Teaching languages through drama/theatre positively impacts oral fluency=Guest post=

by Angelica Galante and Ron I. Thomson

Do you speak another language? Many people who have heard this question don’t necessarily speak a second language (L2) fluently. Learning to speak a new language is challenging, but fluency in the L2 is a goal many people share. Contrary to what most people believe, opportunities to interact in the L2 do not necessarily guarantee a learner will come to speak it fluently (Derwing, Munro, and Thomson, 2008; Ranta and Meckelborg, 2013), so finding ways to improve fluency in the classroom is important. From our recent research, it seems that drama and theatre can help.

If you have ever taken a drama or theatre class, you will probably agree that it is a lot of fun. But drama is not all about the entertainment; it can also help language learners develop speaking abilities (Kao and O’Neill, 1998; Stern, 1980; Stinson and Freebody, 2006) and can impact oral fluency and pronunciation in particular (Galante and Thomson, 2016). We have both taught English as a foreign/second language for many years in Canada, Brazil, Korea, Oman, and Pakistan. In our constant pursuit of new ways to help our students develop fluency and pronunciation we thought we’d give drama/theatre a try.

Theatre of Dionysos, Athens, Greece

Photo credit: Dan Cavanagh

With my (Angelica’s) background in theatre, I began using drama techniques to teach my own English language classes in the late 1990s. I immediately noticed this was very helpful for learners’ oral development, especially among those learners who were somewhat shy or reluctant to speak in class. I also observed that during drama activities, students would practice aspects of the language not typically offered in traditional language classes: intonation, rhythm, intention, meaning-making, improvisation, among others. Because my drama classes were very well received, I was invited to develop a language program for a prominent English language institute in São Paulo, Brazil, which focused on teaching English through drama and theatre. The program was later distributed among 17 other schools in the country.

At first, teachers were hesitant to apply drama techniques because they felt they had to be actors to do so. However, after some initial short training sessions, teachers implemented drama in their classroom and were quite satisfied with the positive results. Despite teachers’ accounts of the success of drama in their classes, I wondered what particular aspects of oral communication actually improved. To find out, I proposed carrying out a study during my Master’s program at Brock University, in Canada, where Ron Thomson became my thesis supervisor. His extensive background in second language oral fluency and pronunciation research was a perfect match.

In drama/theatre classes, there is quite a lot of speaking practice and both of us knew it was likely that learners could develop speaking abilities anyway. But we were interested in finding out whether drama classes could improve learners’ speaking abilities compared to classes that also focused on oral communication. We tracked the oral development of 24 Brazilian learners of English in four different classes over the course of four months: two English drama classes and two English communicative classes. We collected samples of their L2 speech in five different tasks (monologue, dialogue, etc.) before and after the program, all audio-recorded. We then recruited 30 Canadians to listen to the learners’ speech samples and provide their perceptions on three specific aspects of their oral performance: fluency, comprehensibility and accent. After running several statistical analyses, we found that learners in the drama group experienced significantly greater improvement in their oral speaking skills compared to learners in the traditional communicative language classes.

Photo credit: João Urbilio

In particular, we found that learners in the drama group experienced significant improvements in fluency and comprehensibility compared to learners in a communicative language class. Some of the strategies used in the drama classes had a particular focus on improving fluency: learners practiced performance in front of a group, speech with emphasis on meaning-making, and speaking without inappropriate pauses and hesitations. This result supports the idea that teaching aspects of oral language explicitly can result in larger gains in oral fluency compared to using simple communicative tasks.

Another important finding was that although all the English learners were perceived as having a first language (L1) accent (Brazilian Portuguese), this was not an issue when understanding their speech. This is also important because it tells us that having L1 accent is not a problem when communicating in the L2. This can be surprising to some who falsely believe they need to lose their L1 accent in order to be fluent in the L2. We have always believed that “accent reduction” courses do not really have a place in language learning, and our study provides evidence to support this belief.

If you’re interested in learning more about how drama/theatre can improve speaking skills in a second language, you can watch the video abstract of our study or read the article we have recently published in TESOL Quarterly. There, you will find more details about the study and its methodology. We also provide samples of the classroom activities we used.

Angelica Galante is a doctoral candidate in Language and Literacies Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto and a sessional lecturer at York University. Her research interests include innovative pedagogical applications in language classrooms, drama in language learning, and plurilingual education. You can follow her on Twitter @GalanteAngelica and visit her website Breaking the Invisible Wall for samples of digital projects with language learners.

Ron I. Thomson is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics/TESL at Brock University, in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. His research spans L2 oral fluency and pronunciation development, computer-assisted pronunciation teaching, and ethics in pronunciation teaching. Ron is also the creator of English Accent Coach, a free evidence-based online tool that helps learners improve their pronunciation of English vowels and consonants.

© Angelica Galante and Ron I. Thomson 2016

Next post: Switching languages, mixing languages – or using languages? Saturday 25^th June 2016.  

Child musings on being multilingual – The languages

In 1987, Michael Clyne published a study titled “Don’t you get bored speaking only English?” Expressions of metalinguistic awareness in a bilingual child. I was by then quite engaged in collecting data from my children, from birth, for a study on child trilingualism, Three is a Crowd?. So I made a mental note not to forget to document the children’s many comments on many different multilingual matters, throughout the broad age range that the book spans. They are featured, in particular, in Chapters 5 and 9 to 11.

Multilingual children have good reason to talk and ask about different languages, since different languages make up their linguistic resources. We are of course free to interpret this ability as evidence of those multilingual “advantages” that tend to crop up in current news. To me, it simply means that multilingual children are being multilingual. It’s all about exposure: children who use both chopsticks and fork and knife will show motor advantages over chopstick-only or fork-and-knife-only peers, children not nurtured around books won’t talk about books. My point is that children will develop awareness of what strikes them as worthy of attention in their surroundings, and the related willingness to talk about it.

Clyne’s study confirmed my hunch that what children express about their own and others’ use of more than one language offers a rich source of insight into multilingualism. A refreshing one, too: research about language acquisition offers mostly adult takes, and mostly from monolingual environments. This post and the next one discuss a sample of my children’s own takes on being multilingual, starting with the languages themselves: how the children used them, expressed themselves about them, and assessed their usefulness.

The first expressions of my children’s awareness of their (then) two languages came from their uses of prosody, the melody of speech that is necessarily present in any spoken utterance. Adults assume that very young children have limited ways of expressing themselves, because we also assume that linguistic expression follows adult standards. We don’t know, in other words, whether the limitations that adults talk about reflect infant abilities or adult interpretive skills. A common assumption is, for example, that we need words to express ourselves, and so that infants are at a “pre-linguistic” stage before they produce words. But languages aren’t just words, of course, and words don’t even come to us first: we’ve known for quite a while that the acquisition of prosody precedes the acquisition of words, and that prosody is as linguistic as words (and grammar). My children’s earliest attempts at verbal communication showed distinct uses of prosody in their babble to users of Portuguese or Swedish. In lone play, they directed the same kind of utterances to toys and other objects that they associated with each of the languages. The children soon found that such productions made linguistic sense because adult listeners reacted with full attention to what sounded like fluent use of language. This taught me that looking for what multilingual children do with their languages is rather more enlightening than looking for what they do not do.

When words finally appeared in the children’s repertoire, the first mixes did so, too. Little multilinguals mix their languages not because they’re ‘confused’ or suffer from vocabulary ‘deficiency’, but because of vocal tract immaturity: some words may happen to be more baby-friendly in one language than in another. One example is the Swedish word titta (‘look’), compared to its Portuguese equivalent olha, so titta became my children’s choice to call both parents’ attention to something interesting. That the children weren’t confused at all shows in another strategy, at around the same one-word stage, whereby they would pronounce similarly-sounding and similarly baby-friendly words in both languages in a maximally different way, for example the words for banana or crocodile – or their own names.

The way they identified languages then took other turns. In order to talk about language, we may need to develop a specialised metalanguage (another name for linguistics), but we can certainly make do with what we’ve got available to us, something at which children excel. At the stage when multilingual children start associating different people with different languages, and even when not knowing the name of the language – or that languages have names –, the children would seek confirmation of whether a new acquaintance spoke Swedish by asking me Fala jaha? (Portuguese ‘s/he speaks’, Swedish ‘jaha’), jaha being a very common and very conspicuous conversational device in Swedish, and the whole utterance being, technically, another mix. At the same age, they made profuse use of mamma säger (‘mum says’) to dad and papá diz (‘dad says’) to me in both statements and questions about each language, and they used the same utterances to excuse their mixes: a Portuguese word in a Swedish utterance, say, would invariably be followed by mamma säger.

These and other successful strategies that multilingual children devise to manage their languages might predict equal success in learning more languages, regardless of where and how. As the saying goes, children, and only children, are very good language learners because they’re young. At least for my children, the outcomes of their learning of further languages were dismal from day one: their attitude towards this new school subject was dismal, their marks were even more dismal. And they explained why: their first language subject was French, and they had no idea how to find motivation to learn a language that they had absolutely no need for in Singapore, where they then lived. My podcast ‘Addressing common misconceptions about multilinguals’ discusses the age myth about language learning, among others, @bilingualavenue. For sensible takes on young learners of further languages see Sandie Mourão and Mónica Lourenço’s book Early Years Second Language Education: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice, to which I wrote a Foreword.

My children’s own languages, in contrast, first the two home ones and later English, their school language, proved indeed useful to them, in more than an everyday sense. The children understood that different languages also mean different ways of behaving, in them and through them, so they became rather skilled at using their multicultural background as both a shield and a valuable bartering asset. In Portugal, say, when reprimanded about unacceptable child behaviour across the board, they asserted that that’s OK in Sweden and that they were being Swedish that day. And in school, when teased by peers about, say, subpar maths skills, they countered with But I speak Portuguese and Swedish and you don’t.

The next post turns to multilingual children’s thoughts on the users of their languages.

Clyne, M. (1987). "Don't you get bored speaking only English?" Expressions of metalinguistic awareness in a bilingual child. In R. Steele & T. Threadgold (Eds.), Language topics: essays in honour of Michael Halliday, Volume 1 (pp. 85-103). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/z.lt2.13cly

© MCF 2015

Next post: Child musings on being multilingual – The language users. Saturday 21^st March 2015.

Singing to learn pronunciation in a foreign language=Guest post=

by Karen M. Ludke

When I started volunteering to teach English as a Second Language and literacy skills at the Aguilar branch of the New York Public Library in 2004, I soon began using songs in my lessons. In part, I wanted to enable my students to practice with authentic English language materials outside of class in an enjoyable way. But I also thought songs might help them better hear the pronunciation, rhythm and stress patterns of English, which they often struggled with when speaking. Based on my observations over time, singing English songs did seem to help. This experience inspired me to pursue this question further and in 2005 I went to the University of Edinburgh to conduct research on the effects of listening to songs and singing in foreign language learning.

Of course, many teachers believe that listening to songs in a new language can support a range of linguistic skills, but at present there isn’t a great deal of strong research evidence to support the many claims that have been put forward. A few reasons to include songs in the foreign language classroom include cognitive effects, such as improved long-term recognition and recall, which has been shown for verbal memory in the native language (Tillmann and Dowling, 2007; Calvert and Tart, 1993), as well as positive effects on mood (Schön et al., 2008) and potential overlaps in the neural processing of music and language (Patel, 2011).

What do we know about whether singing songs can improve pronunciation in a new language? Research has shown that musical training leads to better imitation of phrases in a new language (Christiner and Reiterer, 2013; Pastuszek-Lipinska, 2008) and that people who have stronger musical skills also tend to have more native-like pronunciation abilities in their non-native languages, as shown by Slevc and Miyake (2006) for learners of English.

Moving beyond studies showing correlations between musical skills and foreign language skills, how does hearing new words and phrases through songs affect the language learning process? One interesting conference paper (Fomina, 2000) reported the finding that adult English learners who were taught songs over a period of several weeks tended to transfer the melody of the song lyrics they had heard to their spoken intonation of the same phrases. My own recent paper with Fernanda Ferreira and Katie Overy showed that a “listen-and-repeat” singing method to learn Hungarian phrases was more effective than a “listen-and-repeat” speaking or rhythmic speaking method, particularly for performance on tasks that required learners to say entire phrases in the new language. Another study (Milovanov et al., 2010) investigated Finnish adults’ English pronunciation skills and found that those with musical training (choir members) had improved English phoneme production compared to a non-musical and an English specialist group, but perceptual discrimination abilities were similar for all three groups.

Although imitation is an important aspect of learning a new language, it can be difficult to directly transfer the sounds you hear in a listening comprehension task to your speaking skills. If you try to learn a spoken dialogue through a listen-and-repeat method and read the words at the same time as attempting to say them, it may change the way in which you listen to the pronunciation and imitate it. The reason is that, when reading, there’s a natural tendency to pronounce new sounds in a way similar to your native pronunciation, or to use an intermediate vowel or consonant sound that falls in between your native and non-native languages, which can lead to having a noticeable “accent” in the new language. For example, for the Spanish word le – even if you’re hearing /le/ spoken at the same time, reading the spelling of that word might result in an English speaker approximating the sound more like [leɪ] or [lε].

For this reason, some music teachers and choir directors will teach a foreign language song using a call-and-response technique, rather than hand out the written words, until the group is able to sing it through with correct pronunciation. Otherwise, there’s a danger that the written words will be encoded into memory more like the group’s native language sounds, rather than as they should be sung in that language.

In the language classroom, songs can provide an excellent opportunity to practice pronunciation, intonation, and fluent, connected speech. Song lyrics generally present words at half the pace of spoken material (Murphey, 1990). Combining this slower pace with the fact that many song melodies follow the natural intonation pattern of the language, well chosen songs can teach foreign language prosody and pronunciation without any “repeat after me” drills.

For the purposes of pronunciation practice, I believe it’s important to choose songs which do not have a very difficult melody or rhythm and in which the lyrics aren’t presented too quickly. While it can be a fun challenge to sing a more complex or linguistically advanced song with certain groups of students, it’s important not to choose songs that are so difficult they cause frustration. Start with easy songs and build up to more challenging materials if the group is enthusiastic. Some students (especially younger learners) may enjoy moving and dancing to the song, and some teachers have found it helpful to coordinate movements and gestures with the words of a song or story. If learners are particularly keen, small groups can be asked to create a simple song-and-dance routine for homework, which they can present to the class or even teach to the rest of the students. In addition, Wendy Maxwell has created a method called AIM Language Learning, after she found that coordinating gestures with words in a song or story dramatically improved her students’ memory for the words and their ability to express themselves in the new language.

If you’re curious about this topic, these online resources and books have more information.

Online resources:

• Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing
• The European Music Portfolio: A Creative Way into Languages

Books:

• Communicative Musicality
• Language is Music
• Music, Language, and the Brain
• Musicophilia
• Top tunes for teaching: 977 Song Titles and Practical Tools for Choosing the Right Music Every Time

Karen M. Ludke is currently working at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, as a Postdoctoral Fellow on the Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing collaboration led by Annabel J. Cohen. You can follow her on Twitter @KarenMLudke, to hear about other upcoming articles about singing and language learning, or visit her website for educational resources that are available for download.

Calvert, S., & Tart, M. (1993). Song versus verbal forms for very-long-term, long-term, and short-term verbatim recall. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 14 (2), 245-260 DOI: 10.1016/0193-3973(93)90035-T

Christiner, M., & Reiterer, S. (2013). Song and speech: examining the link between singing talent and speech imitation ability. Frontiers in Psychology, 4 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00874

Ludke, K., Ferreira, F., & Overy, K. (2013). Singing can facilitate foreign language learning Memory & Cognition, 42 (1), 41-52 DOI: 10.3758/s13421-013-0342-5

Milovanov, R., Pietilä, P., Tervaniemi, M., & Esquef, P. (2010). Foreign language pronunciation skills and musical aptitude: A study of Finnish adults with higher education Learning and Individual Differences, 20 (1), 56-60 DOI: 10.1016/j.lindif.2009.11.003

Murphey, T. (1990). The song stuck in my head phenomenon: A melodic din in the lad? System, 18 (1), 53-64 DOI: 10.1016/0346-251X(90)90028-4

Pastuszek-Lipinska, B. (2008). Musicians Outperform Nonmusicians in Speech
Imitation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-85035-9_4

Patel, A. (2011). Why would Musical Training Benefit the Neural Encoding of Speech? The OPERA Hypothesis. Frontiers in Psychology, 2 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00142

Schön, D., Boyer, M., Moreno, S., Besson, M., Peretz, I., & Kolinsky, R. (2008). Songs as an aid for language acquisition. Cognition, 106 (2), 975-983 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.03.005

Slevc LR, & Miyake A (2006). Individual differences in second-language proficiency: does musical ability matter? Psychological science, 17 (8), 675-81 PMID: 16913949

Tillmann B, & Dowling WJ (2007). Memory decreases for prose, but not for poetry. Memory & cognition, 35 (4), 628-39 PMID: 17848021


© Karen M. Ludke 2014

Next post: Translators and multilinguals. Saturday 31^st May 2014.

Learning to use languages

In my previous post, I wondered about the purposes for which language learning is currently being encouraged.

My understanding has always been that we actively strive to learn languages if the need to use them arises, and that this need is what triggers our will to learn. So when I found myself immersed in a new full-time job, Stay-At-Home Mum, on account of repeated blitz-like family moves across countries and continents, I leaped at the chance of documenting my children’s daily development of their (then) two languages, from Day One. My children were exposed to Portuguese and Swedish from birth, from mum and dad, respectively (English came into our family a bit later), and they were also the first multilingual children from both sides of our family, which added extra appeal to this task. I then reported my observations in my book Three is a Crowd?

My children taught me four things. First, that while it may be true that we learn in order to use, the converse is no less true: we use in order to learn. The children both practised their languages and demanded practice in them at every opportunity. Their eagerness to train themselves to do whatever they needed to do with their languages reminded me of Will Durant’s summary of Aristotle’s thought, in The Story of Philosophy: “[...] we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

Second, that selective practice works best. It is well known among child language researchers that children’s babbling preferences change along time. In particular, at what is called the reduplicated (or “canonical”) babbling stage, babies appear to lose interest in their earlier exploration of a wide range of vowel and consonant articulations to settle for a limited repertoire of baba-dada-like syllables. We could be fooled into thinking that less varied child productions such as these signal a regression in our children’s articulatory abilities. But there’s less variety of vowel and consonant articulations only, and languages are much more than the inventories of sounds – or words, or grammar rules – that our textbooks insist on mistaking them for. My previous work had focused on the role of prosody, the rhythmical and melodic patterns which are necessarily present in any spoken utterance, in adult language learning, so I naturally turned my attention to my children’s use of prosody. 

My observations were that “monotonous” baba-dada babbling was anything but monotonous: these syllables served as baby-friendly carriers of extremely rich prosodic variation, encompassing parameters of rhythm, amplitude and pitch, which the children now explored extensively and often babbled one at a time. My report of their “singsongs” resulted in the first (and, I believe, so far the only) database featuring annotated prosodic transcription of infant vocalisations, from birth up to age 1.

Third, I learned that prosody rulz, as it were. Through prosody, the children were able to make their two languages as different as they managed to, engaging in differential babbled dialogues with Swedish and with Portuguese relatives, friends, paediatric clinicians (and with different toys), where typical cadences of each of the languages could be recognised – and responded to, in (adult) kind. Several months later, first words and first grammar constructions seamlessly emerged from their prosodic entry gates to each language, now firmly in place. Swedish and Portuguese words and grammar fitted their respective foundational chanted patterns like a glove. It made me wonder: how many of us parents go about boasting excitedly among relatives and friends that Baby has just produced her first falling-rising tone, rather than her first “word”? And why don’t we do this?

Practice, selective practice and differentiation characterised my children’s later language learning, too, including for words which sound very similar in Portuguese and Swedish (like banana, crocodile, or mum and dad) and for their own names. It became clear to me that learning to use languages means learning to facilitate engagement through those languages with the different people who use them. Useful engagement, for learning purposes, in turn meant favouring topics which made sense to everyone involved. This made sense to me, too, in the light of research showing that adult learners show better command of their new languages among relaxed company than in formal classroom settings, as Rod Gardner and Johannes Wagner reported in their book Second Language Conversations. More recently, Aria Razfar made similar findings in a study titled ‘Multilingual mathematics’.

Lastly, I learned that we adults might do well to seek inspiration from child learning strategies to facilitate our own language learning and teaching. There is an important sense, I believe, in which new languages are new to child and adult learners alike. Children get at their languages by learning to sing them first, so why not use singing to learn for us adults, too? The next post, a guest post, discusses the core role that music and prosody play in adult language learning, and offers practical suggestions to include songs in language classrooms.

Razfar, A. (2013). Multilingual Mathematics: Learning Through Contested Spaces of Meaning Making International Multilingual Research Journal, 7 (3), 175-196 DOI: 10.1080/19313152.2012.665204

© MCF 2014

Next post: =Guest post= Singing to learn pronunciation in a foreign language, by Karen M. Ludke. Saturday 3^rd May 2014.

Rhythm clues and glues

My previous post discussed the role of prosody in signposting linguistic information. This post deals with the second reason why prosody matters: it helps us remember linguistic information, by glueing together the bits and pieces of language which are meaningful together.

Many years ago, I had this phone number which, according to local phone number pronunciation conventions, was 80-48-03, where the dashes indicate a “chunking” break. We said the name of each digit, by the way, “eight zero-four eight-zero three”. These things vary, too: I’ve lived in places where the norm would be to say “eighty-forty eight-zero three”, for example. Now, I happen to have difficulty remembering numbers in general, not just my own phone numbers because I don’t call myself all that often, as the joke goes. In any case, the standard spoken layout of this phone number didn’t help me. I then happily realised that 804803 can also be chunked as 804-803. Much easier to remember. So the next time I answered the phone, which we did by stating the phone number, I said “804-803”. The caller fell silent, then: “Sorry, is this 80-48-03?” My turn to fall silent. You get the picture, right? Same “word”, different prosodies: we might as well have been speaking different languages.

Wink-wink to those of you who, like me, were reminded of alphabet songs, here. In both cases, we have a random sequence of items which nevertheless makes sense to those in the know. ‘Random sequence of items which nevertheless makes sense to those in the know’ is a good definition of any spoken language. The thing is that when we chunk apparently random things together we’re signalling that they’re not random after all: these chunks carry meanings. As with my phone number, different chunking may impair intelligibility – or carry different meanings. Take this classic example of disambiguation of print through prosody (or of the uselessness of print to carry prosodic meaning, if you prefer): what does “This is how small shops should be” mean? We’re not speaking different languages when we chunk this utterance in different ways, but we’re saying different things – which is also what we do when we use different languages.

Chunking language as we speak is what makes it memorable, too. Rhythmical beats “stick”. Carolyn Graham, musician, writer, teacher, and teacher trainer, explains why. She developed jazz chants to use in her language teaching because, as she puts it in her website, “The brain loves rhythm. This means memory.” Brains love anything else which makes sense to their owners: Carolyn Graham’s other major insight about language teaching is that the language used in the classroom must be real, useful and appropriate to the learner.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s used songs as a sure-fire way of learning the rhythmical clues of my new languages. It turns out that singing assists language relearning, too, for those of us who have lost our language(s) through trauma or disease. Gottfried Schlaug’s research, at his Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory, reports how music helps “glue” together damaged and/or disordered parts of the brain into recovery of language: we seem to be able to sing word chunks that we are unable to speak, for example.

Why do speech melodies have this effect on us? The simple answer is that we’re natural singers and dancers because we can’t help it: we’re born that way. We’ve known about this for quite a while. Jean-Pierre Lecanuet, for example, in a 1999 book chapter titled ‘Foetal responses to auditory and speech stimuli’, reviews previous literature reporting that “a large number of speech components – mostly, but not only, the prosodic ones – are transmitted to the amniotic milieu” (p. 340). The whole book, Perceptual Development, edited by Alan Slater, offers reviews and reports of early research on this topic.

The so-called “effortless” language learning claimed of children may well appear “effortless” because children are having fun: they sing and dance, involving their whole body in their learning. All of us, in other words, know how to involve ourselves with our languages in this way from the very beginning. It may not sound so outlandish, then, to suggest that language teaching methodologies embrace these natural human skills to help us practise our new languages from the very beginning, too. My take is that all of us learn best when we’re having fun learning.

You may be wondering now where the “missing link” is: jazz chants and babies? Here it is. Ten years ago, one of the students in my Child Language courses was struck, as a musician, by the similar makeup of scatted and babbled syllables (I hope you’re reading this, Ben!). He went on to produce a thesis, titled The Phonology of Scat Singing which, to my knowledge, is the first research piece ever to put together scatting, baby babble, and English phonology.

Image © Clipart from clipartheaven.com

When we invented our languages, we made them melodic because this was the natural thing to do. It’s the melody which signals and glues together the lexical and grammatical bits and pieces which we’ve come to (mis)represent as “languages”. So how do we sing our names in different languages? The next post has something about this. 

Lecanuet, J.-P. (1999). Foetal responses to auditory and speech stimuli In A. Slater (Ed.), Perceptual development. Visual, auditory and speech perception in infancy (pp. 317-355). Hove: Psychology Press, Ltd.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Multilingual names. Saturday 18^th May 2013.

Rhythm and clues

I have dedicated most of my academic life to research on multilingualism, whether simultaneous or consecutive, with a focus on pronunciation and related matters of accent. My take on accent is broader than what I’ve understood this word to mean among specialists as well as laypeople. To me, accent relates not just to vowels and consonants, but principally to prosody, the rhythmical melody which necessarily associates with speech and which, therefore, is necessarily present whenever we speak our language(s).

Calls for attention to the fundamental role that prosody plays in spoken communication are not new. In a previous post, I quoted the earliest references I could find which deal with prosody in child language acquisition. Another interesting study dates from 1946, titled ‘Psychological aspects of speech-melody’, where Louise Zucker pleads for the inclusion of intonation in adult language teaching. Her observations among immigrant populations led her to conclude that newcomers to a foreign country can’t feel “psychologically” at home in it without awareness of the relevance of speech melody.

More recently, in 2010, Reyna Gordon and colleagues investigated the psychological bonds holding words and melodies together, in ‘Words and melody are intertwined in perception of sung words: EEG and behavioral evidence’. They found that “variations in musical features affect word processing in sung language”. This reinforced my conviction that attempting to use “words” without their associated linguistic melodies is like attempting to cook a meal by leaving its ingredients intact. To my mind, findings about sung words are no different from findings about spoken words, because spoken words are sung – whether we choose to call them by this or any other name.

What this research makes clear is not that different languages, or different language varieties, sound different: we all know that. The insights are first, that prosody contains clues to meaning, which we must be able to both listen for and produce; and second, that isolated sounds or words tell us nothing about these clues, because nobody speaks in isolated sounds and words – except in language classrooms. As I’ve repeated over and over again in this blog, starting here, traditional language teaching syllabuses, methodologies, and assessments continue to rely heavily on printed modes of language. Standard orthographies of any language tell us as much about how those languages are spoken as a printed recipe tells us about how food tastes. We don’t speak in ingredients.

Another core reason, in my view, for the neglect of prosody in language teaching is that we have come to assume that learning languages is an intellectual task, whereby we start with conceptual mechanics, to then strain our memory attempting to remember what our new language *looks* like, at the bottom of that right-hand page in the textbook. I’m sure I’ve seen telltale signs of these retrieval exercises in learners’ hand and eye movements, and I’ve had learners confirm that this kind of information is what they’re trying to recall. In short, we’ve forgotten that we use our bodies to speak, and that our bodies therefore harbour fundamental clues to meaning.

Image © Clipart from clipartheaven.com

As early as inside the womb, we’re primed to the rhythms of our body, whether physiological or linguistic, with no visual aids. There is no light inside the womb, but there is sound – and I’ll have a lot more to say about this in my next post. Let me just add here that linguistic rhythms, unlike, say, cardiac ones, aren’t inbuilt. Linguistic prosodies have grammars, which is one reason why speaking a language with disrupted prosody results in disrupted intelligibility, as stand-up comedians know well. Prosodic false friends abound as much as lexical ones, the difference being that we don’t talk about them. When we assume that a particular falling or rising tone, or a particular tone of voice, mean the same across languages, we’re (mis)taking similar function for similar form, just like when we assume that English deception means Portuguese decepção. The same is true within the “same” language, incidentally: my Brazilian friends find my way of singing “our” language endlessly funny, as much as my habit of putting on a camisola when I feel cold, which to me is a sweater and to them is a nightie.

If you’re curious about how we sing as we speak, have a look at these two publications. My article ‘Portuguese and English intonation in contrast’, and Daniel Hirst and Albert Di Cristo’s book, Intonation Systems. A Survey of Twenty Languages, where I also have a chapter, and which gives the first overview of uses of prosody across and within languages.

Next time, as promised, I’ll explain why we’re all natural singers and dancers, and why this is relevant to our linguistic abilities.









Cruz-Ferreira, M. (2004). Portuguese and English intonation in contrast Languages in Contrast, 4 (2), 213-232 DOI: 10.1075/lic.4.2.03cru

Gordon, R., Schön, D., Magne, C., Astésano, C., & Besson, M. (2010). Words and Melody Are Intertwined in Perception of Sung Words: EEG and Behavioral Evidence PLoS ONE, 5 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009889

Zucker, L. (1946). Psychological Aspects of Speech-Melody The Journal of Social Psychology, 23 (1), 73-128 DOI: 10.1080/00224545.1946.9712314

© MCF 2013

Next post: Rhythm clues and glues. Saturday 4^th May 2013.

Friendly speakers and friendly listeners

The title of this post draws on Olle Kjellin’s take that speakers of a shared language would do well to nurture what he calls a “listener-friendly pronunciation”. Raising awareness that speaking is about thoughtfulness towards whom we are speaking to may come as a Why-didn’t-I-think-of-this-before epiphany, for those of us bred among the traditional one-size-fits-all kinds of accents that learners keep being fed in language classes.

Sensitivity to the linguistic comfort zone of other human beings certainly is, to my mind, a good thing to nurture. It’s also a matter of etiquette. It makes others feel good in our company, and it makes us feel good, too, because awareness of our surroundings allows us to feel in control. Not least, this kind of sensitivity is usually reciprocated, whether we’re being hosts or guests, including in our languages. It’s not that difficult, either: as newcomers to a party or a business meeting, say, we use the same mechanism to monitor the ongoing atmosphere, so that we may gain entitlement to merge with it. Or not, of course: if we find ourselves surrounded by deliberately hostile merrymakers and moneymakers, or by speaker-unfriendly listeners, it doesn’t matter how mood-friendly or how listener-friendly we strive to be. It’s a matter of will, and of awareness that all of us, habitués or rookies, have been “ongoing” too, for more or less extended periods of time, around more or less varied kinds of people, with the effect that our speaking and listening habits have become set, in what may feel more or less like stone.

Linguistic friendliness matters, both ways, because there is a sophisticated interplay between speaking and listening, rooted in a law which is very, very familiar and very, very dear to all of us: The Law of Least Effort. As speakers, we’re quite reluctant to disturb the comfy humdrum routines that we’ve patiently trained our vocal tracts to observe. As listeners, we simply stop listening to whatever threatens to engage skills beyond what we deem to be our territorial listening rights. Call it laziness, if you so wish. I prefer to say that our human speech and hearing hardwares are optimised to account for effort-effect tradeoffs: less effort from speakers means added inconvenience to listeners, and vice versa. Never has “Do Unto Others” had such a practical, everyday application.

One sure way to create linguistic friendliness is to literally tune into the rhythmical patterns which characterise our fellow speakers. By this I mean their body language, facial expressions, visible and audible articulatory movements, anything that can help us decode the cadences underlying the ways in which our interlocutors use their language(s). Speakers and listeners are individuals, like you and me: the Upanishads put it precisely the way I believe matters of “languages” should be put, with the remark that “It is not the language but the speaker that we want to understand.” It’s all about people, like you and me.

All cultures, as far as we know, have developed characteristic ways of harnessing human vocalisations and body movements as a means of nurturing commonality. This is what we came to call “song” and “dance”, respectively. Steven Mithen, in his book The Singing Neanderthals, draws on archaeological, neurological and other evidence to propose a unified account of The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body, as in the subtitle of the book. More recently, Gustavo Arriaga, Eric P. Zhou and Erich D. Jarvis, in an article titled Of mice, birds, and men: The mouse ultrasonic song system has some features similar to humans and song-learning birds, report that fellow mammals share with us what we already knew we shared with songbirds, the ability to communicate through the use of learned vocalisations, which we fine-tune to match what we hear around us.

Falling in with other people cannot then be rocket science: even when simply strolling around with somebody else, we end up moving with a shared rhythm which makes everybody happy, because our heads bob in synchrony so that we can talk to one another easily. Cadences form a core part of our survival: breathing, chewing, sleeping, digesting, pumping blood through our bodies take place in cycles of natural tempos, amplitudes, frequencies, durations. Small wonder that our languages follow suit: facts are that we can’t open our mouths, in any language, without assigning tempos, amplitudes, frequencies, durations to the sounds we produce. In short, without prosody.

This is why linguistic prosodies are not just niceties, a waste of our precious executive learning time, cherries on cakes, and so on, even if we’ve never been told about these things in our language lessons. Even if we believe that this is irrelevant at preliminary Me-Tarzan-You-Jane stages of acquisition, and even if we believe that language learners must go through Me-Tarzan-You-Jane acquisitional stages, which is far from a universal truth.

“Me dance you?”

Image © 1966, NBC Television (Wikimedia Commons)

Even at this supposed learning stage, are you telling Jane your name and hers? Or are you asking, or repeating what Jane said, or are you expressing stupefaction at a sudden realisation that people can have such names, or names at all?

Prosody is so central to our languages that we felt the need to create, for them, meaningless carriers of meaningful prosodies, precisely because prosody is enough. Nearly thirty years ago, Melvin J. Luthy conducted a pioneering study on Nonnative speakers’ perception of English “nonlexical” intonation signals, which found that core American English-bound melodic signals were either missed or misinterpreted by newcomers to the language.

If you also happen to be a newcomer to American English, have a look at how Judy B. Gilbert implements listener-friendliness in the classroom, in her book (aptly!) titled Clear Speech. One of her teaching mottoes is that “Small chunks of language should be learned like little songs.” You can also watch a video of one of her presentations of her teaching method.

Next time, I’ll take back everything I’ve said in this post.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Secret languages. Wednesday 31^st October 2012.

Unconnected speech?

Unconnected, yes. I wonder: what do we mean when we talk about *connected* speech? We must mean that there is at least one other kind of speech, which is not connected, so that it makes good sense to talk about its connectedness at all. But I would very much like to know who uses it, unless we’re perhaps talking about the so-called one-word stage in child language development, when spoken utterances appear to consist of single words, or expecting speech to and from interlocutors who look like this:

“Klaatu... barada... nikto...”

Image © The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951, via Wikipedia

Qualifying speech with the modifier connected also means that we somehow take “connected speech” as a special case of speech – or it wouldn’t need qualification by means of a dedicated adjective. This is the same kind of reasoning which identifies some people through the qualifier multilingual, thereby leaving it understood that there’s no need to identify in any special way whoever is not multilingual, because there’s nothing special about their lingualism. In the same way that monolingualism came to represent default lingualism, unconnected speech represents default speechiness. One language at a time is desirable linguistic behaviour, and so is one word at a time (whatever the word word might mean, incidentally, since nobody has ever come up with a satisfactory definition of what a “word” might be).

I wonder why. It could be that the only way we might hope to identify the words of a language is by looking at them (assuming, in turn, that we do know what “a language” might be, which is another big linguistic mystery). If you listen to a language you never heard before, chances are you’ll have serious trouble attempting to single out its words (assuming, in turn, that all spoken languages have words, which is yet another moot question). If you see a spoken language, you may have better luck. Printed representations of speech, for those languages which have them, may show spaces separating what in some of them we’ve come to call words. Others won’t, because speech and whatever we choose to call its components cannot be adequately represented in print. It’s like attempting to represent a landscape in speech. It’s like putting a girdle on things. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but pictures of words tell you very little about the thousand different ways they are pronounced, even for those languages which may share printed representations that you recognise.

Take my language students, who mostly come to me after years of traditional vocabulary + grammar language learning, where “vocabulary” means lists of words (for what “grammar” means here, see my next post). They keep insisting that speech forms like wanna and doesn’t, or j’sais pas and t’as vu, or fàchavor and tá bem, are “bad” language. They keep reminding me that even native speakers of their new languages tell them that they use their language “better”, because they learned it the “proper” all-words-in way, whereas natives tend to become “lazy” when speaking – more on which in a future post, too. And I might as well confess that some students thought better of having me as a teacher, given my tendency to attempt to wrestle pens and paper and books off their hands and concentrate on training speaking and listening. This for students who come to me because they, or their own language students, are unhappy about matters of intelligibility from and to users of their new languages.

I don’t blame them. In the textbooks that they were taught by, and taught to abide by, wannas and tá bens are either glossed over or treated in special chapters, whose titles include the phrase “connected speech” and which come after all the chapters dealing with speech forms which apparently need no special treatment and so must be the “real” speech forms. But how do you learn to understand and use a language by first spending chapters and years memorising and spelling out citation forms of visually unconnected words? To me, the disconnect between language teaching and language use is the problem: not that you say things like gonna and you’d and perhaps write them too, but that so many learners are not told that people say and write these things because this is how people speak their languages.

Next time, as promised, I’ll deal (sorry, I mean I will deal) with the “grammar” part of the traditional vocabulary + grammar language teaching methods.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Teaching *about* languages. Wednesday 10^th October 2012.

Vocal versatility and vocal fossilisation

Vocal versatility, described as the ability to make your vocal tract do whatever you want it to do, is usually discussed in connection with professional voice users. In contrast, vocal fossilisation, described as the inability to make your vocal tract move beyond what you’ve grown used to move it for, is usually discussed in connection with language learners. This makes it sound like vocal tract users neatly divide into distinct subspecies, skilled and unskilled, respectively. The point I wish to make here is that vocal versatility and vocal fossilisation are related, because as far as vocal uses are concerned, we’re all pros.

The first observation is that we all come equipped with the same vocal tract model. Since all languages are equally difficult to pronounce – or equally easy, if your outlook on life tends towards optimism – because each language has a signature sound to it, the second observation is that the way we sound relates to the uses to which we put our vocal equipment, rather than to the equipment itself. In the literature on language learning, the (mortifying) label fossilisation stands for ‘routine vocal behaviours’. From learners, as said. For some reason, the word doesn’t apply to petrified accent models that the corporate textbook industry continues churning out, as I’ve argued before.

Routine behaviours are automated and taken for granted to such a degree that you come to believe that they cannot be characterised as specific behaviours at all, and so that there is nothing that can be changed about them because they’ve never changed, as far as you can remember. But fossilised behaviours, vocal or otherwise, are in fact acquired behaviours. For language learning, the issue is then to identify the steps through which we all learned to condition our natural vocal versatility in order to sound proficiently fossilised in at least one language. We could also call this the ways in which we learned to speak with intelligible accents.

Let me try to explain what I mean with an analogy: dancing.

Image © Tannon Weber (Wikimedia Commons)

Getting our steps right involves training muscles and coordinating their movements to match specific rhythms. There is a very similar choreography going on in our vocal tract whenever we speak and, like actors and opera singers, we learners need a choreographer, whom we could also call our language teacher, to help us get our vocal movements right. Teaching you how to get things right doesn’t mean teaching you the technical jargon used to describe vocal tract actions, which is familiar to language teachers. You don’t need to know a third conditional by name either, in order to use it appropriately – an issue that I’ll address some other time. Teaching you means making you aware of what you do and what you can do, when you speak those languages you’re comfortable speaking, so that you become aware of what you need to do, in order to sound the way you want to sound in your new languages: you’ll need “a guided tour of your vocal tract”, and you can treat yourself to a preview of what this feels like in Chapter 5 of my book The Language of Language.

As with dancing lessons, the age at which you start your vocal training programme is irrelevant, and so is the alleged brain shutdown which is allegedly restricted to language learning. Learning means instructing your brain to work in ways that it hasn’t worked before. With competent guidance, and lots, and lots, and lots of practice, your brain will follow suit because that’s what brains do. One day you’ll wake up in the morning to find out that your vocal tract remembers things that you don’t remember teaching it to do, and that you had no idea it could do. But it could do them.

The training of your vocal skills through awareness of your vocal skills is routinely available to professional voice users. But unlike these professionals, who only need to give the impression that they can speak the languages that they’re speaking onstage, we amateurs learn languages because we need to speak them in real life. This is also why we need real-life guides to assist us in our learning: if we learn to samba and to speak from printed images, we’ll samba and speak like printed images.

The next post deals with a strange conception which, to my mind, could only have become a standard conception in matters of language teaching and learning if one assumes that language teaching and language learning proceed, by default, through printed materials.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Unconnected speech? Saturday 29^th September 2012.