Pronunciation and Fluency
SOME MEANINGS OF FLUENCY
In our discussion of the meanings of pronunciation, we made repeated references to the effects of the need for identity: I must know who I think I am and who I think I am not; seeking or rejecting closer ties with various groups is one way in which I verify and maintain that image of myself;
how I use language is one way in which I communicate my desires relative to those groups.
Related to the need for identification with a group, but separable from it, is the need to interact with people. Nida (1972 :59f) provides, within the field of second-language acquisition, an apt illustration of this distinction. A North American lawyer did much of his work in Latin America, and so had numerous occasions to interact with speakers of Spanish. Accordingly, he developed excellent ability both to read the language and to understand it when it was spoken. He was, however, unable to produce even a decent sentence in Spanish. His pronunciation was execrable, his grammatical control almost nonexistent, and his vocabulary poor. As a result, he always traveled wi.th an interpreter. The interpreter was in Nida's view an important part of the "meaning": a prestige symbol, which served to keep the Latin Americans at a distance and to maintain, as a part of his self-image, the lawyer's sense of superiority.
The need to interact, like the need for identity, figures in the development or inhibition of all aspects of second-language competence, but it is especially conspicuous in relation to fluency. This need makes itself felt at different levels. The "instrumental-integrative" terminology is again useful here: one person may "interact" in order to get what the title of one phrase book calls "all you want in France"; another may do so in order to "transact routine business and participate in specialized discus
sions within a professional field"; in a language class, students may interact because the free conversation period has arrived and interaction is required for a grade. These are "instrumental" motivations. If we are to be satisfied with the term "integrative" as the other half of a comprehensive classification of motives for using a language, then it must include more than just the student's desire to learn more about an alien cultural community as though he were interested in becoming a potential member of it (Lambert in Jakobovits 1970:62). It must also cover readiness to interact with people in general, and with other occupants of the language classroom in particular.
How ready one is to interact with another depends on what he expects the consequences of the interaction will be. This statement is abstract, dangerously susceptible to tautological self-fulfillment, and is made with no pretense of proof. Nevertheless, it will serve as a peg on which to hang other statements, some of which receive support from research findings.
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An individual's expectations of the consequences of an interaction depend, in turn, on two sets of factors. First and deepest is his pre-existing personality structure. As previously stated, the word "structure" in this context refers not to a set of fixed points, but to a set of fixed ranges within which the individual at any given time is free to operate. A
"personality structure" includes a self-concept, which is itself complex.
This set of factors wil I be discussed in Chapters V and VI. The second set includes whatever happens in the classroom. This set is not as deep-as the first, but it has the advantage of being relatively open to outside
intervention. These factors are treated on pp. 76-83, 91-97, 116-119.
Influence of Pre-existing Factors on Interaction
Nida (ibid.) gives a striking example of how concerns about identity may influence readiness to interact through the use of language. An Aztec woman who lived in a Spanish-speaking village in Mexico seemed to be able to speak Spanish only when she was drunk, but then she spoke it fluently and with great accuracy. Nida speculates that her failure to speak Spanish while sober was not simply stubbornness; rather, it was at the same time a part of playing her social role of "dumb Indian," and one way of expressing her resentment and her refusal to identify with the dominant culture.
Insistence on using one language with certain people and another language with others is a phenomenon that is commonly observed in bilingual children. It is most acute at the same age (roughly 2 to 3 years}
when a child is in the process of forming an image of itself as a person separate from other people. As we grow older, we no longer refuse absolutely to speak "the wrong language" with others, but fluency may be strongly affected by these same considerations.
The fluency requirement may threaten a self-image at other points besides this one. Obviously, other things being equal, a person who sees herself or himself as the "strong silent type" will resist verbal interaction more than someone with an "outgoing, gregarious" self-concept. More important, though less obvious, is the fact that many other threats to a student's ego may result in a withdrawing type of defense mechanism. "I usually succeed at what I try" is threatened by failures small or large;
theoretically at least, "I'm no good at languages" might feel temporarily threatened by success. "I'm a professional preparing for an important job"
is threatened by materials that seem irrelevant, and "I'm eye-minded" by the withholding of written materials; "I'm a student, and students are supposed to be taught" reacts badly either to a poor teacher or to a good one who is less directive than expected; difficulties arise in a language classroom for those who have no patience with details; for those who must have something to conform to and also for those who bridle at the demands of any authority.
Any of these threats to a student's ego will produce some kind of adaptive reaction, many of which are of a defensive nature. Some defensive reactions are aggressive, while others consist of some form of withdrawal, and the latter generally bring partial {or occasionally complete) loss of fluency. It would be interesting to notice which students habitually direct inward their annoyance at having made a mistake (apologizing, slapping forehead, muttering "stupid I" etc.) and which ones customarily direct it outward ("dammit," manipulation of objects, etc.), and to see how these two patterns correlate with overall fluency.
Unfortunately, there is no way to dissolve all of the frustrations and potential ego-threats; there is not even a single, magical formula to m1n1m1ze them. Nevertheless, there is one fundamental change in our approach that might improve our chances of dealing successfully with problems of this kind: During most of my years in language teaching, I have focussed my attention on the linguistic material-the sounds, the words and the structures-that my students were learning. Their emotional reactions, the relationships between what they were experiencing and how it made them feel, were at the periphery of my thinking. I was conscious of those matters only when a student showed gross and overt signs of being upset. Recently, however, I have tried to reverse my priorities.
Student attitudes now take chronological priority. This means that I no longer care how much of the language they learn during the first week.
Although I do not tell them so, the linguistic material presented during that time is only a vehicle for getting acquainted and for finding and reducing anxieties. Even during the remainder of the course, the first question is "How are they learning7" and the second is "What have they learned?" It is now content, and not morale, that I tend to ignore unless it threatens to cause trouble. Needless to say, I still give much attention to content; what has changed is the focus.
But threats exist at the level of interaction as well as at the level of
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identity. One experimenter measured the fluency, rate and total verbal output of a series of subjects who thought they were addressing an ordinary audience. Actually the audience was primed by the experimenter to react in one of two ways. In the first mode, various members of the audience manifested positive kinds of behavior, including smiling, main
taining eye contact, sitting in a comfortable but erect posture, note-taking, and absence of fidgeting. With other speakers, the same audience fidgeted, withheld eye contact, looked around the room, and doodled. The difference between these two modes of audience response produced the expected differences in fluency, rate, and total output, although these effects were not always statistically significant (Blubaugh 1969). If these variations in hearer response can produce this sort of effect in subjects who are speaking their native language, we should not be surprised to find stronger effects on people who are trying to speak a foreign one.
A different pair of experiments in the same general area produced statistically significant results. In both, the dependent variable was not total output or general fluency; rather, it was a number called the
"type-token ratio" (TTR). This is the ratio between the total number of words used and the total number of different words used.
In the first experiment of this series, the control subjects were simply asked to tell two familiar folk stories selected by the experimenter.
The experimental subjects told the same two stories. After the first story, however, they were required to count backward from 15 to 1, alternately subtracting 3 and 4. As they attempted this fairly difficult task, the experimenter interrupted them frequently, showed contempt or irritation when they made errors, and was generally unpleasant. After this aggressive behavior on the part of the experimenter, the subjects went on to tell the second story. Not surprisingly, their TTR's were down. Apparently, in response to a threat, they had "reduced their perimeter" by sticking to a leaner vocabulary than they would otherwise have used.
In a related experiment, the subjects were invited to the experiment
er's home and, in the course of the visit, they were asked why they had chosen psychology as their major field of study. The control subjects were allowed to answer freely, while the experimental subjects were criticized, interrupted and misunderstood. As in the previous experiment, the second group showed a drop in TTR. In this informal setting, the difference between groups was even greater (Howeler 1972).
CONCLUSION
Some linguists regard speech as the only certain reality of language-as the physical data which are to be sorted and summarized. They take it for granted that the informant will always speak. Language teachers who are influenced by these linguists are likely to insist that their students do large amounts of oral work, whether mimicry or memorization or something else. Other linguists view speech as only the most superficial manifestation of the interaction of underlying entities and rules. Their counterparts in the field of language teaching may place less emphasis on oral work, and more on mental activity. But they usually trace the origins of speech only as far-only as deep-as their own farthest and deepest understanding of the linguistic structures involved.
In this chapter, we have reminded ourselves that the very utterance of words, regardless of how well or how poorly they are pronounced, depends on sources far beyond the linguistic level. And we have seen that the subtlest details of pronunciation, though they are the most superficial part of language from the point of view of the linguistic analyst, perhaps run deeper into the center of the student's personality than any other aspect of language.