A Global Shift to Bilingualism?

Indo-European languages dominate Europe, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, South Asia and much of Northern Asia, the southern tip of Africa and numerous islands and other specks of land around the world. Economic and military forces have combined with simple accidents of history to enable those languages to capture most of the planet's land mass.

Let’s begin with the European Union, which has more official languages – twenty-three – than any other jurisdiction. English, French and German have been the main working languages of the European Commission since the mid-1980s. However, according to The Economist, a news magazine, “at that time half of all EU documents were drafted in English. Now it is around two-thirds, as enlargement to Scandinavia and Eastern Europe has created a bigger group of people with English as their first choice of second language. This points to an unsettling conclusion for advocates of multilingualism: in a union of many languages, increasingly there is but one language.”

Who Rules? This conclusion may apply to the European Union, which is staggering under translation and interpretation costs of $1.4 billion per year. However, it probably does not apply to the world.

Not surprisingly, they also dominate the global economy. If you make a table of how much economic activity the people in various native-language groups generate, the European language speakers as a group are, again, clearly in a league of their own. Here is a summary of the percentages of world GDP (Gross Domestic Product) based on the languages of the countries that created that economic output.

Table #1: Language and GDP

1. English 28.2%
2. Chinese 22.8%
3. Japanese 5.6%
4. Spanish 5.2%
5. German 4.9%
6. French 4.2%
7. Portuguese 3.4%
8. Italian 2.9%
9. Russian 2.1%
10. Arabic 2.0%
11. Hindi 2.1%
12. Korean 1.4%
13. Indonesian 1.1%
14. Other 14.1%

Clearly, it seems, the world’s economically important languages are European. And English is the economic top dog in the pack of world languages.

The picture changes significantly, however, when you look at the numbers who speak world languages as their first or second tongue. The following list, which combines both native and second-language speakers, indicates the world’s ten top languages in terms of total users. Here we list numbers of speakers, in millions.

Table #2: Total Language Users

1. Mandarin 1,052
2. English 508
3. Hindi 487
4. Spanish 417
5. Russian 277
6. Bengali 211
7. Portuguese 191
8. German 128
8. French 128
9. Japanese 126

By the measure of native speakers plus second-language speakers, English is in second place among the world’s languages. This is not too surprising, since China is huge, rather homogeneous, and controlled by a focused central government.

But when you look at the native-speaker rankings, the numbers are sparser yet. Only 50 years ago English was clearly in second place, after Mandarin. Today, it seems likely that Spanish, Hindi-Urdu and English have broadly similar numbers of native-language speakers. According to David Graddol, English may actually have slipped to fourth place in the ranks, and it may drop another point in the world language leagues (after Arabic) in the next 50 years.

Straws in the Wind: You can slice and dice these numbers many ways. But taken together, they suggest shifts that roughly parallel many highly visible economic and geopolitical changes in the world’s power structure. Many kinds of power are shifting in the direction of the rapidly growing economies of China, India and Latin America, where the 800-pound economic gorilla is Portuguese-speaking Brazil.

Many observers have noted that these economic and geopolitical shifts are restoring balance to the world’s power structure. Fewer have observed that these changes are fundamentally altering the balance of power in the world language scene. World languages are jostling for place, and this is having a huge impact on educational policy and second language learning.

Which second languages are the world’s people learning?

Outside China English is still overwhelmingly number one, but the picture is changing. For example, the outside world is voting with its collective feet on Mandarin as a language with a future. Prospective learners from Sophia to Seoul are lining up for Mandarin language classes. And Brazil, surrounded by a Spanish-speaking market, now offers Spanish as an alternative to English in its educational system. This means English is one of two options there. In the past, it was required.

Here are some other straws in the wind. More than 25 years ago, Canada’s Québec province abolished English as an official language, becoming unilingually French as the rest of the country embraced French/English bilingualism. Then there is the case of the tiny Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Presently English-speaking, Trinidadians have made it a matter of policy to turn their country into a Spanish-speaking jurisdiction by the year 2020.

And so the story goes. Around the world, different languages are angling for competitive position.

Building Bilingualism: Another important part of the story is the growth of national languages, some of them new entries in the lexicon of human speech. This is having a critical impact on more traditional languages. For example, Indonesian (a Malay dialect only formalized and standardized with that country’s independence in 1945) is edging out tribal languages in its vast archipelago.

At present, most Indonesians are fluently bilingual. They speak Indonesian as a second language, and use a regional language in the home. All formal education and the national media use Indonesian, however, so the weakening of local languages is inevitable. Similar approaches to creating national languages are taking place in many developing economies.

The approach of educating young learners in a second language can be attractive in many ways. Consider two examples at different ends of the spectrum – the Republic of Ireland and the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. For reasons of national interest, both countries have chosen to educate their children in an essentially alien tongue.

In the republic, schools teach Irish to children from the age of four to eighteen; it is compulsory. In order to enter university citizens essentially have to pass Irish in the final State exam. The point is to preserve Irish as a national heritage. Prior to Independence, it was a tongue at risk of dying.

Often described as the last surviving refuge of traditional Himalayan Buddhist culture, Bhutan is one of the most isolated nations in the world. It is a landlocked South Asian nation situated between India and Tibet, People's Republic of China. Its language of instruction in the public school system? English.

Content-based Instruction: In Indonesia, Ireland and Bhutan, the students are not learning language only. Their teachers are delivering most of their curriculum in a second language. Known as content-based instruction, this approach is fundamentally different from most of those being used to teach languages. It assumes that people learn a second language more successfully when they use it to acquire information. Another motivator behind this approach, in theory, is that learners wanting to acquire a second language need content that will help prepare them for academic studies.

Where is all this leading? According to Graddol, "bilingualism needs to be better recognized as a normal, rather than a special, condition….(This means) we need to recognize that, for an increasing number of children in the world, what the state may term ‘mother-tongue education’ is not in the language of the home." In his excellent study of these issues, Graddol argues that it is not only the world’s language learners that are going through a rapid transition. So are the world’s teachers and workers.

Increasingly, he believes, developing nations will use their domestic cadres of well-trained English teachers to take that language into the school system. This will reinforce local dialects of English as it reduces the demand for monolingual English language teachers from Britain and its grown-up former colonies. This will reinforce local dialects of English as it reduces the demand for monolingual English language teachers from Britain and its grown-up former colonies. This shift will take time to develop, but it is clearly in the cards.

The teaching of English is becoming a service which is no more specialized than that of, say, chip design or legal research. Not surprisingly, Asia, the largest market for English, is already looking for regional sources of supply.

In developing countries like Thailand, nationals with good English-teaching skills are already in high demand. As these countries develop better English skills – and greater confidence in their ability to use the language – the relative demand for additional native-speaking English teachers will decline.

In the meantime, their policy-makers are likely to pay increasing attention to educational systems in which students learn second languages as a matter of course. To a significant extent, this is because bilingual workers have competitive advantages over their monoglot colleagues.

Globalization is having big impacts everywhere, not least in language teaching and learning. Since globalization is driven by economics, this makes sense. After all, the languages we speak bring competitive advantages with them, and this reality is more likely to intensify than diminish. For language teachers, this is a good thing.

Aural and Oral Skills

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

The two most basic language skills, listening and speaking, sound exactly alike when we describe them as oral and aural skills. “Aural” language, of course, refers to language as we hear it. “Oral” language is what we say.

These two words are “homophones” – words spelled differently that sound alike. There is no good reason why they should be homophones, but they are. Perhaps that accident of spelling can serve as a reminder that, while these two skills cannot be separated, they need to be developed in different ways.

Teaching Basic Skills: According to a hoary adage, “We are given two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we talk.” This is a maxim to remember when we plan our lessons – especially when we are dealing with a classroom of new learners.

Logically, listening should be the first skill you teach. In practice, however, most teachers get their students talking on the first day of class, and many make speech the major focus of their lessons. They tend to downplay the skill of listening, as do most foreign language textbooks. Yet listening is probably the more important skill involved in foreign language learning, as it certainly is in the acquisition of one’s native tongue.

Stephen Krashen and other thinkers have stressed that we acquire language best by using it in communicative ways. He was also one of the first to stress that language acquisition and language learning are not the same. Language learning (in the sense of making conscious discoveries about grammar, for instance) involves different mental processes, and those processes play distinctly secondary roles to those we use when we acquire language naturally. Language develops, he says, through exposure to and use of “comprehensible input” – target language the learner can understand and assimilate. All of this is textbook Krashen.

One reasonable conclusion from these observations is that language learners should understand what they are listening to before they begin to speak. Especially at the initial phase of language acquisition, teachers should avoid oral practice to some degree. Instead, they should have their students concentrate on comprehending what they hear. This idea parallels the experience of young children, who spend almost two years in linguistic silence before they begin to speak.

To use listening-focused learning, a communicative language teacher needs to incorporate active listening into their classes. This is done with activities in which the learners demonstrate that they understand, and receive gentle correction when they err. More advanced students must be explicitly taught to recognize reduced language forms heard in colloquial speech – as in “Whaddaya say?” Also, of course, part of aural comprehension is learning to decipher nonverbal clues.

Pure listening is rarely a good strategy for sustained language acquisition. Even if students are still in their silent period – a common phase for beginners, in which they speak very little if at all, – teachers should encourage active participation from them. This is the only way to confirm that they have understood. Participation can mean as little as a nod or a headshake, for example, or the words “yes” and “no” in English or their native language. Listening without speaking is important for foreign language learners, especially when their language learning has just begun, but at some level that listening should be participatory.

Listening activities do not always involve some other skill, but they generally do; the best classroom activities cross skill boundaries. Since the most typical pairing for a listening activity is to combine it with speech practice, a focus on listening can actually promote the effective development of speaking skills. To see how, let's turn to the activation of speech.

Focus on Conversation: Speaking activities best occur in classrooms in which learners feel comfortable and confident, free to take risks, and have plenty of opportunities to speak. While there are countless kinds of activities teachers use to develop speaking skills, they most commonly promote conversational speech. This, of course, requires the use of both listening and speaking skills.

Conversational language has four characteristics. It is interactive, in the sense that we talk back and forth in short bursts. Often, we do not even use complete sentences – “nice day, eh?” Conversation also has narrow time limits. We have to listen and respond without the luxury of thinking much about what we want to say. Conversation is also repetitive, in the sense that we tend to use a relatively small amount of vocabulary and a relatively small repertory of language structures.. And finally, of course, it is error-prone. Because of time limits, we may use the wrong word, pronounce something wrong or mangle structure. While we may hear the mistake and back up and correct ourselves, often we don’t.

Bearing in mind the earlier comments about listening, these characteristics of conversation illustrate an important difference between listening activities and speaking activities. Because listening is a learner’s primary source of comprehensible input, aural activities depend heavily on accuracy. To understand, learners must listen carefully, and their comprehension must be good. In many listening activities, we play a short recording of speech repeatedly until we think our learners understand it.

By contrast, learners shift heavily in the direction of fluency during conversation practice, which combines both listening and speaking skills. At this portion of the language class, the teacher kisses student accuracy goodbye. During speaking activities, the focus is on interactive, time-limited, repetitive and error-prone conversation. As is often the case in the language classroom, as we move from skill to skill, or from language study to language activation, we willingly compromise accuracy in the interest of fluency.

The How and Why of Language: Language originated with the two linguistic skills we have just reviewed – listening and speaking. But why? What is the purpose of language? And how did it evolve to play this role in our lives?

Whether we hear it or voice it, the purpose of language is to do the things that speech can do. In no way is it abstract. Like an axe, language is a tool with which we do things.

According to linguistic philosopher J.R. Searle, we use language to perform five kinds of “speech act”. These are commissive, declarative, directive, expressive and representative. Commissive speech commits the speaker to do something – for example, “I promise to bring it tomorrow,” or “Watch out or I will report you.” Declarations change the state of things – “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” or “You’re fired!” Directive speech gets the listener to do something – “Please come in,” “Watch out!” or “Why don’t you take your medicine?” Expressive language explains feelings and attitudes: “Those roses are beautiful,” or “I hate broccoli.” Finally, representative speech describes states or events – “Rice is an important Thai export,” or “The United States is at war again.” All of our speech seems to do one or more of these five things.

Language is such an important part of our lives that we use it to meet virtually all of our daily needs. Consider psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, which is often illustrated as a pyramid. In Maslow’s model, we can only move to a higher level of need after we have scrambled up the lower levels.

In his view, people have five kinds of need. Our most basic needs are physiological – food and water, for example. The next level up is the need for safety and security, which we achieve, for example, by dealing with emergencies. Tier 3 involves needs for love, affection and belongingness. The need for esteem – self-respect and respect from others – comes next, but the highest level in this hierarchy is the need for self-actualization. According to Maslow, in this last level “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write.” The point of this discussion is that we meet virtually all those needs through speech acts.

The gradual evolution of language has profoundly affected the nature of our species. As Stephen Pinker observes,

Human practical intelligence may have evolved with language (which allows know-how to be shared at low cost) and with social cognition (which allows people to cooperate without being cheated), yielding a species that literally lives by the power of ideas.

It is impossible to overstate the value or complexity of language. It is perhaps the most fundamental feature of our lives.

The Gift of Tongues and The Written Word

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

In the beginning, there were only two language skills: listening and speaking. Language began as an aural/oral process. It has always been associated with visual cues, however (consider the pervasive importance of body language in human encounters}, and those visual cues eventually led to the language skills of reading and writing.

In the West, that process began in ancient Sumer, about 3500 BCE. Oddly enough, reading, writing and arithmetic developed out of early accounting systems, rather than the other way around. Reading and writing extended language in quite an extraordinary way. From a function restricted to ear and mouth, they turned it into one that can also be conveyed by eye and hand.

The gradual development of widespread literacy led to many changes in the human condition. Most notably, it liberated language from the immediacy of the spoken word. Both reading and writing require more time than the aural-oral skills, and they tend to encourage thought. The following lists compare spoken and written language, with item #1 in the first group mirroring item #1 in the second group, and so on.

Listening and Speaking

1. Listening and speaking involve impromptu, informal, colloquial language.
2. Unfamiliar national and regional accents and pronunciation problems cause difficulties in comprehension.
3. Meaning is conveyed by word stress, intonation and body language.
4. Gestures and expressions aid understanding.
5. Speakers speak in real time; listeners participate immediately.
6. People easily develop native-language listening and speaking skills.
7. Speech is essentially impermanent.

Reading and Writing

1. Reading texts tend to be organized, formal and stylized.
2. Alphabets and ideographic-style writing systems (think Chinese writing) vary greatly in complexity and approach.
3. English orthography (spelling) is highly idiosyncratic.
4. Meaning is enhanced through punctuation and writing style.
5. Writers have time for corrections; readers can puzzle out meaning.
6. Learning to read and write requires conscious effort.
7. The printed word is documentation.

To read and write, we need six things. In the balance of this commentary, I will review them, and consider their implications for the English teacher.

The Roman Alphabet: English-language learners need to recognize the letters of the Roman (also called the Latin) alphabet. It is very difficult to understate the impact of this hoary old alphabet on western civilization. According to some theorists, this alphabet uses so few letters to represent words that it helped Westerners become highly analytical, and thus had a huge impact on the western mind and outlook.

The Roman alphabet is the dominant writing system in most of the world. The primary alternatives are the Cyrillic alphabet (used in the former Soviet Union), the Arabic alphabet, the Brahmic alphabets of India and parts of Southeast Asia, and the ideographic systems of China, Korea and Japan. The latter are not alphabets.

Phonics: Also known as the phonetic method, this is a system of teaching children to read. It is commonly used to teach young learners to read in their mother tongue. In this system learners are taught the sounds which the letters represent, and then try to build up the sound of a new or unfamiliar word by saying it one sound at a time.

Phonics can be used for older learners that use either ideographic or non-Latin alphabets. The main difference is that older learners have probably already learned their own writing system, so they will bring to the learning process strategies based on that experience. A useful embellishment on phonics is to have the students spell words out loud as they encounter them in writing. Thus, “ant” is “ay en tee.” This helps develop the students’ ability to remember and recognize the word.

Handwriting and Keyboards: Remember that the printed word is essentially speech produced through our hands. Until recently, the normal progression of things was that we would first learn to write, then move on to cursive writing (rounded script). In recent years, however, cursive has been given short shrift in the West, as youngsters increasingly used keyboards.

Does this matter? According to one observer,

The loss of handwriting … may be a cognitive opportunity missed. The neurological process that directs thought, through fingers, into written symbols is a highly sophisticated one. Several academic studies have found that good handwriting skills at a young age can help children express their thoughts better

Whatever the case, most teachers in Western countries do not spend a great deal of time on cursive writing. EFL teachers are less likely to spend time with their students working on it, except in unusual circumstances. In most cases, to be able to print in English is enough.

It is essential that English-language learners acquire as soon as possible the ability to recognize and produce written words. And since the computer is not going to go away, it is often useful (it depends on class assessment and the nature of the assignment) to insist on typewritten work.

Orthography: Orthography is the fancy work for spelling, and English spelling is more irregular than any other on the planet. As the table below illustrates, the letter combination “ou” can be pronounced in eleven ways, while we can create the “long e” sound with eleven different spellings.
Letters “ou”

tough, tour, dough, famous, bought, you, should,
journey, loud, flour, cough.

Sound “ee”

paediatric, me, seat, seem, ceiling, people, chimney,
machine, siege, phoenix, lazy.

When you teach vocabulary, it is critical that you point out irregular spellings. Because of the oddities of accepted English spelling (think “straight” and “protégé”), it is often quite difficult for students – especially those who speak non-European languages – to develop quick word recognition. This requires frequent practice. However, as the following passage illustrates, native speakers with sophisticated language skills can recognize words with great efficiency.

The phaomnneil pweor of the hmuan mnid
Aoccdrnig to rsreeach at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Asbouellty amzanig huh?

Punctuation: What stress and pronunciation do to the melody and rhythm of speech, punctuation does for the written word. Punctuation skills are to reading and writing what phonology is to listening and speaking.

English punctuation is highly sophisticated, and it is difficult to teach. However, consistently and from the beginning you should stress the basics: capitalize the first letter in a sentence, the pronoun “I” and proper names; put a full stop at the end of every sentence; indent paragraphs. The more sophisticated functions (commas, semicolons, colons, dashes, writing schema and so on) come much later.

Inflections and sentence structure: Good writing requires good grammar. In spoken English, fluency is mostly more important than accuracy. In written English, the opposite is true. Good writing requires good grammar. Because readers have time to study and analyse written English, they are more aware of errors in inflection (he walks, he walked), and other features of language structures than when they are in aural/oral mode. The same applies to spelling. Also, grammatically correct structures enable readers to identify parts of speech, and this aids them in their understanding.

A brilliant illustration of the importance of structure in written English can be found in Lewis Carrol’s famous nonsense rhyme, “Jabberwocky.” The story begins,

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/ Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,/ And the mome raths outgrabe.

In this poem, all of the content words are meaningless. Yet because Carrol’s grammatical structure is flawless, we have no trouble identifying the parts of speech and the inflections of these nonsense words.

“Toves,” “borogoves” and “raths,” for example, are all plural nouns. The other nonsense words are either adjectives or verbs; indeed, "outgrabe" is clearly an irregular verb in the simple past tense. The one ambiguity in this stanza is the word “brillig”. We don’t know whether it is an adjective or a noun, but in terms of sentence structure it is clearly a complement.

Because of the importance of structure in the written word, when you teach writing you must stress strategies – pre-writing activities, revision, dictionary use, spell-checking and peer review, for example – to help students get their work up to an acceptable standard. You must also, of course, let them know what that standard is.

Snow White’s Father: Is He Really Absent?

Cover via Amazonby Peter McKenzie-Brown

I once shared a class of graduate students with a feminist colleague who contended that the heroine's father was always absent in the early Disney cartoons.

We were studying Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in that class, and the students (they were all Thai) had to write a brief argumentative essay based on the cartoon. To help them along, I wrote the following as a model. It addressed the question of the presence or absence of Snow White's father in this 1939 classic.

Many commentators have observed that both of Snow White’s parents are absent from Walt Disney’s classic feature-length cartoon, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” There is no denying that Snow White’s biological mother is absent. The film explains clearly that the poor woman is dead; it is Snow White’s stepmother (not her real mother) who plays the wicked antagonist. However, this paper argues that Father is indeed present, and that he plays key roles throughout most of the film. The children for whom this marvellous fantasy was created will easily recognize Father’s character being performed through the antics and deeds of the seven dwarfs.

Think of this film as an 83-minute metaphor for a family dispute seen through the prism of a young girl’s imagination. The action takes place through three dramatic triangles.

In the opening scene the three points of the triangle are the Queen, Snow White and the Prince. The Queen envies Snow White’s youth and beauty, and Snow White’s gathering affection for the Prince.

In one dramatic highlight, we see the Queen, furious with envy and jealousy, angrily pulling the drapes in her castle room shut when she sees Snow White and the Prince falling in love.

Another dramatic triangle occurs in the middle section of the film. Here the dynamic tension occurs among Snow White, the Old Hag (the transformed Queen), and the seven dwarfs. One dramatic highlight in this segment occurs when the dwarfs suddenly become Snow White’s protector, an important role for father in every culture and society. This process begins when Sleepy exclaims, “Maybe the old Queen has got Snow White!” “We have got to save her!” cries Doc.

The concluding dramatic triangle consists of Snow White, the dwarfs and the Prince. In the form of the dwarfs, Father blesses Snow White’s marriage to the Prince, and the couple ride happily off to their castle together. If we think of the dwarfs as an embodiment of Father, the final scene resonates with even greater strength. A young girl whose first love was spurned by her stepmother seeks refuge in Father, and he blesses her marriage to the Prince.

Seen in this way, the film is an inspired rendering of a domestic theme that is commonplace around the world.

I suggest that the dwarfs embody Father in the same metaphoric way that, in the second dramatic triangle, the Old Hag embodies a transformation of the Queen. As Father, the dwarfs are much older than Snow White, and they are not sexually threatening. And like every child’s father, the dwarfs have many moods. The “Doc” in dad is intelligent and kind. However, Father can also be grumpy or happy, sleepy or sneezy, bashful or even dopey. In my view, the dwarfs in this film are not father figures, as Jenny Sharpe has suggested. They are an image of Father himself, with whom childish viewers will easily identify.

The Stress-timed Rhythm of English

English is timed by the syllables we stress. It is thus irregular in rhythm, like the two family groups above. Graphic from here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Imagine yourself at public auditions in which four conductors are competing for the top job in an orchestra. Each competitor has to conduct the same piece of music, and each to the same metronome. As he waves his baton, the first conductor begins with the words, “One, two, three, four.” The second says “One and two and three and four.” The next says “One and a two and a three and a four.” And the last aspirant says “One and then a two and then a three and then a four.”

Which of these conductors will miscue the orchestra? The answer is “None.” Each of these four sentences takes exactly the same amount of time to say. This illustrates a key and yet peculiar feature of our language. It is called the stress-timed rhythm of English.

Stress-timing: We can illustrate with almost any word of two or more syllables – for example, “syllable.” We stress this word using the pattern Ooo, placing primary emphasis on the first segment of the word. In English every long word has its own stress pattern. Think of the words “import” and “record,” for example. Both words can be pronounced using either the pattern Oo or the pattern oO. Which pattern you use fundamentally changes the meaning of the word.

Something else happens after you choose which syllable to stress. The pronunciation of the main vowel in the unstressed syllable changes, often to the sound ‘uh’ which is the single most common sound in the English language. This sound has its own special name, schwa, and about 30 per cent of the sounds we make when we speak English are the sound schwa. In English, schwa can be represented by any vowel.

For example, consider the following two-syllable words. The first word uses the stress pattern Oo; the second, the stress pattern oO. You will notice that in each case we pronounce the unstressed vowel as schwa, regardless of its spelling.

A: Atlas; Canoe
E: College; Reveal
I: Cousin; Disease
O: Anchor; Contain
U: Lettuce; Support

This practice of replacing unstressed vowels with schwa also occurs in connected speech – English as we use it in our daily lives. If I ask “Where are you from?” I will stress the word “from,” pronouncing the short ‘o’ sound quite clearly. If you answer “I’m from Sydney,” you will most likely reduce the ‘o’ to schwa. The reason is that you are likely to stress the word “Sydney” instead. This reduction of vowel is the key to the stress-timing of most forms of English.

It's worth noting that some English dialects from India, for example, are characterized by a syllable-timed rhythm. These comments refer to the English of Britain, North America and Australia.

Native English speakers from those countries frequently use schwa in unstressed syllables. This is why it takes the same amount of time to say “One, two, three, four” as it does to say “One and then a two and then a three and then a four.” Reducing vowels enables us to speed through unstressed syllables. This is how we achieve the particular rhythm of English, in which stressed syllables are roughly equidistant in time, no matter how many syllables come in between.

Most of the world's other major languages have quite a different pattern. They are known as ‘syllable-timed’ languages. Each syllable receives approximately the same amount of stress as the others in a word or a sentence. These languages thus have quite a different rhythm from that of English. Think of them as being like this line of soldiers.

Vowels: When we learn to read, our teachers tell us that vowels are the characters a, e, i, o and u. Phonologically, though, a vowel is a speech sound in which the air stream from the lungs is not blocked in the mouth or throat. Usually, when we pronounce vowels we also vibrate our vocal cords.

We form the vowels in our mouths by moving five speech organs around. The most important of those organs is the tongue – language is the “gift of tongues” – and linguists often describe the vowels by the position of the tongue in the mouth. The vowels range from front to back and high to low. For example, the following ‘Sammy diagrams’ show the position of the tongue in the pronunciation of the high back vowel in the word “boot”, the low back vowel in the word “pot”, the high front vowel in the word “beat” and the low front vowel in the word “bat”.

The position of the tongue when we make vowel sounds is illustrated in the Sammies shown to the side and below.

Based on North American pronunciation, the words in the columns give examples of the 12 vowels in common use. Note that the vowel in “pot” is neither fully central nor fully back. The central vowels are essentially schwa, the sound that makes vowel reduction possible.

In English, the high vowels, shifting from high to low, include the vowel sounds in beat, bit, bait, bet and bat. The central vowels are the mid vowels in machine and but. The back vowels, ranging from high to low, are in boot, book, boat and bought. The vowel in pot is an odd one. It is a low vowel, but it is neither fully central nor fully back.

The Sammy diagrams above, plus those that follow, come from the book Teaching American English Pronunciation, by Peter Avery and Susan Ehrlich. Click to enlarge.

Finally, a few graphics showing pronunciation patterns in North American English, also from Avery and Ehrlich.

Thai Culture and Customs

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

For westerners living in Thailand, much about this country is difficult to fathom. Although Thais are clearly kind, fun-loving and charming, there is something about the country that is quite alien to most of us. Why is this? Here are a few ideas about why Thai culture is so fundamentally different from those in the West.

Thailand shares a complex of cultural and linguistic features with other countries in East Asia. Together, those local characteristics have led to ways of thinking and organizing knowledge that are fundamentally different from those we westerners employ. Explains Richard Nesbitt,

Two utterly different approaches to the world have maintained themselves for thousands of years. These approaches include profoundly different social relations, views about the nature of the world, and characteristic thought processes….The social practices promote the worldviews; the worldviews dictate the appropriate thought processes; and the thought processes both justify the worldviews and support the social practices.

East is East, and West is West, and the difficulties of the two meeting are scarcely less baffling than they were when Rudyard Kipling wrote Gunga Din in 1892.

People around the world call Thailand the Land of Smiles, but are Thais really happier than westerners? The evidence suggests they are, even though Thai culture – like most Asian cultures – does not place much store in the pursuit of happiness as a personal virtue . Thais tend to place greater stress on public displays of respect and on (hierarchical) social relationships. However, the place to begin this discussion is with body language, which in Thailand has a few easy-to-accommodate requirements.

Body language: The traditional Thai greeting is called the wai. In general, the younger person greets first, by placing the palms together at chest level and bowing slightly. The higher the placement of the fingertips, the greater the respect; the highest wais are reserved for monks and royalty. If someone should wai you, it is polite to wai back (except to children.)

In giving or receiving gifts or passing things, Thais ordinarily use the right hand. They place the left hand under the right elbow, and bow the head slightly.

The head is considered sacred, since it is the source of intelligence and spiritual substance. Do not touch another person’s head. Because the feet come in contact with the ground, they are considered to be profane, dirty – especially the soles of the feet. They should not be pointed at another person. Pointing the bottom of your feet at someone can be interpreted as an insult – the equivalent of giving someone (in North American culture) the finger.

Remove your shoes before entering a temple or a home, and in offering food to monks on their morning rounds. Rural people, who often go barefoot, wash their feet at the bottom of the stairs to the entrance of the house before going inside.

When sitting on the floor, men often cross their legs. Women tuck their legs to the side. It is rude to sit with your ankle crossed over a knee, or to place an arm over the back of someone’s chair. Also, public displays of affection are frowned upon.

Respect: These displays are important in Thai culture, and they make sense in terms of broader social realities. One is the matter of respect and influence, which plays a critical role in Thai life.

Respect is an important part of all societies, of course. However, in Thailand it comes with a few special features. It seems to be built into social attitudes. This is different from the situation in most western countries, where we routinely say that respect needs to be earned. (In practice, of course, few people ask how celebrities have earned the respect they receive….)

In Thailand, respect comes in two flavours. One is the flavour of wisdom and moral influence. Some people have it automatically. In approximate rank order, the top of the respect totem pole is peopled with the King, the Queen and one’s parents; monks; older people; and teachers and professors.

The second flavour of respect is owed to those with wealth or institutional power. Many Thais believe that wealth is a reward for superior religious merit in previous lives. So is raw power – both police and military. In such an intensely hierarchical society, patron-client relationships are dominant. They can be found in business, military and other areas of social life.

Public displays of respect take many forms. These include tolerance, kindness and generosity and the absence of open conflict in public.

Respect is a good thing. Loss of respect is not. If you cause a person to lose respect in public, that person loses face. Thais take loss of face quite seriously, and it is an important social issue. For the teacher, it can affect classroom dynamics in the sense that students will rarely argue or disagree with their teachers. Also, they are less likely to risk making a mistake in class than western students since a serious error could mean serious loss of face.

Sacred, Human and Profane: The Thai world-view reflects a profound sense of the sacred, the human and the profane. Vertically, these roughly correspond to sky, community and earth. Below us are demons; above us, spirits. The human world stands between the two. One can suggest that the (sacred) head touches the higher world and the (dirty) feet touch the profane.

The sense of sacred, human and profane also exists horizontally. Villages need to have a wat (temple) at hand, because it is sacred space. The farther away from the temple you are, the greater your risk of encountering the spirits of the forest, many of which are not good spirits. Rural villages frequently have carvings at their gates to remind the spirits not to cross the boundary between human and spirit space.

These ideas are represented architecturally in the structure of the wat, which has been strongly influenced by Brahmanism (Hinduism). For example, the chedi in a temple – its usually conical central tower – represents Mount Meru. In the Brahmanist religious classic Ramakien (the Thai version of the Hindu Ramayana), Mt. Meru is the home of the gods. The name of this classic’s hero, Rama, is now applied to the kings of the present dynasty. For example, the present king is the ninth Chakri king, and is known as Rama IX.

Thai Buddhism and the King: The glue that holds Thailand together is its religion and the King. While the country is officially Buddhist, the religion itself is a complex mix of animistic, Brahmanistic and Buddhist elements. It takes a long time to understand.

A striking characteristic of Thai society is its acceptance and tolerance of other religions. This was once illustrated by the fifth Chakri King, Chulalongkorn (Rama V). During the early years of his reign, he learned that the Prince of Chiang Mai opposed the work of Christian missionaries in Thailand’s North. In a famous edict, written in 1878, he wrote that

Religion cannot be an obstacle in secular administration. Every person has the right to choose his own religious belief, and whether or not that that particular religion teaches the truth is a matter that concerns him alone. According to our agreement and in practice in Bangkok we do not make any restrictions concerning religion. If anyone considers the religion of Jesus Christ good and true, he is free to profess it. Whenever the country needs his services there is no reason why a man following Jesus’ teachings should not be able to render them. Religion is no hindrance to a man’s duty to his country.

Bearing King Chulalongkorn’s tolerance in mind, it is useful for us to observe a few simple rules.

In the meantime, observe a few simple rules. You should never denigrate Buddhism to a Thai. Show respect for the monks. Their presence greatly enriches Thai life. You should dress respectfully (this means conservatively) when you enter a temple. Women should wear clothing that covers their arms and legs when entering a temple, especially a royal temple. Also, women may not touch images of the Buddha or a Buddhist monk.

The present dynasty of Thai kings has included many remarkable rulers. Thais love and revere their kings in a way that most people from other countries simply cannot understand. The kings of this dynasty have generally deserved the reverence they have received.

The present king, who officially has little power, yields enormous moral influence and authority. Thailand is now celebrating his 60th year as the country’s sovereign. It is extremely rude to say anything disparaging about the king. It is also against the law. Do not do it, even as a joke.

The Best Place to Learn

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Where is the best place to learn language? For young children, the best place to learn language is “at play,” if they have young friends or family members who will use the language with them. Elsewhere we discuss in some detail the ability of 2-6 year olds to pick up languages with little effort – almost as though they inhale it from the air.

For older learners, though, the answer is more ambiguous. Many of us have memories of awful language classes and awful language teachers. Especially if you live in a foreign country, many people find that the best way to learn the native language is from a partner or from people in the market and restaurants. Many people at least begin their learning through the self-study of grammar books or by listening to the excellent language lessons available on Pimsleur- or Rosetta-system CDs and tapes. Other terrific programs have been developed for the computer – for example, the excellent Thai Interactive programs developed by the Australian military.

There is a smorgasbord to choose from, in other words. So where is the best place to learn? In this course, we maintain that the best way for most people to learn is to take language classes, and that the best place to learn is in the classroom. This bald statement comes with a number of provisos, however. The most important is that the class should be focused on teaching the learner how to communicate in the new language. As we shall discuss in a later lesson, this simple consideration is relatively new to the language teaching profession.

The second proviso is this: the teacher must be good. By this we mean that all of his efforts are aimed at providing the learners with language they can understand. According to Stephen Krashen, one of the best-known theorists of language learning, “the best activities (for language learning) are those that are natural, interesting and understood.” Good teachers provide those activities through the lesson plan, which we will discuss in much detail in this course. Good teachers also treat each student as a valuable person worthy of respect, regardless of their aptitude or motivation.

As important is the language that teachers and learners use in class. That language takes three forms, which we know as “teacher talk”, “foreigner talk” and “interlanguage talk”. Each one is an attempt to communicate. But the granddaddy of them all is “caretaker talk”, which was an important source of language for most of us.

Talk, Talk, Talk, Talk: Teacher talk is what the teacher says as a teacher. Foreigner talk is the language she may use at the break. If she is good at her profession, these uses of language will both be like the caretaker talk of those who look after young children.

Here are the characteristics of caretaker talk.
• First, it focuses on giving support to a child’s ability to comprehend what is said to him.
• Second, it is syntactically simple, becoming more complex as the child gains in linguistic maturity.
• Thirdly, and most importantly, caretaker speech is communication. Its purpose is to convey messages, get the child to behave in a certain way, and communicate.

Caretakers are more likely to use imperatives like “Be careful, Johnny.” Teachers are more likely to use declaratives – for example, “We say this when we want to ask for food at a restaurant.” In every other way, though, these language “codes” (ways of speaking) are quite similar. They are simple, clear and loud enough.

Assuming that the teacher is a native speaker, at class break her speech will become the code known as foreigner talk. This is essentially the kind of simplified speech a native speaker uses to communicate with people who are weak in a foreign language. We do it quite automatically when we recognize the other person’s weakness in the language.

Some foreigner talk uses forms that are almost pidgin – we call this “Tarzan talk,” and strongly discourage its use in class or anywhere else. The form of foreigner talk more appropriate for the teacher is speech simplified just enough to enable the learner to understand you. This becomes easier with experience.

In these comments we have also mentioned interlanguage talk. This simply refers to the speech of a foreign-language learner – often that of the student’s peer group. It is generally inaccurate speech, with many grammatical errors. However, when the students use it together, they can understand each other. It therefore plays an important role in their language learning.

These kinds of talk – language codes, as linguists like to call them – are the reason the classroom is the best place for older learners, especially, to learn a second or foreign language. Besides the productive activities of the lesson plan, there is valuable teacher talk to listen to. There are other students to meet for interlanguage talk. Through the teacher and perhaps the other students, it is possible to enjoy foreigner-talk.

These simplified, meaningful codes of language can help almost any learner. That is why, despite the explosion of self-teaching approaches to language learning, classroom teaching remains the staple of language acquisition for older learners.