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Mark

Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan

Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 12:09 am Post subject:

natsume wrote:

I have an aside on the Esperanto debate.

As somebody who has invested a fair amount of time trying to learn both Japanese and Spanish, personally, there is no way I would, at this point, ever try to learn Esperanto. I'm far more inclined to start something like Mandarin or Portuguese, if I'm not too busy trying to work on the first two.

What it comes down to is my intrinsic motivation. I'm learning the languages of cultures I am interested in. Esperanto does not have the allure of any culture behind it, for me.

I can certainly understand that. And, of course, Esperanto is not very useful now. It has two main purposes:

1) to exist. By this I mean that it's available should the world decide that it wants to adopt an easy-to-learn universal second language. This, of course, may very well never happen. But, some people think it's a good idea and are willing to learn the language to support the idea.

2) International contacts and travel. Most cities have some sort of Esperanto association, and if you contact them they'll usually help you out with accomodation and whatnot. Of course, there are English-language hospitality services out there like couch surfers and all that as well. But, if you like travel and want to mingle with locals, then I think the benefits of Esperanto make up for the work of learning it.

zorro (3)

Joined: 19 Dec 2006
Posts: 202

Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 12:35 am Post subject:

Quote:

Katakana English is not used to speak in English, it's used to speak English words in Japanese. It's not a variety of English communication any more than the French words that litter the English language enable us to understand French.

This is simply not true. 'lasto nighto iu wento tou a shopu'.

Is this Japanese?
Many of my students in Japan spoke with katakana English. Having these students attempt communication with someone who has an equally localised quirk to their English (for arguments sake and simplicity a Geordie) you can imagine that there would be problems. Do you agree?

At the minute, the main options for those learning English is to learn the predominant British or American English pronunciation. With the shift in emphasis from NS to NNS (as you are fond of mentioning) the ideas arose that perhaps a neutral form would be better. Is Esperanto the answer? Not in my opinion. How about working from the base we already have (as I mentioned before; a rudimentary knowledge of English for a lot of the world)? Lets build on this and identify a phonological core that can be used by all of the world's English speakers to aid intelligibility (if there is such a word). I believe that this is what Jenkins was getting at.

Quote:

Also there's more to a true English variety than accent, differences will depend on whether the English being spoken is a dialect, New English, creole or pidgin.

Why on earth are you talking about Pidgins and Creoles? I can't see the connection other than to try and throw in a bit of random knowledge. Wink

Mark

Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan

Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 2:17 am Post subject:

zorro (3) wrote:

Quote:

Also there's more to a true English variety than accent, differences will depend on whether the English being spoken is a dialect, New English, creole or pidgin.

Why on earth are you talking about Pidgins and Creoles? I can't see the connection other than to try and throw in a bit of random knowledge. Wink

I'm not sure that it would be possible to come up with a neutral accent that everyone can easily learn. However, I think it would be easier to come up with a national accent that is easy to learn and that is comprehensible to others. The Indian English accent is a great example of this.

Although it may sound strange, accents can be designed this way. Besides, there are already models available, Ken Watanabe's spoken English accent is probably a great example. It's clearly Japanese, but also easily comprehensible. All you need to do is codify that and then teach it in schools.

womblingfree

Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Posts: 826

Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 2:47 am Post subject:

zorro (3) wrote:

Quote:

This is simply not true. 'lasto nighto iu wento tou a shopu'.

Is this Japanese?

Oh, you mean Japanese transferring katakana pronunciation into English sentences. That's a different story.

That's Japanese L1 transfer into an English dialect and pretty comprehensible if both speaker and listener are making an effort.

Mark wrote:

I think it would be easier to come up with a national accent that is easy to learn and that is comprehensible to others. The Indian English accent is a great example of this.

There are hundreds (thousands?) of English varieties in India.

Last edited by womblingfree on Sun Feb 11, 2007 7:54 pm; edited 1 time in total

womblingfree

Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Posts: 826

Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 2:52 am Post subject:

Mark wrote:

many Japanese speak English via katakana and, to some degree, Japanese syntax. Is this a valid example of linguistic diversity?

Yes.

Mark wrote:

Are there really that many people like this? Granted, they are in conversation schools in Asian countries, but those people are not language teachers responsible for students' development. They're just working as chatting partners, and monolingual folks with no teaching knowledge can handle that job.

Teachers at eikaiwa will move into high schools with little or no extra training. The whole genre of 'English Conversation' in Japan is run along similar lines.

Of course for anything that actually involves progress wthin the education system native English speakers are usually sidelined for trained professionals. A major bummer for NS's that are actually able to do the task, although they are the vast minority in Japan.

womblingfree

Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Posts: 826

Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 2:58 am Post subject:

zorro (3) wrote:

How about working from the base we already have (as I mentioned before; a rudimentary knowledge of English for a lot of the world)? Lets build on this and identify a phonological core that can be used by all of the world's English speakers to aid intelligibility (if there is such a word). I believe that this is what Jenkins was getting at.

This really isn't what Jennie Jenkins is getting at. She probaly means that all varieties have a similar phonological core within their variety.

She is the last person on Earth that would suggest a standardised English to be imposed on everyone!

She was my tutor for a year, so I'm pretty certain Laughing

Mark

Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan

Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2007 3:13 am Post subject:

womblingfree wrote:

Mark wrote:

many Japanese speak English via katakana and, to some degree, Japanese syntax. Is this a valid example of linguistic diversity?

Yes.

Ok, hmm. So, just to be clear, if a Japanese speaker says this:

アイ　ウオッチング　ムービー　ベリ　ライク。
ai uotchingu muubii beri raiku.
I really enjoy watching movies.

This is ok? I mean, surely at some point we reach the place where someone is no longer speaking English. Even simplified, generalized International English.

There has to be some core that we all acknowledge, or else we're just saying a bunch of words that we read in the dictionary and hoping that people can understand us.

Mark

Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan

Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2007 3:21 am Post subject:

womblingfree wrote:

That's Japanese L1 transfer into an English dialect and pretty comprehensible if both speaker and listener are making an effort.

This seems like a pretty subjective statement. Comprehensible to who? And how much effort can we realistically expect people to make?

Sure, language teachers who are familiar with Katakana English (meaning pronunciation as well as Japanese phrasing) will be able to understand it. After all, they're being paid to understand it.

But, is it realistic to expect people at an international conference to do the same? I just find it hard to imagine a room full of people happily sitting through a Katakana English presentation.

One way to test this would be to take videos of Japanese speakers at various levels of comprehensibility and show them to NNS and NS of English around the world and ask them to rate the comprehensibility of the speaker. Then you would have a more objective basis for defining the boundaries of what is comprehensible and what is not.

johanne

Joined: 18 Apr 2003
Posts: 189

Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2007 7:24 am Post subject:

How well ESL speakers understand each other is quite interesting. When I was teaching ESL in Vancouver to a variety of nationalities in the same class, the Japanese often complained they couldn't understand the Spanish speakers and the Spanish speakers complained they couldn't understand the Asian speakers, whether they were Japanese, Korean or Chinese. I'm speaking here mostly of a beginner-low intermediate level. Once past that level most students whereever they were from had a clear enough accent to understand each other. It was interesting that no one ever complained that they couldn't understand a European accent or a Scandinavian one. I would think that it is essential to teach pronounciation and accent-reduction to the point where the speaker is comprehensible to the majority, whether NS or not. I once taught a Japanese dentist who had excellent grammar, vocab and idiomatic English but who's pronounciation was so bad it was a real struggle to understand his meaning. In a sense he wasn't getting credit for his excellent English because it took so much effort to decifer his pronounciation.

womblingfree

Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Posts: 826

Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2007 11:10 am Post subject:

Mark wrote:

womblingfree wrote:

That's Japanese L1 transfer into an English dialect and pretty comprehensible if both speaker and listener are making an effort.

This seems like a pretty subjective statement. Comprehensible to who? And how much effort can we realistically expect people to make?

Mark wrote:

ai uotchingu muubii beri raiku.
I really enjoy watching movies.

Most hearing that phonetically should get the meaning, it's pretty typical.

A Japanese person speaking English wouldn't be speaking with entirely Japanese pronunciation as they would obviously be aware of English language structure. Therefore we can deduce that the pronunciation problems would be limited. The meaning shouldn't be too hard to figure out unless the listener is particularly obstinate.

Communicative competence goes a lot further than simple pronunciation and people will usually do all they can to be understood/understand each other.

Last edited by womblingfree on Tue Feb 13, 2007 1:38 am; edited 2 times in total

womblingfree

Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Posts: 826

Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2007 11:20 am Post subject:

Mark wrote:

I just find it hard to imagine a room full of people happily sitting through a Katakana English presentation.

What are you talking about? There's no such thing as speaking fluent English in an entirely katakana style. It's a method of pronunciation used in Japanese speech for foreign words. If there's crossover in English speaking it would be the odd word within the context of an English sentence and so should be easily understandable with a bit of effort.

As for international conferences it's been proved that native speakers actually use their native English ability as an advantage over inernational competitors, and as a way of taking the upper-hand.

Hardly a blueprint for international communication.

Mark wrote:

One way to test this would be to take videos of Japanese speakers at various levels of comprehensibility and show them to NNS and NS of English around the world and ask them to rate the comprehensibility of the speaker. Then you would have a more objective basis for defining the boundaries of what is comprehensible and what is not.

Scientific tests like this that were done discovered that the most globally comprehensible style of English is apparently by the Swedish.

Last edited by womblingfree on Sun Feb 11, 2007 6:40 pm; edited 1 time in total

womblingfree

Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Posts: 826

Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2007 6:35 pm Post subject:

Mark wrote:

womblingfree wrote:

That's Japanese L1 transfer into an English dialect and pretty comprehensible if both speaker and listener are making an effort.

You're basing all these assumptions on the basis that communication is entirely verbal and that if people are presented with unfamiliar pronunciatons of familiar words, they won't understand.

A crash course in Communicative Competence is needed:

Quote:

The sociolinguist Del Hymes posed the question �What is meant by competence?� He was referring to the term �competence� as coined by the linguist Noam Chomsky to describe knowledge of a language. Chomsky saw language as a formal system and separated �performance� from �competence�. He is often referred to as a �sentence linguist.�

Hymes claimed that using this approach was insufficient, that meaning and use were central. It was not enough merely to look at grammatical utterances but to study speech as a social interaction. Hymes therefore coined the term �communicative competence�. By adding communicative to Chomskys competence Hymes claimed he was incorporating:

�rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless. Just as rules of syntax can control aspects of phonology, and just as rules of semantics perhaps control aspects of syntax, so rules of speech acts enter as a controlling factor for linguistic form as a whole.
(Hymes 1972:278)

The goals of communicative teaching are to understand linguistic forms in real life situations and to be able to use, understand and interpret them with appropriate social and cultural meaning. These main aims can be broken down in the following way:

i) Linguistic competence

ii) Pragmatic competence

iii) Discourse competence

iv) Strategic competence

v) Fluency

Together these form a coherent communicative competence.
(Hedge 2000: 45)

Swan and Walters state that:

Where possible, language practice should resemble real life communication with genuine exchange of information and opinions.
(Swan and Walters 1990: vii)

Hedge (ibid) tells us that reference here is made to both spoken and written English, that the communicative movement in ELT encompasses all modes of language use. So then how can this communicative approach differ from local traditional teaching methods?

Communicative competence takes into account a certain amount of language skills already possessed by the learner whether these be in their native language, the target language or another language. This means that every learner has already attained a certain level of communicative competence which the teacher can work with. This contrasts with other methods of teaching such as audio-lingual, grammar-translation, structural and direct methods which students may be more familiar with. Holliday (1992) states that within a CLT method grammar, structure and patterns may still be taught but that they will be taught more liberally, with more respect for the individual within the communicative approach.

Take it from there.

Mark

Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan

Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 3:37 am Post subject:

womblingfree wrote:

Mark wrote:

womblingfree wrote:

That's Japanese L1 transfer into an English dialect and pretty comprehensible if both speaker and listener are making an effort.

This seems like a pretty subjective statement. Comprehensible to who? And how much effort can we realistically expect people to make?

Of course it's subjective.

If a Japanese person is speaking English and pronounces a few words with katakana pronunciation it shouldn't be too hard for the listener to work out the meaning without too much trouble.

A Japanese person speaking English wouldn't be speaking with entirely Japanese pronunciation as they would obviously be aware of English language structure. Therefore we can deduce that the pronunciation problems would be limited. The meaning shouldn't be too hard to figure out unless the listener is particularly obstinate.

Communicative competence goes a lot further than simple pronunciation and people will usually do all they can to be understood/understand each other.

I think that's key, "a few words". Yes, katakana-influenced Japanese should be fine. But there are plenty of speakers who speak pure katakana, so I don't know that it's accurate to say that they wouldn't be speaking with entirely Japanese pronunciation.

And, do people really do all they can to understand each other? It was my impression that people generally make relatively little effort to understand each other, unless they have a compelling reason to do so.

Mark

Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan

Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 3:44 am Post subject:

womblingfree wrote:

Mark wrote:

I just find it hard to imagine a room full of people happily sitting through a Katakana English presentation.

Ah, so we're back to "fluent" English then. Katakana is more than just a way of pronouncing English words in Japanese, it means pronouncing words according to the rules of Japanese phonetics/phonology. I don't think you're being clear about whether or not that should be considered an acceptable part of linguistic diversity.

womblingfree wrote:

As for international conferences it's been proved that native speakers actually use their native English ability as an advantage over inernational competitors, and as a way of taking the upper-hand.

Hardly a blueprint for international communication.

I'm sure that they do use their ability to their own advantage. That's not really what I was talking about. There were many NNS speakers at my university and I sat through many presentations that were completely incomprehensible due entirely to the pronunciation of the speakers. Now, you can say that I wasn't trying hard enough, but I don't think it would be accurate to say that.

womblingfree wrote:

Mark wrote:

Scientific tests like this that were done discovered that the most globally comprehensible style of English is apparently by the Swedish.

Yes, but I was talking about videos of Japanese speakers. That way, there would be some objective guidelines about how close to "standard" English Japanese speakers have to come in order to be comprehensible.

As for Swedish speakers, that's no surprise. They pretty much speak a kind of Standard English without much in the way of reductions or idiomatic speech.

Mark

Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan

Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 3:50 am Post subject:

womblingfree wrote:

Mark wrote:

womblingfree wrote:

That's Japanese L1 transfer into an English dialect and pretty comprehensible if both speaker and listener are making an effort.

Thanks for the crash course in Communicative Competence. I've actually heard of the concept before. Just because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't mean they're a fool. Right?

And, as for language, it is principally verbal. There are gestures/facial expressions/etc. as well as conceptual elements to language, but language is verbal communication. If you can't recognize the words that the other person is saying, you will be unable to communicate.

If you recognize the words, but they're all jumbled up in a way that is difficult to decipher, you will be unable to communicate.

And, just to be clear, I'm not talking about unfamiliar pronunciations, I'm talking about impenetrable pronunciations.

womblingfree wrote:

Quote:

Take it from there.

Thanks again for the education.

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