3.2.2. Becoming familiar with unfamiliar topics
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3.2.2. Becoming familiar with unfamiliar topics |
However, there is something far more important than getting people to talk to you on familiar topics. There is a severe limit to how far that can take you. What is more important is for you to increase the number of local topics with which you are familiar. This takes us back to the matter of schemas, and the fact that successful communication depends on a large body of shared knowledge and experience. Recall how your understanding of my traffic ticket anecdote depended on your knowing the general schema of how traffic tickets are given in North America. Each culture has a large number of schemas that are partly or wholly unique to it. Also, there will be schemas which are important in your new culture which were far less important in your original culture. I go many years at a time in Canada without ever attending a wedding, and when I do, it is quickly over. In Pakistan, by contrast, weddings are one of the major social events. They are very elaborate, and the activities associated with engagements and weddings go on for days. Now a Pakistani learning my culture would probably think that s/he needed to quickly learn the general Canadian wedding schema. Of course, it is something s/he needs to learn, but it is far less important than s/he might imagine. A Canadian in Pakistan might likewise under-estimate the importance of learning the wedding schema. In either case, it would be a serious mistake to assume that just because the two cultures both have weddings, the schemas are the same, or even similar.
This obviously brings us back to the Principle III. Learn to know the people whose language you are learning. From here on in, Principle III is in the foreground. During Stage III, as long as you are applying Principle III in a major way, you will be exposing yourself to increasing comprehensible input (Principle I), and engaging in extensive extemporaneous speaking (Principle II) without worrying about it.
To some extent, you were learning cultural schemas when you used the Series Method. However, your point in using the Series Method was to hear speech that was highly predictable. That assumed that in using the Series Method you concentrated on schemas that were already familiar to you. This puts them into the category of gimmicky, semi-artificial communication activities. The advantage was that it made the content predictable, and hence comprehensible, during Stage II. This enabled you to become familiar with a lot of new vocabulary, and gave you a lot of practice in listening to the language with understanding. But in normal communication, a speaker does not tell the listeners the minutest details of things they already know.
You can now use the Series Method with all kinds of schemas that are unfamiliar to you. Your goal can be to become familiar enough with these series that you can produce them yourself, in your own words. That does not mean that you memorize them. Rather, you may have several people tell you a series, and then you attempt to tell the basic series to several people as best you can. Some of “your own words” will be words that you have acquired in the process of learning the series.
- Subsections
- 3.2.2.1 Ethnographic interviewing
The Series Method brought us to the brink of one of the major Phase III learning activities--ethnographic interviewing. However, ethnographic interviewing is far more like normal everyday communication than the series method is. In authentic communication, it is commonly the case that the speaker has information that the listener lacks, the listener desires the information, and the speaker desires to give the information to the listener. This is often true in ethnographic interviewing. The LRP has information which you lack. You desire this information, and she desires to give it to you. It is still not natural communication in the sense of being exactly like the speech that goes on in conversations between two native speakers. First of all, you are being told things that native speakers would not need to be told, since they already know those things. Second, your LRP is still using careful, simplified speech in talking to you, in order to enable you to understand her more fully and more easily than you would be able to understand her if she spoke to you exactly as she speaks to native speakers.
The word “ethnography”, in its most general meaning, refers to the description of culture. When people speak of ethnographic methods nowadays, they generally have a more specific meaning in mind: coming to understand a culture from within its own frame of reference, through intensive observation and interaction with members of that culture. A professional ethnographer is first of all a skilled observer, noticing, and recording, a myriad of details in a situation which the untrained observer might miss. After making extensive observations of specific events, the ethnographer attempts to understand the cultural system which gives meaning to those specific events. From the standpoint of a member of the culture, how is each event related to other events, and how is each understood in terms of its causes and its purpose? The ethnographer attempts to uncover the organized knowledge system by which members of the culture regulate their behaviour and interaction. The crucial idea here is that the ethnographer seeks the insider's perspective on events and relationships within the culture. Can you see why the language learner needs a good deal of this ethnographic spirit? Spradley says that his book on ethnographic interviewing is “in a sense... a set of instructions for learning another language” (Spradley 1980, p. 21) .
What you want to do as a language-learner- cum -ethnographer is to get people to reveal to you their knowledge of their culture, and to allow you to start seeing their world through their eyes. Often this will mean getting people to talk about things which they know, but do not often consciously think about. You will need to keep emphasizing to people that you are really ignorant of even the simple details of their lives. Then, as people tell you things that to them are hardly worth mentioning because they are such common knowledge, you should express appreciation, reminding them that you are quite ignorant even of such mundane, common facts of life there.
A challenge you face right off is how to decide which areas of the culture to ask about. You may have already been making a list of social situations, back when you were looking for conversational topics by touring the community. A social situation, in Spradley's terms, can be understood in terms of 1) a place, 2) actors, and 3) activities. (see Spradley 1980, pp 39 to 52) . By a place is meant either some specific place, such as the village square, or a type of place, such as a cornfield. People use that place or type of place for a particular purpose or set of purposes. For example, the village square might be used for feasts, and for political speeches. When a place is being used for a purpose, that purpose will be defined by who the actors, or participants, are and by what they do. In the case of political speeches, the actors may be the chief, or some other political figure, and the crowd who stand and listen to the speech. The activities include the giving of the speech, which will have certain typical characteristics, and they will also include all that the members of the crowd do while listening.
In any culture there will be a large number of social situations. Think of breakfast. What is the place? Who are the actors? What are the activities? Or how about an interchange between a salesperson with a wagon load of goods, and a potential customer at the door of her home? Or how about a woman at the village well? Or how about two women meeting at the village well? The world is filled with social situations. Even a single day of detailed observations should provide you with a long list of social situations that can form the basis for discussion with your LRP and other friends. In addition, in the course of interviewing people, you will learn of many social situations that you have not yet observed. Your aim is always to discuss a specific social situation with people who actually participate in it. They are the ones who are certain to possess the cultural knowledge which underlies successful performance in that social situation.
The interview itself makes extensive use of questions. Spradley (1979), pp85-91, describes thirteen different varieties of questions under the general heading of descriptive questions. These fall into five major categories:
Native language questions are used to find out how to talk about particular experiences. For example, Spradley wanted to ask tramps in Seattle about the experience of getting arrested, but first he needed to find out their terms for jail, and for getting arrested. It turned out that a jail was referred to as the bucket and being arrested was described as making the bucket. Once he knew the correct terms, he was able to ask people to tell him all about making the bucket. Since he was interested in tapping their knowledge of their world and experience, it was important that he use their terms. Only their terms specifically refer to their experience. If he were to simply ask about “getting arrested and going to jail” he might get a lot of information, but he would be working from his own pre-existing frame of reference rather than from the frame of reference of the tramps.
For you as a language learner, the application of this principle is straightforward. If you want to learn about the experience of using a taxi, you could simply ask about it in some way that is communicatively adequate, perhaps using communication strategies. But why not begin by learning how to ask about using taxis? Then suppose the person you are questioning uses a generic word to describe the person who hires the taxi. The generic word might mean “person” or perhaps “customer”. You should ask if that is the normal word used to describe that person. You may find that there is a more specific word such as passenger. Now you will be better able to ask questions about passengers using the language that is normally used in that culture. You can increase the likelihood of getting the normal expressions by asking people to use the term they would use when talking to a normal participant in that culture. Needless to say, your goal is to ask your questions, and hear the responses, entirely in the new language.
Now let's go back to the first type of question in Spradley's list: grand tour questions. You may have observed a number of social situations in the corn field, including some sort of religious ceremony, the ploughing of the field, and the planting of the corn. A grand tour question dealing with the planting of the corn might have the form, “Could you tell me everything you do during a day of corn planting?” This is what Spradley calls a typical grand tour question. It is called typical because it is not asking about a specific day's planting, but rather about a typical day's planting. This is a good starting point, because it helps you to start internalizing the general schema which will serve you as you discuss any specific day of planting. Spradley's second type of grand tour question deals with a specific instance, and is thus labeled a specific grand tour question. You might ask, “Could you tell me everything that you did yesterday as a part of your day's corn planting?” I find that I get a much fuller answer to a specific grand tour question than to a typical grand tour question. Just the same, dealing first with the answer to a typical grand tour question, and learning the appropriate language for discussing the situation, will improve the likelihood of your understanding a large part of the responses to the specific grand tour questions. Spradley also talks about guided grand tour questions and task-related grand tour questions. In answering a guided grand tour question, someone might take you to the cornfield, and describe the activities that go on there as you walk about the field together. In the task-related variety, you would ask your friend questions about the activity right as it is being performed.
Perhaps the grandest tour you can ask for is a description of a typical lifetime. Many of the events and stages that are mentioned in a description of a typical lifetime will provide ideas for additional grand tour questions. For example, you might hear that a major ceremony occurs when a child is six months old. Such a ceremony would provide the basis for a grand tour question. You could also ask for a specific description of a specific person's entire life. In most cases, this would involve people telling the story of their own lives. It is good to get such accounts from people of a variety of ages and backgrounds.
In addition to asking about a typical life-time, and a specific life-time, you might ask about a typical year, a typical month or week (if it's relevant) and a typical day, meaning a day in general, as opposed to a day during planting, a day during harvesting, or a market day. You can also ask for specific tours of such time units.
Mini-tour questions arise directly out of grand tour questions. Your common procedure in asking a grand tour question would be to tape record the response and then go over the tape with the person who gave the response. As you go over the recording, you will notice details that could be elaborated on. For example, when a motor-rickshaw driver gave me a grand tour of what he does when he gives a ride to a passenger, he mentioned starting the rickshaw. When we went over the recording, I asked how he starts the rickshaw. That was a mini-tour question. By way of response, he told me in some detail the steps he goes through in starting the rickshaw. Like grand tour questions, mini-tour questions can be typical, specific, guided or task related. For example, I could have asked him to take me to his rickshaw and give me a demonstration, with explanation, as he started the motor. That would have been a task related mini-tour question. In addition to suggesting mini-tour questions, the responses to grand tour questions will also suggest additional grand tour questions.
Like mini-tour questions, example questions grow out of the answers to other questions. For instance, in discussing planting corn, your friend might mention poor cornfields, and you could then ask for some examples of poor cornfields. It may turn out that there are a variety of conditions that can make a particular field a poor one.
Experience questions involve asking the person to tell an interesting experience. You might ask, “Have you ever had an especially interesting experience planting corn?” It is good if you have worked through some grand tour questions and mini-tour questions on the same topic before asking experiences questions. That is because the responses to the grand tour questions and mini tour questions will supply you with cultural schemas which will enable you to comprehend the stories that are told in response to experience questions. My rickshaw driver friend told of a time when a female passenger jumped out of his moving rickshaw without his knowledge because she had doubts about his intentions. This story revealed a number of values that go into defining good rickshaw driving, and also opened up wider cultural issues having to do with interactions between men and women.
There is much more to Spradley's method than this. Asking descriptive questions is just the first step. The subsequent steps take you more deeply into understanding how members of the society experience the component parts of social situations. Spradley takes you from seeing a mere social situation, that is, actors performing activities in a place, to uncovering a cultural scene, that is, understanding the meanings that members of the culture attach to the actors and activities, and how those actors and activities are related to one another and to other actors and activities. An important concept is the cultural domain. You can spot cultural domains within the answers to descriptive questions when the speaker indicates, either explicitly or implicitly, something along the lines of X is a type of Y, or X is a way to do Y. Here you can see that the speaker is assuming a whole category of objects or actions within the culture. For example, in connection with corn-planting, your friend might mention that planting corn on the day someone died can cause bad luck. This might suggest two possible cultural domains: causes of bad luck, and instances of bad luck.
As you spot possible cultural domains, you should try to flesh them out. What are some other things that cause bad luck? You may be able to add to the list by questioning many people. What are some things that happen to people who have bad luck? In addition to noticing possible cultural domains while going over the tape-recorded responses to descriptive questions, you may also notice possibilities through direct observation. Sometimes simply observing complexity is enough to clue you into a cultural domain. If you observed a sweets shop in South Asia, you would notice a considerable variety of sweets. Here is a conspicuous area of knowledge which may be universally shared by members of the culture. What are all those sweets? What meanings are attached to them? You might learn that certain sweets are distributed to neighbors on certain occasions. That could clue you into a cultural domain. This domain might start out as “Occasions when people distribute the sweet called laddu to their neighbors”. Once you get a list of such occasions you can then find a better name for the cultural domain by reading the list of occasions to people and asking people for a cover term that refers to all such occasions. People might respond by saying, “Those are all examples of times of celebration.” Once you have the cover term, times of celebration, it might prompt people to come up with additional instances of the domain, that is, additional times of celebration, which may go beyond those in which the sweet call laddu is distributed to neighbors. The distribution of laddu to neighbors might then turn out to be itself one instance of a cultural domain of ways to celebrate.
The label for cultural domain might be similar to one of following:
A good time to look for possible cultural domains is when you are privately listening to the tape recordings of your interviews. Not all of the possibilities you spot will pay off, but many will. Out the numerous examples of cultural domains that you find, a few will turn out to be particularly fruitful. This was the case when Spradley began learning all the ways to make a flop which were generally known to tramps in Seattle. It turned out that there were over a hundred ways to make a flop, and that this knowledge was generally shared by members of the tramp community. When you stumble onto such an extensive cultural domain, you know that you are dealing with an area of major concern within the culture.
For fuller details, and further steps in ethnographic analysis, you will need to refer to Spradley (1979, 1980). I hope I have whetted your appetite for using ethnographic interviewing as a major means of improving your language ability during Stage III. Ethnographic interviewing achieves the goals related to Principles I and II. Many responses to questions will be lengthy, providing comprehensible input at the time, as well as later when you listen to the tapes. You can go over the tapes in detail with the speaker, discussing what she said, and clarifying what needs to be clarified. This will stimulate a large amount of extemporaneous communication. Once you are familiar with a lengthy response to a question, you can attempt to say it in your own words. For example, suppose your LRP has given you a verbal grand tour of a wedding, telling of each event in sequence. After going over the tape, you can rewind it, and then attempt to describe a typical wedding yourself. After each few details that you describe, you can play a little bit more of the tape, and see how close your description is to that of your LRP. You would need to do this with that LRP present, so you would actually have someone to talk to.
In addition to satisfying Principles I and II (comprehensible input and extemporaneous communication), through ethnographic interviewing, you will be getting to know the people on a major scale (Principle III). As you become thoroughly familiar with an ever increasing number of areas of local experience, knowledge and belief, you will be increasing the number of topics that are familiar to you. The result of this will be that when you hear people talking in any context or situation, you will increasingly find that it provides you with additional comprehensible input. Thus eventually you will reach the point where much of what you hear said in the course of your life will directly contribute to your language learning (Stage IV).
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Page content last modified: 11 September 1997 |
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