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.  

The perfect multilingual

In case you’re wondering, let me reassure you straight away that yes, the title of this post is meant to be sarcastic. Perfect multilinguals do exist, of course, though only in the minds of those of us who mistake ideals of perfection for reality.

Multilingual perfection awardees must satisfy a number of criteria. If you are, or were, a language learner as an adult, forget it: not having acquired all of your languages as a young child automatically makes you a non-multilingual. Either your accent, or your choice of words, your delivery, proficiency, fluency, grammar, conversational skills, in one or more of your languages, or your physical appearance, or all of the above, won’t pass the perfection litmus test, which is a match to native(-like) standards. This is an intriguing criterion, because it assumes that we know what native users are, look like, and do with their languages. I recently came across a very entertaining report in Nature, about the woes of having articles submitted to journals anonymously peer reviewed in order to assess their scholarly quality, where I found this gem: “Another reviewer suggested that the [article] authors should find ‘someone who speaks English as a first language to proofread the paper’, even though all four authors – including two tenured professors – were native English speakers.”

If, on the other hand, you’re a child acquiring your languages from birth, you may stand slightly higher up the qualifying ladder. But only slightly, because even though you might technically qualify as a native multilingual, there have been studies on such children reporting on their foreign accent in one or more of their languages, numbering their languages L1, L2, Ln to suggest sequential language learning, or arguing that one of their languages is dominant across an often unspecified board. As a young child, you are also bound to fail the LSRW condition, stipulating that being multilingual means proficiency in Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing all of your languages. This acronymic criterion does two things: first, it disregards all of us for whom language use involves neither listening nor speaking; and second, it adds the ‘RW’ twist, drawing on the well-attested confusion between languages and their printed counterparts. If I read and write Latin, but don’t speak it, am I multilingual with Latin? If I’m a native user of Singlish, but never wrote anything in it, am I multilingual with Singlish? Fascinating questions, and fascinating criterion, because it means that young multilinguals, as well as multilinguals who are illiterate, or happen to use one or more of the vast majority of the world’s languages which lack printed versions, aren’t perfect multilinguals either.

So who is? The issue is not so much that defining multilinguals looks pretty much like an exercise in shooting at a moving target: every time you think you’ve answered a question, about yourself or others (Am I multilingual? Are you?), you find that the question has changed. The issue is that the perfect multilingual matches the mythical being that I’ve called multi-monolingual and that can be represented like this:

Cover of Cruz-Ferreira, M., Multilinguals are ...?

Image © Dinusha Uthpala Upasena

Perfect multi-monolinguals, in short, have complete, unmixed, and parallel command of all of their languages. If taken seriously, this means, for example, that they must be dominant in all their languages which, if taken seriously, makes one wonder about the seriousness of the paradoxical claim that multilinguals must develop a single dominant language.

Instead of taking seriously claims about multilingualism which make no sense at all, let’s leave the sarcastic mood and take a serious look at what these criteria imply: they say that there are perfect, and therefore imperfect, uses of language, which means that those uses are best judged rather than observed. They say that living up to language standards is what steers our language uses, which means that languages exist independently of their users. And they compound the myth that being multilingual means being lesser lingual. There is one good reason why questions about the perfect (real, proper, true, etc.) monolingual aren’t ever asked: they would just make us laugh. Which monolingual has perfect command of their single language, according to the criteria that should define a perfect multilingual?

Real-life multilinguals are as linguistically perfect as their monolingual counterparts. All of us draw on all of the linguistic resources at our disposal in space and time, whether we label these resources mono- or multi-. And all of us are fair game for judgement and deprecation according to someone else’s and, not least, our own ideals of perfection.

The questions that make sense aren’t about linguistic perfection, they’re about why claims of linguistic perfection go on being made. Asking these questions is important also because the mix of ingredients in funny criteria purporting to define multilingualism carries over to funny methods that we go on using to teach and assess those who are (becoming) multilingual in school. I turn to this next.

Woolston, C. (2015). Scientists offer advice on how best to respond to reviewers. Nature, 522 (7554), 9-9. DOI: 10.1038/522009f

© MCF 2015

Next post: Textbook languages. Saturday 11^th July 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.

Accent, dialect, or disorder?

When is a feature of speech a feature of speech and when does it signal possible speech-language impairment? It may not always be easy to tell whether our linguistic habits reveal something worrying about us or just something about us.

The term accent(s) describes the way we sound (or the way we sign), as part of the dialect(s) that we use. The trouble begins right here, in that these two terms are often confused and/or misused. (In case you’re suspecting that I will, yet again, rant about one of my pet peeves, wholesale lay and professional use of obscure terminology, I’m afraid you’re right. I do suffer from a fixation with our fixation with labels whose relevance to what we’re using them for either doesn’t exist or we don’t understand.)

The trouble is compounded by the widespread use of accent and dialect as judgemental labels, not descriptive ones. Saying that someone speaks with an accent or that someone speaks dialect carries the assumption that there are ways of speaking with no accent or no dialectal features. We all speak dialect, because we all speak language varieties, not “languages”, and dialect is shorthand for ‘language variety’. Dialects come complete with characteristic vocabulary and grammar. Whole monographs have been dedicated to dialectal variation of what we call “languages”, one example being Benedikt Szmrecsanyi’s study of a restricted sample of what we call “English”, Grammatical Variation in British English Dialects. Dialects also come complete with accents, their characteristic patterns of vowels, consonants and prosody, which means that we all speak with an accent, too.

The issue is that the standard accents we’ve learned to associate with prestige varieties of language do not necessarily match the accent standards that we use in our everyday lives. Our accents reflect our social networks, because accents don’t exist without people, but also our bodies, because people don’t exist without bodies: we all speak through our own vocal tract, not somebody else’s – something I’ll come back to some other day.

So how do we tell idiosyncratic uses of language from disordered uses? Take lisping, for example. It is taken as a speech defect when it concerns replacement of other sounds, usually sibilants like /s/. But lisping in itself can’t be a “defect”, in that lisped articulations are part of standard dialects of, say, English (in words like think) and Spanish (in words like hacer), and are in fact recommended as a desirable goal in acquiring “good” accents in those languages. Or take saying [w] where /l/ might otherwise be expected, as when some of us enjoy owd friends, pick fwowers, and don’t wike to be iw. This is typical of child speech and is thus associated with “incomplete” learning. Incidentally, standard speech-language clinical terminology calls these child manipulations of speech sounds errors, a word commonly equated with ‘wrong’. Child pronunciations such as these aren’t wrong: they need no correction, because they’re developmental. In adult speech, saying [w] for /l/ may require specialist attention if it impairs intewigibiwity – or dents the user’s sewf-esteem. We can also use [w] for /l/ only in specific phonological contexts, that is, specific places within a word/phrase, in which case we enjoy owd friends, pick flowers, and don’t like to be iw. This is the rule in many Brazilian dialects of Portuguese, for example, one instance being the word Brasil itself.

There may, in sum, be nothing “wrong” with the way we pronounce our languages. One thing is an observed feature of speech, quite another is what we’ve been conditioned to think about it. There’s a world of difference between clinical and social evaluation of pronunciations. In addition, monolingual standards concerning specific dialects of a restricted number of languages have dominated the creation and implementation of speech-language assessment tools. Countless studies over countless years have insisted on “differences” between monolingual and multilingual uses of language, as if differences were unexpected, all the while portraying monolingualism as benchmark, as if multilingualism were exceptional. Against which “normal” are we assessing multilinguals, really? There’s a world of difference between typical multilingualism and disordered multilingualism.

Healthy speech does not mean standard speech and does not mean monolingual(-like) speech. If we keep using Cinderella’s slippers to serve everyone’s feet, no wonder we end up saying everyone else is an Ugly Sister.

© Anne Anderson (1874-1930) – Wikimedia Commons

Next time, I’ll try to explain why the sisters aren’t ugly at all.

© MCF 2014

Next post: Learning languages – what for? Saturday 8^th March 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.

Shibboleths & Co.

The word shibboleth originally designates a specific pronunciation of itself. Failure to pronounce the word in one native way, namely, substituting an ‘s’ sound [s] for a ‘sh’ sound [ʃ], entitled [ʃ]-natives to hack [s]-natives to pieces. It could have been the other way around, of course, given our propensity to nurture murderous feelings towards whoever speaks differently. It all depends on who is wielding the righteous axe at any given place and time.

Many of us have come to believe that making mincemeat (literally) of differently-accented people isn’t really an acquired right, so we’ve come up with civilised ways of obliterating such people instead. We can bully them in school, for example, or refuse them jobs, or force them to lose academic visibility, or just poke fun at them. We can also talk about them as belonging to ghettos, which is a bad thing to belong to, for those of us who belong to good ones.

Likewise, shibboleths can be good or bad. It all depends on who is wielding the righteous standard at any given place and time. When you enrol in language courses, you’re destined (I was going to say “doomed”) to learn what your textbooks deem to be good shibboleths. Whether you like them or not, whether you need them or not, for the purposes which made you enrol in those courses in the first place.

Sometime into your language learning, you are likely to be told that you speak your new language “with an accent”, and should therefore strive to get rid of it, on the (extremely entertaining) assumption that speaking a language well means speaking it without an accent. The claim that a good accent means no accent probably stems from the widespread practice of teaching languages through printed media. Printed languages have no accent, so it’s up to whoever happens to be reading them to provide them with one. Just look (yes, “look”) at the different accents which have been attributed to Latin, for example. This also means that whoever is in charge of teaching you a language can always claim that whatever accent you have in it doesn’t match the “good” one intended by the textbook writers, because they’re native speakers and you aren’t, and native speakers can’t be challenged on matters of “good” language usage. That argument usually cows learners into accent submission.

“Good” and “bad” accents, however, are not simply a matter of native vs. non-native pronunciation practices. As with the original shibboleth incidents, native speakers are more than willing to chop figurative heads (and so offending vocal tracts) off one another as well. I’ve blogged about this before, but Richard Cauldwell, in an article titled ‘Lord Rant: A personal journey through prejudice, accent and identity’ puts it much better than I ever could.

Our accents reflect the ways in which we’ve trained our vocal tracts to produce speech. They match not just what we hear around us but also, and importantly, the ways in which we want to be heard. Until around age 3, we’re not aware that we’re acquiring accents in our languages (or the languages themselves), because we’re not aware of ourselves as independent from our surroundings. From then on, we start being able to pick and choose, be it our friends, our clothes, or our dialects, complete with accent, all of which will become part of who we are. We acquire and lose accents for the same reasons that we acquire and lose languages, and we do this at any age. Just listen to one-time fellow-speakers of your dialect(s) who, as adults, moved to different countries, or different regions of the same country.

Being able to adapt to the surroundings of our choice is a condition of survival. That’s why we, as a species, have been able to inhabit (I was going to say “infest”) every nook and cranny of the world that we are able to perceive. We will adapt, including our accents, if we so wish. Not all of us need or want to learn a new language in order to impersonate some of its other speakers. Learners may want to distance themselves from specific accents of their new languages because, well, learners aren’t free from prejudice either. Perhaps learners will want to acquire the shibboleths which identify them as borrowers of a language, rather than the shibboleths associated with specific lenders of that language. This includes prosodic shibboleths, more on which next time.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Rhythm and clues. Saturday 20^th April 2013.

Children speak child-speak

               
            Me: Children speak child-speak, you know?

            Possibly you: Duh!?

            Possibly you: Of course they do!

            Possibly you: Hellooo (singsong), they’re *children*... (ditto)

            etc.

If your reaction to the title of this post matches one of these (possible) responses to it, I’m with you all the way. But do read on, by all means. I’m not going to tell you that children speak child-speak, I’m going to tell you about those of us who appear to believe that children don’t. And I won’t be telling you only about your average, averagely misinformed layperson, either.

The first time I realised that something must be very wrong with academic treatments of child multilingualism was back in the 1980s, when the literature about “translation equivalents” was making headlines. Briefly, proponents of multilingual equivalence had it that children being raised multilingually should either provide evidence that they had acquired words for the same things in all of their languages, or forfeit their right to be (called) multilingual. Being multilingual was then viewed as being what I call multi-monolingual: multilingual children are just like monolingual children, only several times over. Implicitly, the claim was that multilingual adults must also be multi-monolingual, on the understanding that children don’t typically remain children all their lives.

If you’re shaking your head in benevolent disbelief at how this kind of nonsense could ever have made headlines, then don’t. Not just because nonsense about multilingualism keeps making headlines, but principally because this claim appears to have resurfaced lately: one announcement of a meeting on multilingualism, dating from only a few weeks ago, states that “early bilingualism often result[s] in perfect parallel proficiency”. Note: perfect, parallel, proficiency. I doubt it that the convenors’ choice of words was a simple tribute to alliteration. But I do wonder what these words mean, in isolation and in collocation, and I would love to know about the evidence supporting this statement.

My first publication explaining that perfect parallel translation equivalence proficiency can’t make multilingual sense also explained why. The data came from my own children, then only two of them, and then users of only Portuguese and Swedish. At the one-word stage, the children started using the “wrong” language with us, parents. Or rather, they started using the same language with both parents, in words like, for example, Swedish där (‘there’) or Portuguese dá (‘gimme’), and I wanted to know why.

On preliminary inspection, the observation was that “translation equivalents” of these words in their other language were way beyond babies’ articulatory abilities, e.g. Portuguese ali or Swedish får jag. I concluded that the children’s “vocal tracts were, at the time, not mature enough to pronounce the respective translations in each language, which are phonologically more elaborate.” Child speech doesn’t reflect adult articulatory sophistication.

On closer inspection, the children turned out to use different intonations with each of the words that they so “mixed”. In fact, they used different prosodies altogether with each parent, and they did so in their babbling. I understood their use of prosody as a means of differentiating between the otherwise very similar syllables/words that they were able to pronounce, like Swedish där or Portuguese dá. The children were signalling, through intonation, rhythm, and stress, that they were speaking different languages, and that they were doing so with the “right” parent. So I wondered: should we also look for “equivalents” of intonation across languages, as evidence of “perfect parallel proficiency”? Where can we find such equivalents? And if we can’t find them (we can’t), does this mean that multilingual children who do this (my children are not the only ones) are not multilingual after all, and are instead “confused”, because they’re using the “wrong/right” words with the “right/wrong” parent?

We may want to rethink what we mean when we talk about using “words”, and we may want to rethink what being multilingual means. It’s not the children’s fault that adult expectations shape the way we see and hear our little ones. My children were using both of their languages, and they were differentiating their use of both. Not by replicating adult uses of these languages, not in ways that adults believe languages “should” be used, and not in baby ways of doing adult things: they were doing baby things the baby way. If you’re keen to read a detailed account of (all three) children’s strategies to sort out their (three) languages, have a look in my book Three is a Crowd?

In contrast to many adults, small children do and say things that make sense. What they do and say teaches us about how we all learn, including how we learn to be multilingual, and teaches us how to give evidence of what we’ve learned: by using the means that are available to us. If, that is, we choose to *see* what’s going on, instead of attempting to fence in facts within the theory of the day.

OK, so untrained vocal tracts explain child mixes, and productions which don’t match uses of language in the children’s surroundings. Could this also be the case for adult language learners? My next post has something to say about this.

Cruz-Ferreira, M. (1990). Karin and Sofia in Bilingual-Land In J. Leather & A. James (Eds.), New Sounds 90. Proceedings of the 1990 Amsterdam Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech (pp. 248-254). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Shibboleths & Co. Saturday 6^th April 2013.