By Enrique Rojas R.
You know the story. He was a very good English student; at the language
center, he communicated effectively with his classmates and the teacher, he was
quite vocal and he’d made individual and group presentations before his
classmates in power point, prezi and you name it, and even participated in
debates. But when he arrived in the States he found he couldn´t understand
people very well, and was unable to make himself understood, to the point that
he became mute for all practical purposes, at least in what the English
language was related. What had happened?
And the educational institution where he studied advertised repeatedly
and loudly that they used the Communicative Approach, the one that can’t fail,
the very one we continue calling new and modern although it has been in use for
over half a century. How could have gone wrong?
THE TOWER OF BABEL
Yet this occurrence keeps repeating in Great Britain, Canada, Australia
and other places where the language of Shakespeare is common currency. There’s
a communication gap for the new arrivals from our country. It would seem he
learned a kind of English that is different to the one used in all these
latitudes. What kind of English would that be? Perhaps a Peruvian or a Latin
American version of it?
The truth to this dilemma is not based on a different type of English at
all, Not dissimilar in terms of syntax, morphology or semantics. The problem is
with pronunciation, a topic that usually escapes the diligence and frequently
even the awareness of most English teachers. It’s the “spanglization” of English in terms
of pronunciation. We can say that the
majority of English teachers suffer from it and spread it to their students.
The main reason for this is the bogus assumption that
English and Spanish share the same alphabet; therefore, educators don’t feel
the need to teach it right from the beginning to their pupils like their
colleagues from China, Japan, Egypt or Russia do. “English and Spanish use the
Latin characters so we don’t need to learn them” they usually think.
The problem is that we tend to identify letters with
graphemes, that is, with a visual form of representing them. But we forget that
the graphic symbol also represents a sound, a phoneme. In the case of a Spanish
speaker, each grapheme is correspondent with a phoneme. But in other languages,
a grapheme can be representative of more than one phoneme. In English, a
grapheme can be the visual clue that represents up to six different phonemes.
THE GOOD EARS OF
CHILDREN
Furthermore, the way in which bigger children, teenagers and adults
learn the English vocabulary is through the eyes not the ears. Students find it
very hard to identify a word when they hear it from a native because it
contains sounds they are not familiar with. Only when they see it written with
the characters they know they can take it in and venture to repeat it. But
then, they adapt it to the sounds they are used to utter, based on the phonemes
they can associate with the letters they see. And abracadabra! The
Spanglization process has taken place.
We have to ponder that, as Marta
Bartolí, from the Rigol Laboratori de Fonètica Aplicada – LFA, at Universitat de Barcelona,
notices “…in the communicative approach, written language is still used as a
support in the teaching of oral language and pronunciation. As we will see, the
reading-writing base of teaching can damage phonic acquisition.”
And that is precisely the difference with children. One of the reasons
why they pay more attention to the English utterances and learn how vocabulary
sounds in this language is because they can’t read, they just imitate the
sounds they hear. They are not restricted to a number of phonemes they have
already learned.
Another reason for the small children noticeable prowess in terms of
pronunciation is given by Steven Krashen who contends that babies are born with
the capacity to hear and distinguish all phonetic speech sounds from all
different languages in the world and that they lose that capability respect to
the phonemes they never hear and keep it only for the phonemes employed in the
language or languages they are normally exposed to.
In sum, we aren’t doing things right in teaching pronunciation and when
trying to teach real English. Something needs to be done. I, for one, feel that
we should go back to teach the alphabet, the whole alphabet. With graphemes as
well as phonemes.
What do you
think?
Why is real
communication with locals so difficult?
BIOGRAPHICAL
DATA
Graduated in Journalism at the PUCP, Peru,
Enrique Rojas R. holds a MA in Journalism and MA in Inter American History from
Southern Illinois University, USA; an MA in Literature from University of the
Americas, Puebla, Mexico, all the coursework for a MA in TEFL at Universidad de
Piura, Peru and BA in Education from Universidad Federico Villarreal. He has
also obtained Certificates of Proficiency in English both from Cambridge
University and the University of Michigan and the Diploma for EFL Teachers from
Universidad del Pacifico. He is an Oral Examiner for the Cambridge University
exams and has been awarded the title Expert in E-Learning from Asociacion
Educativa del Mediterraneo and Universidad Marcelino Champagnat. He has worked
as a professor in universities in Peru, Mexico and the United States; as a
newscaster and a producer in radio and television stations in the United States
and Mexico, and as a writer and editor in daily newspapers of the same
countries. He has been in the staff of CIDUP for 19 years teaching English and
Spanish specializing in International Exams, English for Business, ESP and
Teacher Training. He has been a speaker in every Congress of English for
Special Purposes organized by Centro de Idiomas de la U.P. He is also a member
of its Research Area.
