A - Z ELT A Flashcards
What is ability
What are the most common ways of expressing ability?
When do we use can? be able? could?
What is a good context for teaching ability?
The most common ways of expressing ability and inability are (1) lexically using the adjectives able to and unable to, (incapable of) and verbs like ‘managed to’, to succeed, and to enable/help/assist/empower, etc. (2) grammatically using modal verbs can/can’t could/couldn’t.
Can is used for present context and general truths but for the future ‘be able to’ is used. In the past tense both could and was able to are used to talk about general abilities, but only be able to is used to talk about achieving something on a particular occasion.
Can and could also express permission and possibility.
Good context for teaching the language of ability include: talking about skills, eg in a job interview;talking about past achievements and difficulties that were overcome for example a holiday that goes wrong; making excuses (for things you can’t or couldn’t do) and describing what particular animals are capable of.
Academic writing’?
English for specific purposes
accent phonology?
A person’s accent is the way their pronunciation reveals their social and geographical background. Within those categories there will also be other factos determining accent, for example social class and educational background.
There is no such thing as no accent - when someone says this it just means they are listening to someone with the same accent. or they speak a standard variety - that is, one that is not closely related to a particular region.
accent phonology - Received pronunciation (RP)
is considered a presigious British standard accent, although fewer and fewer people speak it. many leaners of English aspire to speak with a standard British accent but few achieve it. The adoption of an alien accent is not necessary a good thing as it may threaten the speakers sense of identity, since, from childhood, a person’s accent is an important marker of who they are.
accent phonology - traditional teaching of language production.
tradtinally, the teaching of pronunciation has focused on accent reduction in favour of a standard English one. However now English is taught increasingly as an international language.
accent phonology - English as an international language (English being taught as an international language)
an alternative approach to accent reduction in favour of standard English is accent addition. This approach recommends that only those feature that promote mutual intelligibilty between speakers of English - irrespective of their L1 - should be ‘added’ to the speakers L1 accent. (-> phonological core)
acculturation
this is the process by which a person intergrates into a particular culture. Some researchers have claimed that success in second language learning has a lot to do with the learner’s degree of acculturation into the second language culture. For example, John Schumann tracked the development of one Spanish- speaking adult learner in the USA, called Alberto, whose English had effectively fossilized. Schumann identified features of Alberto’s interlanguage, such as absence of articles. Some of these features closely matched aspects of pidgin languages and which have reduced grammar and vocabulary. He argued that this ‘pidginized’ nature of Alberto’s interlanguage wsa due to his isolation and his lack of desire to acculturate. The acculturation hypothesis was one of the first theories of SLA and attempted to prioritize social factors over purely cognitive ones, and , although ignored for a number of years, it has now been partly rehabilitated under the name socialization.
What is Accommodation?
Think Joey Barton crap French but speaking with thick French accent.
What does Robin Walker say?
David Crystal?
Jenny Jenkins?
Accommodation, as Robin Walker reminds us, is ‘the ability to adjust your speech and aspects of spoken communication so that they become more (or less) like that of your interlocutors’. David Crystal adds that, ‘among the reasons why people converge towards the speech pattern of their listener are the desires to identify more closely with the listener, to win social approval, or simply to increase the communicative efficiency of the interaction’.
Jenny Jenkins (2000: 169) identifies a wide range of linguistic and prosodic features that are subject to convergence between speakers, ‘such as speech rate, pauses, utterance length, pronunciation and… non-vocal features such as smiling and gaze’.
And, as Richardson et al., (2008: 75) note, ‘conversational partners do not limit their behavioural coordination to speech. They spontaneously move in synchrony with each other’s speech rhythms’, a finding which is likened to the ‘synchrony, swing, and coordination’ displayed by members of a jazz band. The researchers tracked the posture and gaze position of conversants to show that this coordination is not simply a byproduct of the interaction, but the physical embodiment of the speakers’ cognitive alignment – ‘an intimate temporal coupling between conversants’ (p. 88) or, (in T.S.Eliot’s words) ‘the whole consort dancing together’.
Arguably, accommodation occurs not only at the paralinguistic level, but at the linguistic one too. As we speak, for example, we are continuously monitoring our interlocutor’s degree of understanding, and adjusting our message accordingly. This is especially obvious in the way we talk to children and non-native speakers, forms of talk called ‘caretaker talk’ and ‘foreigner talk’, respectively. Both varieties are characterized by considerable simplification, although there are significant differences. Caretaker talk is often pitched higher and is slower than talk used with adults, but, while simpler, is nearly always grammatically well-formed. Foreigner talk, on the other hand, tolerates greater use of non-grammatical, pidgin-like forms, as in ‘me wait you here’, or ‘you like drink much, no?’
Various theories have been proposed as to how speakers modify their talk like this. One is that they ‘regress’ to an early stage in their own language development. Another is that they negotiate a mutually-intelligible degree of communication. A third (and this is really a form of accommodation) is that they simply match their language to that of their interlocutor, imitating its simplifications, including its lack of grammatical accuracy. Rod Ellis (1994: 265), however, thinks that this explanation is unlikely, as ‘it is probably asking too much of learners’ interlocutors to measure simultaneously the learners’ phonology, lexicon, syntax, and discourse with sufficient accuracy to adjust their own language output’.
However, this was written before the discovery of ‘mirror neurons’, and their key role in enabling imitative behavior. As Iacoboni (2008: 91-92) observes, ‘the fact that the major language area of the human brain is also a critical area for imitation and contains mirror neurons offers a new view of language and cognition in general’. According to Iacobini, it is because of these mirror neurons that ‘during conversations we imitate each other’s expressions, even each other’s syntactic constructions… If one person engaged in a dialogue uses the word “sofa” rather than the word “couch,” the other person engaged in the dialogue will do the same’ (op. cit. 97-98).
It seems, then, that as humans we are hard-wired to imitate one another.
So, what are the implications for language teaching? In the interests both of intelligibility and establishing ‘comity’, Joey Barton’s adaptive accent strategy may be the way to go. For learners of English, whose interlocutors may not themselves be native speakers, this may mean learning to adapt to other non-native speaker accents. As Jenkins (2007: 238) argues, ‘in international communication, the ability to accommodate to interlocutors with other first languages than one’s own… is a far more important skill than the ability to imitate the English of a native speaker.’
So, in the interests of mutual intelligibility, rather than teaching pronunciation per se, maybe we should be teaching accommodation skills. The question, of course, is how?
