Language is a feature of culture. The ways in which a people live form their words and phrases. Therefore, we need to understand a people and their culture to fully understand the nuances of their language. This is why people pay attention to art when learning a language–not just grammar. By art, I mean books and other media–such as TV, radio, plays, talk shows, movies and visual creations. You may think you are paying attention to those things for pronunciation–and maybe you are, but there is much more to it than that-or should be
The thoughts and feelings of a people in a culture–especially English-speaking culture–can be quite complex; just think of the large number of native English-speaking countries. It isn’t a list that comprises only the United States and Great Britain. Canadians are native-speakers of English, of course. You knew that; but that’s just to get me started. Ireland and Scotland are native-English speaking countries. There is also–naturally–Australia, and New Zealand. The Scandinavian countries and Germany utilize English so well–English could be called a first language in those places. All these western countries (not “westernized”) have been speaking English for hundreds of years–some of them closer to a thousand. And the writing system of the English language is Latin–called the Roman Alphabet. So you can see the multiple cultures infused with English–not to mention that England and France have intertwining histories, their countries having ruled and been at war with one another for long stretches in their history. Many English words hail from the Dutch, too, who were the Vikings when they were conquering vast tracts of England–before it became a united kingdom. And English comes heavily from the Celt language and the German one as well.
Practice with Native Speakers
Thankfully, though English has so many cultural inflections and dialects and it stems from many tongues, today, if you speak standard English, basically anyone from most of the English-speaking countries and many of the English-as-a-second-language speaking countries will understand you–though–it may be a little more challenging for you to understand them. So, in the least–practice with and listen to native speakers. These are the people you are practicing to be understood by. Now–if you work with many people from countries where English is a second language but where the English spoken does not sound like native English, you might say you want to be understood by and understand those people, but then you are not shooting for the highest mark, are you?
And though there are many learned and lettered language teachers whose first language is not English, and they are valuable scholars--because they understand the struggle of learning a foreign language, and they may be technically proficient in grammar and style when fluent; and they may speak your native language and the target language of English–so understand your cultural and cognitive challenges, you must choose carefully. Not every bilingual speaker of English is necessarily all that helpful in a comprehensive way; many may exhibit broken English speech patterns–possess a shallow knowledge of colloquialism and idioms and some may be looking at English–still–through the filter of their own native culture. But the most harmful element is the broken speech patterns, which are absorbed by students–especially young ones.
A few years ago–maybe more than ten, actually–I had in my possession a reference, a book written by linguists specializing in English and Korean; I was impressed to find out in this work that what I thought about the importance of studying with a native-speaker teacher was true: that an educated non-native speaker teacher is not as good as a non-educated native-speaker teacher, for helping a student practice English.
The reasons are probably many, but I will name a few from my own thought:
- The native speaker learned in infancy, so English is natural to him or her; this cannot be over-estimated. It means that the native-speaker was absorbing and cognitively correlating syntax (word order), cultural inflection (when to say what), pronunciation, enunciation, vocabulary, expressions, idioms and meaning–as well as emotion attached to all of the above–as a survival skill–when his or her brain was interpreting the new world it found itself in–organically. This rooted the native-speaker a sentient being to all experiences spoken about, linguistically. The learning was not abstract. It was an element of its biological experience. This means that the human experience of English for the native speaker who began absorbing English from infancy has the language deeply rooted in its cortex as elements of its conscious state. This is very different from learning a language through another language–the most second-language learners acquire their second language.
Of course not all native-speakers are good teachers, and some are terrible. And naturally, a teacher with some vast experience and some knowledge of how to teach, as well as expertise in grammar and style, or, the conventions of how we use the language is a great benefit to the student, but the non-native speaker had better speak fluently without non-dialectical inconsistencies if the learner wants to acquire native habits.Hearing bad English makes the student’s English potentially as bad. It is the non-native tutelage coming from non-native -speaking teachers–who likely have impediments created by transliteration issues (trying to write foreign words in a local language ), and those who have not been immersed in a native-speaking target language environment long enough–who bring the bad habits into the classroom or study hall, which causes whole populations to speak with local broken-English patterns of speech; that is why a whole group of people in a country learning English will say the same incorrect things. They are reinforcing one another’s errors–and thus create dialects–such as “Singlish”, “Indlish”, “Japlish”, “Konglish” and “Chinglish”, to name the ones I have heard of, experienced and thought of. A dialect is a version of a language which is different from the standard, which and understood by a community–and often a dialect contains differences one would consider incorrect were they put in written form. The fact that thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people use these “incorrect” versions of a language and understand them–normalizes them, and it is this normalization which makes them ‘dialects.’
All of this is okay–in a manner of speaking; if people understand and one another despite their non-standard speech, what’s the problem? Well, that’s up to you and your associates, which may include your teachers, employers, coworkers, partners and family.
Now some will say these versions of language–accepted and not–don’t come from teachers–but rather from poor students; that can be true. but it can–in the English as a Second language world–also not be true. There are local and foreign teachers who sometimes teach the wrong things; this is a case of when education does matter–or proper exposure to standard language. And a college or university degree does not mean one can teach–or that one knows how to teach, or finally, whether one speaks well. I have answered basic grammar questions coming from teachers who have degrees. And–most impressive: all; you have to do is watch the news or politicians and academics in America or England–to name only two countries–to see that very influential people, including scientists, politicians and teachers (certainly actors and ancestresses–even narrators and writers) speak with endemic error–which in may cases is a form of dialect–because so many of them do it.
To be continued….
Copyright 2022 Carl Atteniese / All rights reserved
