3.1.2. Getting your tongue loose in stage II

During Stage I, your ability to speak the language was extremely limited. During Stage II you will reach the point where, by using communication strategies, you can usually succeed in getting your point across to a sympathetic friend. At the end of Stage I, you felt like you did not have a lot of freedom in communication. By the end of Stage II you will feel that you do have a lot of freedom. This change will come as a result of extensive efforts at extemporaneous speaking.

You know many hundreds of the most important vocabulary items, and you are familiar with a wide range of basic sentence patterns. Yet it is a struggle for you to say very much. Here is an exercise. Think of one of the most interesting events from your childhood. It must be one that you have not yet related to anyone in your new language. Find a sympathetic listener. Your best choice would be your regular LRP during your regular language session. Inform her that you are going to tell her a story from your childhood, and that you will absolutely refuse to revert to English (or any other language that you both know well) for even a single word. It is important that you do no advance planning or preparation. Don't spend several days imagining how you will express yourself. You should do this absolutely cold. As you tell the story, make a tape recording of yourself talking. Don't listen to that tape recording, but store it in a safe place.

Done? If you are at the beginning of Stage II, you probably found the experience stretching, to say the least. Now forget about that story. Don't try to tell it again to anyone for a few weeks. Then, as you are getting into Stage III, tell this same story to someone else, again taping it. Now compare the new tape with the earlier one. You will notice that your tongue has really loosened up. How did it loosen up? Through lots and lots of extemporaneous communication.

So what you need are activities that will keep you talking. Telling stories from your own past is one good way to do a lot of talking. You may think you have nothing interesting to tell, but you should nevertheless have plenty to tell. You might start by thinking through your whole life story to date. Spend an hour or so making lots of notes. You may find that you will have enough to keep you talking for several language sessions. Whenever you engage in conversational practice with your LRP you should tape record it. I have found that a stereo tape recorder which accepts two microphones is useful for this. Lapel microphones work well, since they stay relatively close to the sound source without being a distraction. Tell your LRP that you want to learn to talk all about your previous life experiences, and also to learn about hers. You can give your family's background, and talk about your earliest memories, describing the setting, and the general details of your early life. As you get stuck, your LRP will attempt to help you. It is good if you don't break into English (or any other language that you both know well) at these points. Rather, you can come back to them afterwards. You and your LRP can listen to those parts of the tape. If she is bilingual, you can tell her, say in English, what you were trying to say, or wanted to say in her language. She can then tell you how you might have said it. You can tape all of this discussion. It shouldn't be too long before you are consistently able to negotiate the desired meaning without resorting to another language. Early on, you may find this helpful at times. But it is better if you do it after you have finished the story, so that you have the experience of extended extemporaneous speaking without reverting to another language.

At the spots where you did have difficulty getting your point across, you need to identify the nature of the problem. If the problem was that you lacked the necessary vocabulary, have the LRP record the relevant word or idiom on your vocabulary tape in the manner described earlier: first she says the vocabulary item in isolation, then she says the whole sentence which contains the item, then she says the item again. You can record this right onto the tape of your language session and later dub it onto your ever growing vocabulary tape. (I find that I use at least two tape recorders for all the things that I do with tapes, usually a small stereo one for making tapes, and listening to them as I travel about, and a larger double cassette for dubbing, and listening to tapes at home.)

Getting back to your trouble spot, the problem may not have been related to vocabulary. It might have resulted from your not knowing a particular sentence form. Then you can create a communication situation in which you can hear that form over and over as comprehensible input. For example, suppose you needed to be able to express the idea of one person making another person do something. You might have your LRP talk about many situations where one person makes another person do things: school teachers make children read aloud; traffic police make people stop; parents make children be quiet in church; the government makes people pay taxes; etc. After she has come up with many examples, you might come up with many more of your own, attempting to formulate your own sentences. In the case of some sentence patterns, the Series Method will provide a ready-made means of emphasizing the detail that you wish to focus on. In the discussion above I showed how it can be used to provide a lot of repetition of a particular sentence pattern.

As you cover various phases and details of your life, you can encourage your LRP to share similarly. Much of what she says may be a challenge for you to understand, but you can replay those parts of the tape to her. Rather than simply asking, “What does that mean?”, why not attempt to explain to her, in the new language, of course, what you think she might have meant, and let her correct you, also in the new language.

Another important source of ideas for discussion in the language is your day to day life while you are learning the language. It is a good idea each day to tell your LRP or someone else everything you did the day before. Tape record your account, and then go over the tape with your LRP or friend. Stop at spots where you had difficulty, and decide whether the difficulty was due to a lack of vocabulary, or sentence patterns, and then handle the problem area in the ways already suggested. You might get your LRP to also give an account of her previous day's activities, and go over that with her.

Remember, it is a good idea if you follow up on whatever you converse about with your LRP by conversing about the same thing with a few friends whom you visit or who visit you. Remember, if you are a full-time language learner, such social visiting should be viewed as part of your ordinary work day. If you have been working at developing relationships, there should be a small number of people who know you well enough that they can communicate with you successfully. As I say, there is a big advantage to communicating with familiar people as opposed to strangers. You will be more relaxed with them, which will make it much easier for you to process and respond to what they are saying. And they will have a good feel for your current level of ability, and will therefore be able to communicate with you at a level that you can handle. Whereas much of what a stranger attempts to say to you initially may be unintelligible to you, your good friends will be able to rattle on and on to you in language that you can understand. It is not that they will speak at the same level that you do. Rather they will speak at a level at which you can comprehend, which will be beyond the level you speak at. As you are exposed to speech which is beyond your current speaking ability, but within reach of your current comprehension ability, you will be receiving precisely the level of comprehensible input that you need for your speaking ability to continue to grow beyond its present state.

Part of your learning should be related to your specific needs list, as discussed above at some length. These needs may be framed in terms of topics you need to be able to discuss, or in terms of real life situations in which you need to be able to communicate. If a need is stated in terms of a topic, you can use an approach similar to the one I suggested for telling stories from your life. Suppose you want to be able to discuss child care. Make some notes (in English) on the topic of child care. Then attempt to talk about child care to your LRP. You might discuss the topic of child care as it is carried out within your own culture, and ask your LRP for reactions from the standpoint of her culture, tape recording the entire interchange. Then go over the tape, and focus on places where you had trouble communicating in either direction. If the communication problem was due to your lack of vocabulary or sentence patterns, you might focus on these. If the communication problem was caused by your lack of knowledge of this aspect of the culture, then you will want to discuss this area of the culture (in the local language) at some length. Now, having discussed this topic thoroughly with your LRP, you are in a better position to discuss it with friends while on social visits. By the time you have discussed the topic of child care with four or five friends, you should find that your ability to discuss this particular topic has improved markedly.

Others of the needs in your needs list will be stated in terms of situations in which you need to communicate, such as “responding to a proposal of marriage”. For starters, there is much to be gained from treating these situations as topics, that is, learning to talk about these situations and talking about them extensively with a number of people. Another good technique for learning to communicate in specific situations is role-play. In any communication situation there are at least two roles: the role you have, and the role of the person with whom you interact. For example, your role might be that of a bank customer, and the other person's role might be that of a bank teller. Now you want to learn to talk like a bank customer, not like a bank teller. Therefore, in role-play, you should take the role of the bank teller.

“Just a minute”, you say. “How will I learn to talk like a bank customer if I take the role of a bank teller?” Well, how else do you expect to learn? If you start out by taking the role of bank customer, assuming you are doing this because you don't yet know how to talk like a bank customer, you won't know how to talk. True, you don't know how to talk like a teller either, but that is less important, since that is not what you mainly want to learn. But as you play the role of teller, your LRP or friend will talk to you in the role of a customer. Now you will hear how a customer talks, and even make a tape of it. Of course, you may foul things up by not behaving like a proper bank teller. But now that you have some idea of what a customer says, you can trade roles, and get some idea of what a teller actually says. Then switch back, and have a somewhat more authentic role-play in which you hear a better example of what a customer says, which is what you mainly want to learn. You do also want to learn the sorts of things you might expect the teller to say, since that will make it easier for you to understand the teller in real life. You can repeat this role-play with a number of friends. It is good if you can record any role-play with a number of people, since you want to get a general idea of how to talk in a given role, and what you will have to respond to, rather than just memorizing a single example of how somebody did it during a single role-play. You can listen to the tapes many times.

One special type of role-play is called Strategic Interaction (see Di Pietro 1987). In Strategic Interaction, each role-play is centered around what Di Pietro calls a scenario. In a scenario, there is some complicating factor which demands creative communication. For example, in the case of the bank customer and teller, the bank teller might be given a record of the customer's account which says that it is overdrawn, and the customer is given a play bank book which shows that there is still a healthy balance. The two records could differ in terms of both deposits and withdrawals. The problem might be that there are two account holders with the same name, but different account numbers, and the teller is unknowingly looking at the account record of the other person. The account number is conspicuous enough that it will eventually be noticed by either the customer or the teller. Through spoken interaction they would first become entangled in the problem and eventually find the solution. Obviously, this would require the help of a third party (such as a fellow language learner) who would invent the scenario so that the nature of the complicating factor would be unknown to the participants. An excellent approach to any type of role-play is to first observe pairs or groups of native speakers performing the role-play before you attempt to do so yourself. This should be especially productive in the case of Strategic Interaction.

An excellent way to find weaknesses in your general speaking ability is to attempt to do on-the-spot oral translation of written material. This prevents you from using avoidance strategies, forcing you, rather, to develop new areas of language ability. A wide variety of printed material can be used for this purpose. In Pakistan we found a book that contained a number of first person accounts of people's daily work. Each account was two or three pages long. They were written in English, but the subject matter dealt entirely with life in Pakistan. The idea of this technique is not to translate simultaneously while reading. Rather, you read several sentences which form a natural unit, perhaps a paragraph. When you have grasped this whole unit, look away from the printed material, and tell your LRP or friend what you have just read. You may prefer to think of this as retelling rather than translating. But you are reading the material in a language that you know well, and retelling it in the language that you are learning. In the book about people's daily work in Pakistan, there was one account of a fisherman. At one point the fisherman says that the fish are either sold by weight, or at auction. Consider the phrases by weight and at auction. Both of these could be a challenge to a Stage II language learner. The language learner may initially get the meaning across using achievement strategies. That is, s/he may give descriptions or examples of what s/he means, expressing the ideas in roundabout ways (try it). S/he would then ask the LRP for the correct way to express these meanings. The advantage of translating is that it forces the learner to relinquish control over what s/he is going to say, and to break new ground when the need arises. Otherwise, s/he can get into the habit of staying in comfortable, familiar territory. Being forced to express every meaning on the page that is translated can be a helpful, stretching experience. This technique is appropriate once you are well into Stage II, and in Stage III.

Apart from such focused communication activities, a good part of your speaking efforts will occur in uncontrolled social situations where you have to attempt to cope with whatever comes your way as the need arises. Your ultimate goal is to be able to do just that, easily, and in any situation. However, by employing somewhat structured and focused communication activities with an LRP as a means of improving your ability, you will find that you can progress more quickly than if you leave your communication experiences entirely to the whims of fortune.