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O Idioma Disfarçado de Língua Inglesa

Após um período acumulando trabalho, materiais e mais trabalho, cá estou novamente para conversar com meu amigos teachers sobre fenômenos linguísticos que influenciam diretamente na aquisição de linguagem (me senti o padre Quevedo agora falando sobre fenômenos). Nossas escolas, públicas e particulares, têm ensinado inglês como língua estrangeira, escolas de idiomas também têm se degladiado para mostrar quem ensina melhor inglês como segunda língua, mas será mesmo que nossos alunos estão de fato aprendendo inglês ou o que estão produzindo são uma língua diferente disfarçada de inglês?

Talvez esse disfarce seja fruto de algo que já conversamos aqui antes: a influência do idioma nativo no processo aquisitivo da língua estangeira. Não precisam ficar nervosos, eu não vou falar sobre transfers novamente, mas a interferência que, no nosso caso, o português, exerce sobre  a língua estrangeira pode gerar um caso de criação de creole. E o que viria a ser creole, você pode me perguntar. São línguas híbridas criadas a partir de pidgins. E o que seriam os pidgins? São esquemas frásicos, teoricamente sem função sintática, gerados pelo baixíssimo conhecimento de uma língua estrangeira. Mesmo longe e sem ver, consigo perceber o enorme ponto de interrogação estampado na sua testa. Vamos por partes então. Começaremos por entender o que são os pidgins, pois são basicamente a origem de toda nossa conversa. Imagine que você acabou de cair no meio de uma tribo maori, na costa neozelandesa. Deu pra visualizar a situação? Após um tempo, você aprende a dizer coisas simples como “obrigado”, “eu comer”, “por favor”, etc, simplesmente para conseguir manter o mínimo de comunicação possível. Obviamente que nosso pensamento lógico vai nos fazer utilizar a língua que sabemos para tentar inferir (às vezes acertar) como essa funciona essa nova língua maori e, munidos de tentativa e erro mesmo, inserimos partículas linguísticas de nossa língua nativa nesses esquemas frásicos simplificados para tentarmos sobreviver à essa nova aventura nas praias da Nova Zelândia.

Claro que conforme você for interagindo com os maoris, seu alcance linguístico aumenta, aprendendo sons significativos, palavras, aumento dos esquemas frásicos para sentenças completas, significados, em combinação com nossa (para alegria dos gerativistas) inata capacidade de raciocínio. Assim, os pidgins evoluem e se tornam creoles, isto é, uma língua estrangeira recém aprendida que contém buracos sintáticos, influência da língua nativa, mas que se assemelha um pouco mais com uma sentença mais evoluída, como podemos ver em (1) (Schumann, 2009: loc. 473).

(1) And too much children, small children, house money pay.

(2) If like make, more better make time, money no can hapai.

O que Schumann (2009) nos mostra é a maneira que um coreano encontrou para se comunicar em inglês, sendo que seu conhecimento linguístico da língua estrangeira é bem limitado, porém conseguiu(?) conectar sua fala e transmitir significado. Já em (2), nota-se utilização de duas palavras de uma terceira língua, make, que significa “morrer” e hapai, que significa “carregar” ambas em havaiano. É o exemplo da fala de um nativo japonês tentando se comunicar em inglês com um havaiano e é possível perceber que a língua inglesa, embora mais evoluída que a havaiana, ainda contém muitas brechas sintáticas e também nota-se a presença de palavras da terceira língua, o que mostra o início de uma aquisição.

Acho que consegui deixar claro o que são pidgins e creoles, mas o que tudo isso tem a ver com as aulas de inglês e com a maneira que nossos alunos têm se comunicado em inglês? Em alguns anos trabalhando como professor de inglês e outros recentes como linguísta percebi que nossos alunos estão se comunicando em um creole disfarçado de inglês. Podemos perceber em (3) a forma standardizada da língua inglesa, aquela maneira que tentamos ensinar aos nossos alunos, mas, na maioria das vezes, a fala de nossos prezados students tem influência bem direta e aparente da língua nativa – o português – como vemos em (4).

(3) Yesterday, a weird scene happened on the street.

(4) Yesterday, happened a weird scene on the street.

Claro que em (4) trata-se de algo distantemente parecido com creole haja vista a complexidade e conexão entre as palavras para formar a frase, mas a inversão entre sujeito e verbo, que não faz parte do inglês standard (a menos que você seja o Mestre Yoda), mostra a influência da nossa língua nativa. Também é muito comum encontrarmos a fala de nossos alunosmais parecida com creole do tipo “if have vague, I sleep in hotel” com sentido de “if there’s a vacancy, I’ll sleep in the hotel”. Isso occorre, segundo John Schumann e outros linguístas, porque a aquisição fica superficial, não existe aprofundamento de exposição afinal a pessoa consegue, de alguma maneira, transmitir a mensagem e acaba não indo além. Muitas aulas de inglês, quer seja de escolas regulares (públicas e particulares) ou escolas de idiomas, acabam contribuindo para que isso aconteça mesmo que seja sem querer. Nós teachers precisamos tomar cuidado pra que nossos alunos saiam da sua zona de conforto e sejam lingusiticamente desafiados a pensar e aprender para não ficarem atrelados à proposta de comunicação para realizarem uma tarefa ou fecharem um negócio simplesmente.

Às vezes, fatores externos nos deixam de mãos atadas na hora de fazermos nossos alunos darem um salto maior no processo de aquisição de linguagem. Porque faz mal pra nossa carreira de professor ter alunos falando como se fosse o Tarzan, “mim, comida, agora”, sem contar que isso nada mais é do que uma língua híbrida, sem profundidade, um disfarce para a aquisição que foi mais manquitola do que o Saci Pererê.

 

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Having Our English Outside The box

In over a decade teaching English, I have lost count of the many times people (students, teachers, principals, TV ads, etc) told that someone speaks good or bad English. By the time I started my (super duper) career as an English teacher, becoming a linguist was not even an option,  but every time I heard something like that it did not sound good. It was as if language had to be performed in a specific manner otherwise the speaker would be burned like a witch. I do not think this is the way.

Thinking about phonetic symbols we will certainly find a an average line for pronunciation. What would this line turn out to be? Those utterances that cause no confusion, so whether you are from the countryside or the capital, Texas or San Francisco, your pronunciation will not lead you to a minimal pair situation, i.e. those small phoneme chunks that once misplaced will generate different words. In addition to minimal pairs, we can think about accent issue, a very regional linguistic feature. For countless times I also heard people (mis)judging another person’s linguistic competence due to the accent being that maybe that funny sound coming from someone’s mouth is the result of an exposure to an English that comes from northern England, Scotland, ?India, South Africa and maybe that person did not know that. Thus, saying a person speaks “good” English under a fully phonetic perspective may cause some breakdown.

Syntax, oh my beloved syntax! Those who have a linguistic educational background just like this poor writer for sure had dark days doodling syntactic trees to analyze phrases. Believing that a person is a good or bad English speaker leaning upon the syntactic elements noted in a person’s speech is understandable yet arguable. If one of our students uttered something like (1), we would certainly say that he or she is a terrible English speaker and we would even say that the student is not proficient if we compare it with (2) – nonsense!

(1) *You’s cool, man.

(2) You’re cool, man.

Of course our role as teachers is to show our students the language’s canonical manner as can be seen in (2), but labeling (1) as awful and non-proficient English is agreeing with a generative perspective of language, which in fact, even if unconsciously, is part of the behavior some of my peers have. Language does not develop as if there were labelled boxes where we can only put things that are specified in the label. As a matter of fact we can play with the boxes and their content, actually this will happen so that our students know how to explore every characteristic of the language and then they will become a highly skilled speaker once he or she will have become able to to communicate in any sort of context. If we acknowledge that there are some speech community where (1), ‘he don’t work’ among others are accepted, we will not be embarrassed by our students when we hastly correct them – with some kind of arrogant air – because they will certainly say that they had heard that type of utterance from a native speaker which, by our students’ logic, native speakers have more credibility than us. A current phenomenon that portrays metamorphosis in the language is the teen-famous ‘I can’t even‘, where ‘even’ plays a verb. This is not in the correct box, but it is certainly not considered non-proficient.

We teachers have to broaden the matter of language acquisition (Rajagopalan, 1996), because if we keep framing our students’ utterances we will never evolve in the concerns of language in general and we will remain with the biased behavior projecting language as a steady organism that does not carry any proposition, ideas, thoughts and this unfortunately has set the tone of the discussions involving native language teaching in Brazil. We need to try to understand what our students’ point is and then show them the many ways they can achieve their goal in varied contexts. What about you, teacher? How do you have your English outside the box?

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To Correct Or Not To Correct? That’s The Question

Have you guys ever seen that little plant that when it’s touched it closes instantly? Well, that’s exactly what happens to our students when teacher end up poorly providing feedback. Correction is the moment in which students really learn and this learning will influence the evaluation they will go through.

For times, teachers believe they have the formula for correction and support the perspective that students must receive feedback firmly for thus order and discipline will be kept. That is not true. Correction is more technical than behavioral and with regard to English classes, order has a different characteristic: it comes from noisy classes because students have to talk and express themselves. Thus, the feedback given by the teacher needs to be delicate, subtle, preferably with as a follow-up activity so that students do not feel they are being punished. A follow-up activity with a good transition will transmit to the students the necessary information for the feedback towards errors without that look of ‘what a boring teacher, he corrects me all the time’ for students not always need to know they are receiving feedback.

According to Ellis, Loewen and Erlam (2006), it is through feedback that acquisition takes place for they have almost all their attention directed to the teacher besides the activity have happened moments before, i.e. it is easy for students to relate the correction to what they said. Among the types of feedback available there are explicit and implicit feedback. As redundant as it may sound, the explicit one is evident for our students that they are being corrected whereas the explicit is not (duh, huh?). The explicit form of feedback is apparent for students there was an error or mistake for correction is directly addressed to the student.

Student: Yesterday I go to the mall.

Teacher: You need past tense here.

Student: Yesterday I went to the mall.

In classrooms with younger students or with a beginner level of proficiency, this type of feedback tends to be more effective for students are said what they should have uttered.

For students with a proficiency level a bit higher (let’s be clear here that i’m not talking about C1s or C2s only), corrections can be made subtly and yet be very effective. Recasts are also a very subtle way of correcting  our students without their noticing they are actually being corrected for recasts are part of implicit feedback category.

Student: She will going to the concert tonight.

Teacher: Oh! She will go to the concert. What concert will she go to?

Student: She will go to Foo Fighter’s concert.

Obviously, by using recasts the expectation is that the student notices the proper model of the language and reproduces it from that moment on, although that doesn’t always happen.

Whether we use explicit or implicit feedback, we have to be sure corrections will be made subtly, delicately so we do not block English in our students minds. Furthermore, poorly offered feedback will not generate the desired outcome which means that moment when students say ‘oh yeah, I got it’ will not happen. there isn’t a magic formula for feedback, it hinges on the profile of our students after a thorough scanning by the teachers and on the development of follow-up activities so that our plant do not close.

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Let’s Hang Out

In the last 14 years working as an English teacher the top-3 most heard sentences from students are ‘I hate English’, ‘this present perfect stuff has no equivalent in Portuguese, does it’ and ‘this phrasal verb thing is too hard’. Well I would respectively reply like ‘maybe our previous teachers were not so good then’, ‘yes, there is’ and ‘yes’. Say what?! Sure it is hard, phrasal verbs are idioms that carry a strong semantic function and therefore are really tricky to be taught and learned.

The dilemma of teaching an idiom is how to shape meaning so that students understand it and at the same time the teacher’s talking time is reduced? Of course that depending on the methodology adopted, the teacher will indeed speak a lot (not recommended by CELTA), but with a fun and well prepared activity the teacher may have an A+ performance in the classroom and also engage his or her students. As it was previously discussed in another article, Google offers more than just a searching tool. There is something called Hangouts which is some sort of Skype embedded in Android OS and allows us to make calls and video calls with those who have a Google account. In addition, hangouts provides people with live stream automatically uploaded to a YouTube  account which means that someone might be visiting MoMa and call a group of students who are inside a school on the other side of the planet. Although this might look like a Google ad it isn’t. What happens is that there are so many resources available that can be used in the classroom that encourage the development of activities.

Let’s take the following phrasal verbs: ‘come up with’, ‘get along with’ and ‘set in’. The teacher can prepare a very interactive and communicative activity using Hangouts. Making use of context that involves friendship, social interactions as themes, it is possible to introduce such idioms and for drilling students can interview one another. To make practice more interesting, the teacher can hand out roles to students in which they can be athletes, celebrities, filmmaker, whereas the other student (considering an activity in pairs) plays a journalist. Students can also drill questions besides the idioms for many find asking questions quite hard to be produced. In order to make it up for the time possibly spent by the teacher to introduce the content of the day and the highly used talking time, the activity can have a grand finale with the students’ performance using Google’s tool. Inside the computer lab, students can make contact with other students around the world who were previously arranged by the teacher so that interview could be held and the studied phrasal verbs could be used. As the video is automatically uploaded to YouTube, the teacher can evaluate the students more accurately.

Thus, learning a controversial such as idioms (frowned by many) gets a plus through a very  real experience that might motivate your students. Leave your students hanging out with other from abroad with Hangouts using the phrasal verbs that were taught in the classroom.

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