3

Aspects of Language

I Before E / Except After C / or When Sounded as A / as in Neighbor or Weigh

When children learn language, they learn to speak before they learn to read. Some adult foreign language learners feel that they should learn their target language in much the same way. That is, they try to ignore written language until they have mastered spoken language. This misconception no doubt appears logical to speakers of English because, in English, sounds and letters do not correspond to each other in a one-to-one fashion.

The technical term for the relationship between sound and spelling is phoneme–grapheme correspondence. A phoneme is a sound in a language, and a grapheme is the written form for that sound. Ideally, there would be a one-to-one relationship between a sound and the letter used to represent it. English has about forty phonemes, and the Latin alphabet has only twenty-six letters, so some letters have to pull double duty. Other languages solve this problem, in part, by using diacritics—marks above or below letters to denote different sounds, such as affamé (hungry) or façade (front) in French. None of this would be a problem if English behaved consistently in this regard. But it doesn’t. English was frozen into type relatively early in its history, and wholesale changes in how the language was pronounced happened later. Other languages have changed more slowly than English, or have had their spelling overhauled to bring it in line with the spoken form. This didn’t happen with English, and therefore, the same sound can be written in a variety of ways. Some letters are silent, but only some of the time. Exceptions abound. And it is these inconsistencies that are the bane of anyone trying to learn English as a foreign language.

The capricious nature of English spelling–sound relationships was illustrated in an example famously, but also perhaps falsely, attributed to George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright.¹ Consider how the word fish could be written as ghoti, given that the “f” sound can be written as “gh” in words like enough, that the “i” sound can be written as “o” as in women, and that “sh” can be written as “ti” in words like nation. In other words, just about anything goes. Based on “words” like ghoti, many people over the years have championed a wholesale reform of English spelling, and although the problem is easy to illustrate, it doesn’t admit to any easy solutions.

In contrast, when Roger began studying German during his freshman year in high school, his teacher made a statement so outrageous that it has always stuck with him, “German is very regular. You’ll know how to pronounce almost every word that you read, even if you’ve never seen it before. And you’ll know how to spell almost every word that you hear.” This seemed like an utter impossibility—and it is, if your frame of reference is English.

If we think about a language’s spelling and sound consistency as points on a continuum, with one endpoint denoting perfect consistency and the other denoting perfect chaos, then English could be thought of as the “Wild West.” Many languages, however, do show impressive levels of spelling and sound consistency. Finnish, Greek, the syllabary systems of Japanese, and Spanish all fare well in this regard. The spelling–sound correspondences are regular, and exceptions are few (and mostly involve foreign terms borrowed from other languages). And at other points along this spelling–sound continuum, we would find languages like Arabic, French, and Hebrew—languages that are more regular than English, but less consistent than the ideal.

There are real-world consequences to a lack of correspondence between spellings and sound. Developmental studies have shown that children have more difficulty in decoding words in inconsistent languages, like English, and learn to read more slowly as a result. And as mentioned earlier, adult speakers of other languages attempting to learn English find these inconsistencies bizarre and frustrating. Nevertheless, these difficulties do not cause English speakers to stop reading or writing. And they make spelling bees possible, which aren’t needed in languages like Spanish, which have a regular phoneme–grapheme correspondence.

Given this state of affairs, it’s no wonder that people are advised to focus solely on speaking and listening so as not to be confused by the irregularities that might be found in reading and writing a foreign language.² However, the educational psychologist David Ausubel pointed out two reasons why written and spoken materials should be presented in tandem. First, he noted that by adolescence, the vast majority of adults are already quite proficient at learning new information through a combination of reading and listening. Consequently, it would be unnatural not to learn new material that way. Therefore, to focus only on spoken material “deprives the older learner of his principal learning tool and of the instructional medium in which he feels most comfortable and confident. This is particularly unfortunate during the early phases of instruction when learning stresses tend to be the greatest.”³

Second, Ausubel pointed out that reading can be an invaluable support for spoken language. Especially early on in the acquisition of a new language, unfamiliar sounds and sound combinations, stress patterns, word boundaries, and grammatical structures are difficult to differentiate. Providing written materials in conjunction with spoken materials gives adult language learners additional cues with which they can make these distinctions. As students learn to speak and read concurrently, these materials can be alternated, or gradually withdrawn, when the time comes to strengthen purely spoken or purely written modes of communication.

As you learn a new language, therefore, be sure to learn to both read and speak the language at the same time. It may seem like slow going at first (depending on the language you are learning) but at least if you are a native speaker of English, it is likely that you will find more consistency in your target language than in your native tongue. Not only will you be as amazed as Roger was to learn that spelling and sound can indeed coexist harmoniously, but you will also be reinforcing your speaking and listening through reading, and vice versa. You are already an adult who knows how to do both—why try to learn a language by denying yourself one of your obvious strengths?

Behind the Scenes at the Foreign Service Institute

It is only natural to compare ourselves to others. Doing so provides valuable feedback about progress. But it is important to make the proper comparisons in order to put language learning in perspective. Therefore, before thinking about your own language progress, consider the gold standard of foreign language learning: the Foreign Service Institute (FSI).

The Foreign Service Institute is the US Department of State’s training center for diplomats and other individuals who work for the US government in the field of foreign affairs. FSI has branches in various parts of the world, but the largest by far is the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center (NFATC) located in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC. Each year more than 100,000 students enroll in over 700 courses at NFATC. These courses are designed to prepare Foreign Service Officers and others for their work advancing US interests at the more than 290 embassies, consulates, and other types of diplomatic missions around the world. Organized much like a university, FSI offers traditional classroom and online courses in a wide range of areas, including leadership, crisis management, diplomatic tradecraft, information technology, and safety and security.

The Foreign Service Institute is most famous, however, for its School of Language Studies. More than seventy languages are taught at FSI (although not all are being taught at any given time). But not everyone who works at a diplomatic mission abroad receives language training. In general, language classes are provided only to those individuals serving in language designated positions (LDPs). Furthermore, not everyone going into an LDP receives the same amount of instruction. FSI measures language proficiency on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale, which describes levels of proficiency that range from 0 (no proficiency) to 5 (functionally native proficiency). Although there are several different types of proficiency (i.e., speaking, reading, listening, writing, translation performance, interpretation performance, competence in intercultural communication, and audio translation performance), LDPs are only specified for speaking (S) and reading (R). There are approximately 4,100 language designated positions worldwide, the majority of which require speaking and reading scores of 3 (general professional proficiency) which is notated as S3/R3, or called just “3-3” for short. We discuss these levels in more detail in the next section on measuring proficiency.

As you can imagine, not everyone who will serve in an S3/R3 language designated position will study their target language for the same amount of time. The length of time designated to reach S3/R3 in any given language depends on the difficulty of the target language. Difficulty is determined by how long it should take a native speaker of English to go from no proficiency (0) to general professional proficiency (3). Diplomats studying languages such as Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Dutch are expected to reach S3/R3 proficiency in 24 weeks. French takes 30 weeks. Students who need to speak languages such as German, Indonesian, and Swahili receive 36 weeks of training. Languages at the next highest level of difficulty, so-called “hard” languages, such as Russian, Urdu, and Burmese, require 44 weeks of training. Finally, to get to an S3/R3 with no prior background in the so-called “super hard” languages of Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Japanese, and Korean takes almost two years (88 weeks).

Of course, these times are only averages established by FSI based on the success rates of previous students; they are reviewed periodically and subject to change. The reason some languages are expected to take longer to master than others is complex. But in general, the more closely the language is related to English, the more quickly the language can be mastered. For example, French is more closely related to English than Thai; therefore, for an English speaker, Thai is expected to take longer than French. Likewise, Spanish uses a writing system similar to that of English, but Arabic does not. Therefore, students are expected to spend less time studying Spanish than Arabic. Other factors, too, influence the perceived level of difficulty, such as how similar the sound system of the language is to English, but you get the point.

Because FSI is a government-funded entity, it is also evaluated periodically by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG). In fiscal year (FY) 2012, the OIG reported that the success rate for students with no prior knowledge of a target language reaching a designated S3/R3 level was 60 percent. However, since most students who do not attain their desired score in the allotted time period continue to study, the overall success rate ultimately rises to 82 percent. Interestingly, two of the languages with the lowest on-time success rates were not Arabic or Chinese, but rather French and German.⁴

One thing to keep in mind is that for the vast majority of language students studying at FSI, learning the target language is their full-time job. These students receive four or five hours a day of direct language instruction in classes of no more than four students, with many receiving one-to-one instruction. Because studying their target language is their full-time job, students at FSI are expected to be on campus for at least eight hours a day, using the time outside of language class for self-study. FSI also provides state-of-the-art language laboratories, a library with language learning and reference materials, and Internet-enabled classrooms. Is it any wonder, therefore, that most of these students eventually reach their language goals?

Whether you are a student at FSI preparing for your assignment in Tirana, or a working parent who always wanted to learn Italian, don’t worry about whether the language is easy, hard, or super hard. In the end, the perceived difficulty of the language matters far less than your attachment to the language. If you are fascinated by China, study Chinese, and remember to cut yourself some slack if you aren’t memorizing vocabulary words as easily as your friend who is studying Spanish. And also remember that 40 percent of students at FSI, with all of the resources available to them, don’t reach the designated S3/R3 in the estimated time, but they don’t give up—and neither should you.

Measuring Fluency and Proficiency

Most people use the term fluency to mean how well a person speaks a foreign language. In fact, we used the term that way in the title of this book. However, linguists, educators, speech pathologists, and others define fluency more specifically, and each slightly differently, depending on their goals.⁵ Technically, fluency depends on rate of speech. In other words, a person is fluent in a language if he speaks it rapidly, smoothly, and accurately. The term fluency in this sense is different from proficiency, which refers to one’s competence using the language. If this seems like splitting hairs, consider the following.

Aphasia is a general term for loss of language after brain injury.⁶ One type of aphasia, called nonfluent or Broca’s aphasia, is characterized by halting, effortful, and yet still meaningful speech. People with Broca’s aphasia cannot express themselves fluently; nonetheless, because they still possess knowledge of the language and are able to make themselves understood, they can be said to have retained linguistic proficiency after the brain injury. In contrast, people with fluent or Wernicke’s aphasia speak rapidly and effortlessly, but make little sense.

Here is another example. An opera singer who has memorized the score of a libretto can sing the opera perfectly and expressively, and yet be unable to leave the opera house and hail a taxi using that language. The singer could be said to be demonstrating fluency, and yet not be proficient in the language. Likewise, a poorly educated native speaker of a language could be considered fluent, but without having attained a high level of proficiency.

But the distinction between fluency and proficiency doesn’t really matter for most adult foreign language learners. Because being fluent in a language is generally understood to imply a high level of proficiency, most foreign language learners are working toward both goals.

It’s not easy to quantify how well someone speaks a foreign language. One person may boast that he is 100 percent fluent, but be unable to order a meal in a restaurant. Another person may apologize for her poor linguistic ability as she uses the target language to deconstruct Kierkegaard’s use of irony. One way to solve this problem would be to create a scale that objectively measures linguistic ability, and, as introduced in the previous section, this is exactly what FSI did. Let’s take a look at this scale in more detail and see how it applies to the adult foreign language learner.

As noted earlier, proficiency on the ILR scale can be assigned a score from 0 to 5. A score of 0 is equivalent to no proficiency in a language. Richard and Roger both have a S0/R0 in Hindi, because neither one of them can speak or read Hindi. At the other end of the scale, people who receive the highest score of 5 demonstrate a functionally native proficiency. For example, a score of S5 means that someone speaks a target language like a highly educated, articulate, native speaker. As odd as it may seem, not all native speakers of a language speak or read their own language at level 5. If you’d like to learn more about the ILR scale, or if you’d like to take a self-assessment for speaking, reading or listening, go to http://govtilr.org/.

Let’s look in depth at Levels 1 through 4 of the ILR Speaking Skill Scale with regard to the area of speaking, since most adult language learners concentrate on speaking when they study a foreign language

Level 1: Elementary Proficiency

Speakers of a language at Level 1 can introduce themselves (name, age, country of origin) and can engage in simple, predictable conversations. They can usually exchange greetings and follow politeness rules. Native speakers must speak slowly and clearly to them, often repeating what they’ve said in order to be understood. Likewise, the native speaker must work hard to understand what is being said by a Level 1 speaker. The Level 1 speaker may often be misunderstood, and his vocabulary is limited and might be inaccurate. He makes some errors in basic grammar and pronunciation. A Level 1 speaker may be someone who took the language as an elective in high school and/or college, and can speak the language in an elementary way.

Speaking a language at Level 1 is an appropriate goal for many adult language learners. S1 ability demonstrates that you took the time and effort to study someone else’s language and will win you many points among native speakers. It takes hard work to get to Level 1. Don’t focus on what you can’t do, focus on all that you can.

Level 2: Limited Working Proficiency

People who speak a language at Level 2 can easily satisfy the demands of everyday social situations and can fulfill basic work requirements. However, they still have difficulty with complex tasks. They can engage in everyday conversations on basic topics (e.g., the weather, current events, work, and family). They have trouble, however, when conversations veer from routine topics. The Level 2 speaker won’t make mistakes with basic grammar and vocabulary, but his utterances are still not very sophisticated. He may try to overextend his limited vocabulary. For example, rather than differentiate between beautiful, gorgeous, stunning, attractive, or cute, he uses the word pretty in every situation. The use of complex grammatical structures (for example, the subjunctive in certain languages) is still weak or nonexistent. A person who majors in a language in college could be expected to speak that language at Level 2 upon graduation.

Adult language learners who reach Level 2 can be justifiably proud of this accomplishment. With Level 2 abilities, adults can get around quite easily using the target language. The confidence that comes from speaking at Level 2 is very freeing, because one need not rely on native speakers to fulfill basic needs. Speaking at Level 2 often propels people to work even harder to achieve Level 3 proficiency.

Level 3: General Professional Proficiency

The grammar and vocabulary of a speaker at Level 3 is sufficient to participate in most formal and informal conversations. She will use the language well, but there are still some noticeable limitations. She can speak at a normal rate, and native speakers do not need to slow down to speak to her. The Level 3 speaker may still have some difficulty, however, with figurative language (e.g., metaphors, idiomatic expressions, and proverbs) or cultural references. Also, her accent still sounds somewhat foreign. A Level 3 speaker easily understands, and is easily understood by native speakers. This is the level to which most adult language learners strive. A person with a master’s degree in a language probably speaks the language at Level 3. If the definition of fluency is being able to express oneself readily and effortlessly, then Level 3 speakers can say that they are fluent in a language.

Level 4: Advanced Professional Proficiency

A Level 4 speaker makes few speech errors. The Level 4 speaker uses cultural references and figures of speech appropriately. For example, a Level 4 speaker may accurately use sarcasm. These speakers may also be able to act as nonprofessional interpreters between the target language and their native language. The Level 4 speaker also understands various dialects of the language. Level 4 speakers differ from Level 5 speakers only in subtle ways, occasionally saying something in a way that a native speaker would not.

As you think about these levels, keep in mind that an ILR score will not reflect a person’s ability to live in or adjust to another culture. The real test of how well you speak a language is how easily you communicate when you are using that language, and the pleasure you derive from speaking it. The important point is to think about exactly what you want to accomplish with your language study, and to work in that direction. Do you want to speak formally for work or do you want to just make friends? Keep in mind that proficiency is a continuum, with different levels and areas and ways to measure them. So, go at your own pace and emphasize your strengths. Test scores can be useful, but they can also cause you to forget what it is you want to accomplish with the language. And as you are studying, when you get frustrated or feel like giving up, just remember that native speakers don’t speak their native language perfectly either; rather, they speak it well enough to accomplish their communicative goals. Why hold yourself to a higher standard?

Interlanguage

In a humorous essay in the New York Times, Philip Crawford recounts how he once said “Bon appétit” to his French wife and son before a meal and was roundly chastised for being gauche.⁷ He appealed to French friends who were professors and they basically agreed with his family, although they acknowledged that “the subject is indeed delicate and would deserve a symposium involving linguists, socio-linguistics, teachers of good manners, specialists of customs and traditions, plus a few duchesses.” It should be noted that Mr. Crawford was living in France and had studied French for over thirty years when he committed this faux pas.

Perhaps you too have been surprised that, once you achieved a level of fluency in a language where you got around quite comfortably, you discovered that a word or phrase you had been using consistently for a long period of time was, in fact, wrong. And like Mr. Crawford at the dinner table, perhaps you felt so sure you were right that you found yourself trying to correct a native speaker! How does this happen?

As individuals learn a language, they are gradually acquiring new sounds, vocabulary words, grammatical structures, and ways to use the language socially. With regard to the ILR scale, any language ability between 0 and 5 can be considered an interlanguage.⁸ In other words, your interlanguage is how you speak a particular language between the time you start studying that language and the point at which you have achieved complete mastery. Most adult language learners, therefore, will be contending with an interlanguage for many years.

Although a person’s interlanguage is specific to that individual, and because it comprises that speaker’s own unique set of learned (and unlearned) material, all adult language learners do similar things with their interlanguage. First, out of necessity, they draw upon their native language to learn the new language. Depending on the two languages, sometimes this language transfer is helpful, as in true cognates between languages, and sometimes it interferes, as in using English word order in Japanese. Second, once a person learns a new word or grammatical structure, he will tend to overgeneralize. That is, he will use this new word or structure a lot—and sometimes in ways that are not appropriate. For example, one of the first words English speakers studying Korean learn is a word that means complicated. They learn this word early on because it sounds a lot like the English word “pork chop.” Because it is such an easy word to learn, suddenly everything that has any level of complexity at all becomes “pork chop” even when it’s not appropriate, such as to describe a traffic jam or a difficult test question. But unless the speaker knows how to say traffic congestion or tricky question, “pork chop” is all one has to work with.

This overgeneralization makes sense because if you have a vocabulary of only a few hundred words, chances are you will be forced to try to extend their usage. In fact, overgeneralization and language transfer can occur together, since you try to use a learned vocabulary word in all of the same ways you can use a word with the same meaning in your native language. Finally, because a person’s interlanguage is less than optimal, it is by definition a simplified version of the language.

Obviously, therefore, some of the things you say in your interlanguage will be correct and some will be incorrect. But the mistakes will be unique to you because—as mistakes—these are presumably not utterances you’ve ever heard from a native speaker. Ideally, as you keep learning a language, the number of correct utterances will grow and the number of incorrect utterances will decline, which means that theoretically your interlanguage should progress systematically toward mastery in an orderly way.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Interlanguages are not orderly. There is great variability among speakers—even those studying together in the same class. Furthermore, improvement in one’s interlanguage may stop or greatly slow down, which is referred to as fossilization.⁹ Once you reach a point where you are able to do most of the things you want in a language, you no longer have the need to keep improving. Because you are generally intelligible, native speakers may stop correcting minor errors, as long as they do not interfere with intelligibility. This may lead you to stop expecting their feedback, causing you to believe that you have achieved a certain level of mastery, when in fact you have not. If you reach this point, not only will your linguistic skill improve much more slowly, but you may also find yourself going backward, making mistakes in areas that you had previously mastered.

When and how fossilization happens depends on many factors, one of which will be your motivation to learn the language. At a certain point, you may feel that you speak the language well enough so that further instruction is not worth the additional effort. You may recognize that there is still much you don’t know, but what you do know is sufficient to your purpose and therefore you stop pushing yourself.

In addition, your interlanguage can become fossilized in more subtle ways. Because the people around you have become used to your speech habits, they may speak to you like you speak to them—even though they know it is not exactly right. Perhaps you are guilty of this as well. Have you ever found yourself speaking less than perfect English to a nonnative speaker? Don’t be surprised, then, when a native speaker in your target language does the same thing to you. This is yet another reason why one’s interlanguage can become prematurely fossilized with minor, and perhaps not so minor, errors.

I Know You Know What I Know

Although teachers generally avoid the habit of not correcting even minor errors, they do become familiar with your particular way of speaking. Your teacher knows your accent, knows the vocabulary you have mastered, knows the grammatical structures you use most frequently, and knows the topics you like to discuss. All of this means that your teacher is likely to understand you far better than native speakers who don’t know you.

Among diplomats who study foreign languages at FSI, this phenomenon is known as “FSI Speak.” You too may have found yourself being understood in the classroom with teachers and classmates, while outside the classroom your efforts fell flat. Why is there sometimes a sharp distinction between what one can do with the language in class and what one can do with the language in the real world? An answer can be found by considering what cognitive scientists call common ground.¹⁰

Keeping track of common ground is not specific to foreign language learning. All speakers take into consideration which personal and situational factors are shared, and which are not shared, by their conversational partners. In other words, when speaking to someone, you must take into account what you know they know and what you know they don’t know. Now consider how much more of a problem monitoring common ground will be when speaking with someone whose culture you don’t share, and whose language you are still learning. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that you will be more fluent with your teacher and classmates than with a cab driver. Unfortunately, adult language learners sometimes attribute this discrepancy in fluency to their own lack of language-learning ability, or they may blame their teachers for not preparing them appropriately for real-world interactions with native speakers.

One way to improve your chances of being understood outside the classroom, therefore, is to think about what the other person might share with you, and then to enlarge upon this common ground by filling in missing information. For example, you might start by using greetings and pleasantries to establish how you speak the language, which will help your conversational partner get used to your accent. In addition, you may want to ask your conversational partner questions that will also help establish more familiarity. Keep in mind that even though you do this automatically in your native language, it’s easy to lose track of common ground when you are trying to communicate in a relatively unfamiliar foreign language. Moreover, just being aware that you will likely speak the target language better with people you know than with strangers should reduce your frustration in these situations.

It is also possible that the way you speak the language could signify differences in common ground that are not really there. These kinds of mismatches can create confusion, hurt feelings, and misunderstandings. For example, when Richard studied French at FSI, he learned mainly the polite vous form of verbs—which is what he needed to use at work. At one point, however, a friend he’d made in Niger said that his continued use of the formal vous instead of the informal tu made him feel that Richard was maintaining a wall between them. Richard, however, did not know the tu form of verbs very well, so he was forced to use vous. Although using vous made Richard sound professional at work, he was unaware that he came across as cold and distant in everyday situations. His teachers at FSI would have understood, but how could anyone else be expected to? To correct the situation, Richard expanded the shared common ground with his friend by explaining how he had learned only professional French. He next worked harder on learning the tu form of verbs.

In summary, it may seem obvious, but it is crucial nevertheless, to recognize that unless you have complete mastery of a language, you have only partial competence. To keep your interlanguage from becoming fossilized, it is important to become neither complacent nor frustrated when you plateau at a particular level. Remember too that in your native language, you make linguistic choices that reflect the common ground you believe you share with others. A problem arises, however, when native speakers assume that you are choosing from among the full range of linguistic possibilities available in the target language, when in fact your ability to express yourself is limited by what you have and have not learned. Your conversational partner, being unaware of what you don’t know, may misinterpret your intentions.

To improve overall fluency, therefore, it is important to engage as many different speakers of your target language in as many different contexts as possible. It’s also important to push your conversational partners to correct you and give you suggestions. As long as you are being understood, they may avoid doing so out of politeness, so it is important to tell them that you want to be corrected. Moreover, don’t be defensive when a teacher or other well-meaning person points out to you that what you meant is not what you said—even if you’ve said it that way a thousand times before. As irritating as this is, being open to it will keep your interlanguage from becoming fossilized and will help you establish the common ground you need for successful communication.