Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Graduate School of TESOL
Developing Bilingualism
Fall 2007
Week 10 - Answers
Hamers and Blanc (2000), Chapter 9
Herdina and Jessner (2002), Chapter 3
1. What are the two levels on which people interact with each other in intercultural communication? (p. 241)
The two levels of interaction are the societal and interpersonal.
People interact with each other basically on two different levels the first and most basic of these is the societal level and the other is a personal level. At the personal level people interact with each other based on what they personally know about the other or others. Therefore they're going to be able to use a lot of different personal information for fine-tuning their communicative endeavor. On the personal level they know many things about the person based on experience and, therefore, they can talk about topics that the person knows, use structures that the person is aware of, and use many other different techniques for forming effective communication. So communication or interaction on the personal level really relies on specific personal information that people have about each other which they have accumulated over many different personal encounters.
Communication or interaction at the societal level usually happens with people we don't know very well. When we don't know people well we obviously have little or no specific factual or personal information we can use to try to communicate with them so we have to use information which is of a societal nature. As we shall discuss more extensively in the next question, this information is basically stereotypical in nature. When we don't know anything about someone we have to fall back on what we have been taught by our society for better or for worse and this type of information usually comes in the form of generalizations. But what is also interesting is that even when we are interacting personally with someone it is actually very hard to escape some of the societal undertones which permeate our psyche. It takes time to be able to get over societal norms in dealing with people. It is not a given necessarily that people are going to move quickly or at all from a societal norm to a personal norm as they get to know someone. Some personal relationships, because of the nature of the relationship, will never move to a more personal level and will always be conducted at a more societal level.
When first encountering others people use stereotypes or individual experience to categorize them. When someone meets another person for the first time a whole range of different ideas need to pass through their mind which allow them to sum the other person up quickly. It is through this sum up that we decide how to deal with that person. This personal evaluation depends of course on who we are meeting and their own individual features. If that someone belongs to a different ethnic or other in other way readily identifiable group then that only adds another dimension to the already highly complex evaluative process. Society, for better or for worse, is based on stereotypes. Thus, how we think about other people is going to be based on stereotypes. We cannot say whether stereotypes in general are a good or bad thing. They are a simple fact of life and they are also absolutely necessary. Without stereotypes we'd have no idea how to deal with people. At the same time, individual negative stereotypes applied universally and without contemplation are bad and dangerous.
Stereotypes are dangerous because they are tremendous overgeneralizations what may or may not have been true at some specific point or place in time. They develop from a societal grain of truth but societies and the group the stereotypes make reference to change while the stereotypes themselves stay the same. Collective memory is very robust. Without stereotypes, however, we would not be able to make any kind of decisions about people. All schemas are in some way stereotypes. As soon as we encounter someone we immediately start to size them up based on gender, attire, facial expression and nonverbal communication, hair color and specific genetic/racial features, just to name a few variables. We have stereotypes for everything, values for everything, some of which are very much societal and some of which are quite personal. We use these and hopefully to help us in being able to communicate more easily. It is easy to forget that the main purpose of stereotypes is positive and they are not necessarily used as a weapon to hurt other people, but this is often what we think about when we think about negative stereotypes. Stereotypes vary quite widely from society to society which means as teachers of a different language/culture, to a large extent, were going to need to expose our students to stereotypes. Knowing stereotypes will not only allow our students to be able to engage in more communication more readily but it will also allow them to form defense mechanisms for when they are being abused by vicious stereotypes and this is very important. We don't want to teach our students forms of language so that they will not find it possible to determine whether they are being ridiculed by a speaker of that language.
2. How does speech accommodation theory basically work? (pp. 242-244)
Speech accommodation is the blanket name for a theory which revolves around how people react to each other affectively and linguistically as they engage in conversation. According to the theory there are two basic reactions that people have to each other as they are involved in conversation. The one reactions would be convergence. Convergence is when a speaker will actually alter their language to make it more similar to that of the other party in an effort to become closer to that person. Divergence is the other type of reaction and it is obviously the opposite of convergence. In divergence a speaker will purposefully alter their own speech to make it different from the speech patterns of the other speaker because they want to establish distance from that person. This is the basic idea and it correlates very nicely with the idea of language appropriation.
Language appropriation is the idea that language initially develops in children and continues to develop in adults based on the concept that people simply steal or appropriate pieces of language from others as they listen to a person or read a text. This is how people learn new vocabulary items in new phrases and even new functions as well. It is a very simple idea and a very powerful idea, particularly for us as language teachers. In a very real sense, we want our students to appropriate language. We need them to appropriate language. It is one of the most effective ways of getting them to learn. Linking this now to speak accommodation theory we can ask a simple question. When do you think, or under what conditions do you think, will a person appropriate language? Certainly, as research has shown, people will appropriate language when they seek to converge with a speaker. For us as language teachers we need to put this up on a slightly different plane and think about input not only the specific forms used but equally important is input as a type of speaker. Since our students probably do not engage in interaction in English with real native speakers or anyone else for that matter we need to devise a theory in which our students engage with texts and other forms of input. From this input we want them to appropriate language through convergence. This means we need to have input which makes them want to feel closer to native speakers and native speaker norms.
Use this idea in the classroom to help you evaluate the input and the materials that you have. We need convergence and at the same time we need to avoid divergence. Divergence occurs when people don't care about the other side. We diverge when we want to show our own individuality and differences, when we are competing with others or feel animosity toward them or the society from which they come. Therefore, focusing on differences, as unfortunately we often do as foreign language teachers (to a large extent due to the contrastive analysis hypothesis a fifty-year-old travesty), is going to cause divergence. With Korean as their first language and a much stronger language what would you expect your students to do when you start to tell them that another language is so very different from Korean? Is it going to make them inquisitive? Maybe for some but probably not for most. We foster convergence by focusing on similarities and making similarities apparent. We need to eliminate the competitive factor.
3. What are some of the variables that effect speech accommodation? (pp. 244-248, 249-251
Power and status
We could run through a long list of different variables that affect speech accommodation, and some were mentioned above, but what it often really boils down to is power and status. If people feel that their status is being threatened by someone else in a conversation they're not going to accommodate. They are going to diverge. If people feel that they are not being respected they will feel threatened and they will diverge strongly as a result. It is only when people feel safe and secure that they will converge. People converge when they have nothing to lose and everything to gain and in order for this to happen. This is a two-way process. It is not simply an internal response from one side for a clear signal must come from the other side. Now, in teaching English to Koreans we run into a slight problem.
In this class we have dealt previously, actually quite a while ago, about valorization levels. Here, suddenly, they come back into play. We stated before that English is certainly more highly valorized than Korean currently. This is both on a global scale but also on the local scale and basically the result of the global scale valorization. This means that English has a substantially larger amount of power than Korean. Native speakers of English as well as other speakers of English know this. This means that the possibility of disrespect for Korean speakers by English speakers is high. We also argued that it is not only useful but necessary to assess language contact on a global level. On the global level remember that Koreans are a minority group. Therefore, the possibility for divergence can be quite high. These are things we need to be careful about when we teach a language like English. We want to make sure that our students feel that English and Korean are equal and that they're not losing anything by converging to English speech patterns and the result will hopefully be that they will start appropriating pieces of English from speakers or the input which they're exposed to. We have to make sure our students do not feel threatened by English for this to happen, no mean feat when we have built our job security on the very opposite premise.
4. How is it that linguistic convergence depends on both parties involved in the communication? Cite a relevant example from either the book or your own experience (pp. 245-248)
We already talked about this above to a certain extent so I will be able to go through this quickly. Convergence is a two-way street. If one side is provisionally converging while the other is not then obviously the converging side is going to feel offended and upset, resulting then in a swift and violent shift to divergence. In order for a true and enduring convergence to take place both sides need to do so. As soon as one side stops converging the other side begins to diverge which will then cause the other party as well to diverge and what we wind up with is divergence on both sides. This does not mean, however, that both sides each need to be converging in exactly the same way. Particularly when we are talking about speakers of different proficiency levels there might be a need for different strategies to be employed in order for the convergence to work effectively. It should also be clear that too much convergence is also negative because it challenges someone's face. So, for example, if I start to speak very slowly to all of you and simplify my vocabulary and simplify my grammar based on a well-meaning but ultimately insulting manner you might actually become upset because I'm treating you in a way which might seem to indicate to you that I think you're stupid. This often happens when we engage in foreigner or teacher talk. The person being spoken to may very well be offended. Therefore, it might be a better idea to try to employ different types or different strategies of convergence. If the lower-level speaker is converging by appropriating pronunciation and vocabulary from the higher level speaker then it is probably a really bad idea for the higher level speaker (especially a teacher) to converge by simplifying their language.
To extend this point, there is no point in having a learner appropriate language that is neither authentic nor useful. Higher level, more authentic language is obviously what the lower-level speaker needs, and this can be achieved by repeating, choosing topics or presenting topic information in a more organized more careful fashion, not by making your language simpler.
It should be clear to all of you that I'm very much against convergence through simplification of language forms. This does not help our students learn. Making input simple for our students under the argument of comprehensibility means guaranteeing that they learn absently nothing which they need to learn. Why bother converging when you're not being exposed to anything worth appropriating. Bear in mind, however, that this is a general principle. Certainly, it's OK to simplify language sometimes. It depends on the type of tasks that you want your students to perform with the input as well as the age and/or level of your students. But as a general policy simplifying input is often extremely ineffective in the long term.
Psychological
Linguistic convergence is just an outward manifestation of our psychological situation. Therefore, the underlying psychology is more powerful than language itself. We converge linguistically because psychologically we have already decided to converge with this person/input/language/society and we will do so until our psychological state changes. Such changes could happen very fast if a person starts to diverge or fails to converge appropriately. The psychological state is simply more basic. It is the underlying reason which causes us to behave in certain ways. As teachers, therefore, we need to get our students to produce and internalize a psychological state towards English which is positive. Without this positive psychological state learning will never really occur effectively. Psychology and generally positive feeling are the key to all learning.
5. How does a bilingual decide which code (language) to use? (pp. 252-255)
Obviously the language that a bilingual is going to decide to use is going to depend to a large extent on who they are talking to. If the other party is monolingual, well, then the choice is simple. If the other party shares both languages then the surrounding context will have a large role to play. Choices can often be exceedingly complex. Calculations must be made about the languages that the other party speaks, obviously the languages that you speak, the situation that you are in and the purpose for engaging them in conversation, as well as other factors like who might be listening and which language you have been speaking more of late and do you hate your boss who speaks a certain language. In general we try to pick codes which ease communication and make ourselves look good at the same time. This process, then, basically revolves around the same two levels that we claimed basic interaction occurs on: societal and personal. We need to use the personal information we know about the person (if there is any) to help us decide which language to choose. If we don't know anything about this person then we are going to have to fall back on societal norms about language use based on norms as well as stereotypes.
6. What are some of the modification strategies speakers use in intercultural communication situations? (pp. 255-258)
The modification strategies that people employ should be clear. They occur on all levels of language in addition to several extralinguistic levels. Any kind of structural level you can think of (phonetics, phonology, morphology, lexis, syntax) is fair game for change. People alter speed, volume, as well as body language. When people converge they might actually become physically closer to each other. In some type of conversion situations people start to move in similar ways to the person they're talking to. Other strategies include how topics are approached, the topics themselves which are chosen, how much repetition is going to be made available. These are the types of strategies that we are most interested in because they're the ones that we can use to help us teach our students by not simplifying the actual structure of the input.
7. Myers-Scotton and Gardner-Chloros (1995) argue that all loan words begin as code-switching. Do you think this is true? Explain? (pp. 259-260)
In a pre-technological world where there was no global contact situation such as we enjoy now, this claim might have been true, but nowadays where contact sometimes occurs between languages more or less indirectly, through a small set of elites, this would not seem to be true anymore. Korean-English happens to be a great example. Certainly Korean and English have not had a direct contact or large amount of bilinguals who do code switch, yet this has not stopped a huge amount of loanwords from entering the language. Global media has allowed words to move from one language to another even in languages which really don't have direct contact with each other. The idea of a global language and technology has allowed this type of situation to occur. So what once might have once been true is certainly no longer the case. This forces us to reevaluate traditional concepts of bilingualism and bilinguality. Luckily for us that is exactly what DMM is doing.
8. Briefly describe the grammatical constraints of code-switching. (pp. 259-266)
A tremendous amount of research has been invested in trying to explain or put constraints on code switching. This is often done with a certain linguistic theory in mind. Thus, for example, a tremendous amount of researchers have tried to explain code switching based on universal grammar principals, but with highly mixed results at best. They have failed. Code switching occurs on all different levels, from the individual phoneme (if there is such a thing) all the way up to do discourse level, which would mean above the sentence level. The only type of limitations or constraints that we can feel absolutely safe in making is to say that proficiency seems to be a determining factor in the type of code-switching one can engage in. As logic would direct us, somebody with lower proficiency is not going to be able to code switch at the paragraph level simply because they can't make paragraphs in one of those languages because they lack the proficiency. Not only have linguists failed to identify particular rules or constraints on code switching but they have also identified instances of code switching which somehow manage to violate the regularly accepted systems of the two languages involved. This would seem to indicate that code switching occurs at a different grammatical level than those supposedly imposed by the two linguistic systems. It is also been observed that code switching seems to be constrained more from a societal/social level than necessarily from a grammatical one. This means that certain societies seem to impose their own regulations on what is acceptable and unacceptable in the forms of code switching. This would seem to indicate that grammar itself, or structure/syntax may not be determined by some sort of underlying universal grammar but by what is accepted in society and would thereby verify a cognitive approach to language.
9. How does code-switching relate to speech accommodation? (pp. 266-269)
The answer here should be obvious by now. Code switching is simply one type of accommodation. In fact we can say that code switching could be the ultimate type of convergence or divergence manifestation. Thus, if you feel close to someone or want to feel closer to someone you might start to code switch into or between languages that that person knows. If on the other hand you do not like someone or do not want to be more like someone than what better way is there than to code switch right out of the language that they understand. We, therefore, have found a very simple yet powerful answer to why people code switch and why people code switch into the languages that they do. It's all about psychological convergence or divergence.
Herdina and Jessner - Chapter 3:Transfer reconsidered
1. How does transfer occur? Explain its effect on language acquisition.
Transfer occurs due to `distance` between L1 and L2. It is related to the structural similarity of the two language systems. That is, the more similar the two linguistic systems, the more likely positive transfer is to occur. And it will facilitate the language acquisition. Reversely, the greater the difference between the two systems, the more likely negative transfer is to be observed. Transfer is generally observed to occur on all linguistic levels, phonological, syntactic, semantic and even on a pragmatic level. Also transfer phenomena have to be seen as related to cultural, social, personal and historical factors. Transfer may not only be observed in speaker errors but also in avoidance techniques, excessive use of certain structures and simplifications.
The traditional view on transfer focused on transfer`s unidirectional influence, which means that only the influence of the L1 to L2 is stressed in SLA. Here, the success of transfer processes relies on the structural similarity between L1 and L2. However, this simple explanation was criticized by many researchers. They added the backlash interference which means transfer is bidirectional. Fransceschini (1999) mentioned that the influence between two language systems does not necessarily have to occur from the dominant language by also from the minority on the majority language.
Therefore, transfer occurs bidirectionally between L1 and L2 very actively owing to `differences`. Besides, it can facilitate or hinder language acquisition.