LL-L "Language proficiency" 2003.09.25 (12) [E]

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From: Luc Hellinckx <luc.hellinckx at pandora.be>
Subject: Language proficiency

Beste John & annere liëglanners,

>Now the foreign student of English already has a slight problem
learning
>from teachers with different accents of English, how much more
difficult
>would it be if every teacher he had was teaching him different dialect
>forms, different verb forms and so on?

Slight problem? Quite right John, the foreign student of English does
indeed have a problem dealing with regional varieties of English, a
significant problem if you're asking me. Let me tell you what I
experienced myself when I was trying to teach Chinese students "Oral
English" earlier this year. Mind you, I'm not a native speaker, but I'm
very much interested in languages; any language, whether it's standard
or substandard. By the way, there were other foreign teachers as well in
my town (English, Irish, American, Australian, Canadian, South African
and New Zealand ones), so I could easily compare methods, results and
efficiency. Very soon it became obvious that Chinese students nowadays
have serious difficulty understanding every English accent, except an
American one. This goes to show the enormous role that movies, TV and
music play these days. Like it or not. My case is not exceptional; just
have a look at some Japanese ads where foreign teachers are wanted. Very
often a teacher is explicitly required to have an American accent. Any
other accent just won't do. Apparently, East Asian ears are no longer
tuned in to British sounds. Usually they thought of them as exotic; no
doubt because they'd seldom had the occasion to hear any. This all
happened in a city of more than half a million inhabitants (considered
small for local Chinese standards). Another common remark was that the
British tend to swallow sounds which made it all the more difficult for
them to reconstruct a mental word picture they could interpret.

Another thing that struck me was the fact that many a teacher just
didn't seem to care very much whether the majority of his/her students
understood what he/she was saying. Psychologically, it seems to be hard
for native speakers to slow down their speech (not so much for 3 minutes
but for 50 minutes anyway).

I'm not really trying to make a point, but I do have the impression at
least that the Central and North Asian countryside is currently not
really under major British influence (whether cultural or linguistic).
American and German pressure however are gaining ground every minute.
Two examples: Last monday, the Goethe Institut was the first foreign
cultural center to be set up again in Kabul (after being a cultural
wasteland for more than 12 years). The Schiller Institut on the other
hand is seriously thinking of economically unlocking the interior of
Asia (see:
http://www.schiller-institut.de/seiten/wirtschaft/wirt3_0.htm). South
Asia is a completely different matter of course.

Kind greetings,

Luc Hellinckx

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language proficiency

Luc wrote (above):

> Another common remark was that the
> British tend to swallow sounds which made it all the more difficult for
> them to reconstruct a mental word picture they could interpret.

I am quite familiar with this, also mostly among East Asians, especially
Chinese.  I take it as meaning that what people generally understand as
being "British" English has clearer differentiation between primary stress
and non-primary stress, and this leads to "vowel reduction" in syllables
with non-primary stress, in this case mostly to /a/ and /e/ becoming [@]
(schwa) or [I] (<i> as in "cabin"); e.g.,

<secretary> -> ['sEkr at t(@)ri], ['sEkrItri], etc.
<strawberry> -> ['stro:b(@)ri]
<elementary> -> [?ElI'mEnt(@)ri], [?ElI'mEntri], etc.

versus North American:
<secretary> -> ['sEkrItæri], ['sEkrItEri], etc.
<strawberry> -> ['strQ:bEri]
<elementary> -> [?ElI'mEntEri], [?ElI'mEnt at ri], etc.

This "vowel reduction," which is more developed in most non-North-American
English varieties, tends to be perceived as "swallowing sounds."  It makes
it (even) more difficult for learners to mentally connect words with their
written forms and to phonetically replicate such "vague" or "swallowed"
sounds.  This is also a reason why the phonology of Russian is more
difficult to learn compared with the phonologies of Ukrainian and other
Slavonic languages, and why it is more difficult to cope with the
phonologies of Portuguese and to some degree of Galician and Catalan,
compared with those of Spanish (Castilian) and Italian.  I would even go as
far as suggesting that vowel reduction ("schwa-ization") and other vowel
changes make Afrikaans phonology somewhat harder to learn than that of
Standard Dutch.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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