners with how polished and refined his or her language is. A professor, for example, being interviewed for a position in a university department of English Language and Literature is likely to deliberately choose to use the most sophisticated language possible to demonstrate a richness of vocabulary and highly developed communication skills. There are other occasions when native speakers may need to carefully choose the words they use and, as native speakers, we are aware when these instances arise. Nevertheless, these occasions are comparatively infrequent for native speakers.
Conversely, in the speech of non-native speakers, the disparity between what and how is immediately and consistently evident. The non-native speaker frequently encounters situations where he or she cannot express a clear, simple thought because he or she does not know how to express it due to the lack of the linguistic means or to the lack of automaticity of using these means. The non-native speaker constantly performs dual activity in real time – keeping track of the idea he wants to express and generating foreign sounds, grammar and words in correct order. In other words, conversational interaction for the non-native speaker is communication mediated by language, a ‘formalized intercourse’, since for the non-native speaker what to say and how to say it are two distinct but equally important aspects of interaction.
According to Walter Benjamin (1996), language is a form of communication, a system of “signs” which represent meaning (pp.65). The existence of non-native speakers is, arguably, the most striking proof that meaning and language are two different entities. Non-native speakers quite often have a lot of ideas and meanings they would like to convey but lack the language or “system of signs” to express these meanings.
Sometimes communication in the non-native language relies heavily on body language which is why, when trying to express himself or herself in the target language, a non-native speaker may sometimes resemble a fish cast upon dry land. The non-native speaker's mouth opens and closes, without making any sound, or produces sounds that do not resemble language. Sometimes, the foreigner makes rapid and wild gestures, which do not necessarily serve to clarify the communication but instead may create a humorous situation.
However, non-native speakers are, of course, not mute or dumb. On the contrary, they have a rich and sophisticated language in their possession which they control perfectly, their own native language. When they change their communicative performance from that of a native speaker’s to a non-native speaker, their ability to use their native language turns off automatically as it becomes useless. The problem here is that, although their native language is turned off, it remains in the background and can have both positive and negative influences on the second language. The positive influence comes from the overall experience of the native speaker to use the mother tongue: understanding of its communicative functions and macro level structures. The negative influence arises from micro structural elements.
Knowledge of our
native language can be constructive in assisting us to recognize certain
elements of our non-native language such as, nouns and verbs, the order of the
words in the sentence, the formation of the words, the concept of singularity
and plurality, etc. We also can notice the sociolinguistic difference between
languages, specifics in their communicative use. From the basis of their
experience and knowledge of their own native language, when the learner
approaches a foreign language, he or she very quickly understands that it is
also a language, that it is a phenomenon of the same nature. That is why the
more foreign languages the person knows the easier it is for him to comprehend
another one. With each studied language his or her “language vision” becomes
increasingly intuitive.
However, the influence of micro structural elements of the native language on the second language of the non-native speaker is usually harmful. In his or her desire to speak the second language as well as he or she speaks the first, it is tempting for the non-native speaker to try to transfer the specific grammar structures of his or her native language into the foreign language. This trick almost never works because the foreign language is likely to have a totally different grammar and syntax. As a result, the non-native speech, if it is comprehensible at all, sounds awkward and not like the target language should at all. A Russian, for example, might ask a question like “’How much cars did you buy?’ instead of ‘How many cars did you buy?’ In Russian, the question phrase “how much” is used for both countable nouns (where ‘how many’ is used in English) and uncountable nouns” (Shekhtman, 2003b, p.63).
We really do not know what happens in the non-native speaker’s head when he or she speaks but we can consider two possible scenarios. In the first scenario the non-native speaker thinks in his or her native language and then translates into the foreign one. If we label the thought of the native speaker as T, his or her native language as L1 and his or her second language as L2, then the formula of this first model is T>L1>L2. The second possible scenario may follow the formula T>L2>L1>L2. The latter is evidently a more advanced model for speaking L2 as the non-native speaker at least tries to express their thoughts in the foreign language first and only refers to their native language after failing to do so.
What both scenarios have in common is the lack of unity of meaning and language, and this unity is typical in speech of native speakers. Native speakers are seldom conscious of how to say what they are saying but rather they are able to concentrate fully on the meaning of their speech. On the contrary, the what and the how in a non-native speaker’s speech rarely correlate neatly or imperceptibly and thus their verbal interactions always to one degree or another depend on the ‘how’, i.e. the language, the mechanical part. Not only can non-native speakers not employ the same level of automaticity as native speakers but they never equal native speakers in terms of grammar intuition, vocabulary volume and cultural input. This contributes to the strong argument that the main difference between the speech performance of native and non-native speakers lies in the correlation between ideational plane and mechanical plane of their speech.
For more posts about Boris Shekhtman and his books, click HERE.
For more posts about Dina Kupchanka and her books, click HERE.
The paperback version of this book is available at the MSI Press webstore.
Use coupon code FF25 for a 25% discount.
Sign up for the MSI Press LLC monthly newsletter
(recent releases, sales/discounts, awards, reviews, Amazon top 100 list, author advice, and more -- stay up to date)
Follow MSI Press on Twitter, Face Book, and Instagram.
Planning on self-publishing and don't know where to start?
in exchange for reviewing a current or forthcoming MSI Press LLC book?
Contact editor@msipress.com.
Want an author-signed copy of this book?
Purchase the book at 25% discount (use coupon code FF25)
and concurrently send a written request to orders@msipress.com.
You can!
Find their contact information on our Authors' Pages.
Check out our rankings -- and more -- HERE.
Comments
Post a Comment