Washington Academy of Languages

Brown bear

Originally uploaded by madbronny52

Once upon a time I was a philosopher. That time was even before electric typewriters, let alone cell phones and computers. One area of interest of mine was human emotions. Like others, I took my lead from William James who once asked “What is an emotion?” I will use James’s most famous example and I paraphrase, of course. It is natural for us to say we see a bear, fear it, and run. James said, to the contrary, that we see a bear and run, consequently we fear the bear. We run because we notice we are in danger and we are afraid of what will happen if we don’t.

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Communication

Originally uploaded by Johannes de Jong_

Recently, I have been interviewing several ESL teachers and teacher trainers and I find I had to rethink a few matters with regard to teaching oral language. Since the 80s it has been politically correct to describe oneself as a ‘communicative teacher’ during job interviews. Every ESL teacher knows that. The communicative approach states that tasks should provide the learners language to use in order to communicate meanings without focusing on accuracy. In other words, fluency is encouraged as fluency leads to creativity and the independence of a language learner. A central issue with this approach comes from asking the question: How can accuracy and fluency come together? Any answer to that question involves the instructor deciding on a range of discourse skills taught to a particular audience. For example first graders who are playground-fluent in language may need a discourse emphasis on accuracy in an academic context relevant to their maturity level. Adults may need more discourse tasks having to do with fluency and integrating such skills into what they have learned in grammatical drilling (if that is the way that they had learned a little English abroad).

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Baby you can drive my car

Originally uploaded by in touch

My first two notes on pronunciation were primarily for a general audience. This note is primarily for those with a little experience in teaching pronunciation; though the general reader may find it of interest.

I wouldn’t say the musical metaphor was correct while the building metaphor was incorrect. Both metaphors have their uses. I tend to think that the music metaphor is useful in getting one to think and feel how a native speaker of a language reacts to speech. For example, suppose a native speaker of English hears “I am going on bacation.” The confusion between /v/ and /b/ will not cause the native speaker much trouble. However, consider this exchange: Native speaker: “I am going on vacation.” The Second Language Learner says, “Where will you go?” with rising intonation (when speaking, people usually raise or lower the pitch of their voice). Her intention is to find out the location of your vacation (which a native speaker would ask by rising then falling intonation). A rising intonation would express surprise to a native speaker and so a serious misunderstanding could occur.

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PIANO_JAZZ

Originally uploaded by ramon_perez_terrassa

In my previous blog I indicated thinking of constructing an adequate second language speaker in terms of constructing a building. It was a misleading analogy in certain ways. I closed with the suggestion that music may be a more constructive analogy then the creation of buildings. I asked you to imagine Chopin playing a piece by Thelonius Monk. I used this analogy because I was struck by the following comment made by Monk over 40 years ago, “You know, anybody can play a composition and use far out-chords and make it sound wrong. It’s making it sound right that is not easy.”

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