Steve: Hi Jill.
Jill: Hello Steve. How are you?
Steve: Good, thank you.
Jill: Good.
Steve: Here we are again talking about English and language and language learning. One subject that came up and it was brought up in an email we received from one of our learners is the concept of interlanguage. Now this particular learner is taking a course in language teaching at a university and she is required to find some arguments on this whole issues of this term interlanguage. Now, one of my and I think our philosophies here at the Linguist is that everything that we do and any ideas that we talk about should relate to things that will help the learner.
One of my pet peeves, now here's an expression, pet peeves, right, one of the axes that I regular grind, ok? Grinding an axe, one of my pet peeves is that so much of the discussion in linguistics and language teaching is about subjects that are very interesting to the teacher maybe but are quite irrelevant. There's another term irrelevant, of no use and have relatively little meaning for the student. Now, interlanguage in my opinion is one of these terms and interlanguage refers to the language, theoretically that someone speaks before they achieve fluency in the language. So theoretically you start off not being able to speak you know, Swahili and then during the period that you're trying to learn Swahili you are not quite speaking Swahili you are speaking an interlanguage. Then at some magic point you mast Swahili so this is my understanding of what interlanguage is.
The other term that was raised by this learner was the term fossilized when they talk about people who never say, their usage of words and phrases never improves past a certain point or their pronunciation never improves past a certain point so they reach a certain level and they freeze. In other words, they are fossilized. From the word fossil which is you know, skeletons that we find, or not necessarily skeletons but imprints of, Jill: Remains, dinosaur remains. Steve: remains of ancient you know life on this planet. So the idea is that somehow your language fossilizes, you become like a fossil. Well. I think both of these concepts are not at all useful to the learner. So, I'd like to talk a bit about the process of language learning. Now you speak obviously English which is your native language and you have studied both French and Spanish.
Jill: That's right. Steve: What would you, how would you say, what are level, what is your level in French, what is your level in Spanish?
Jill: My level in French is, I would say probably at this point about intermediate. An intermediate level. I can read a lot of French and understand it. I can read it and understand it much better than I can speak it now or write it because it's been so long since I've done those activities. Spanish, you know I can read some short emails and understand what they are saying but I really, short of a few simple sentences I really can't speak it anymore. So I would say I'm a beginner for sure in Spanish. Steve: Now, with your French, now I've heard you say some things in French and you have quite a large vocabulary in French and of course you rarely have an opportunity to use it but probably you have a sufficient base that if you were all of a sudden put into a situation where you had to use it within a few days you would be able to operate. Jill: Yeah, yeah for sure and when I was in France a few years ago that was the case. I kind of wanted to practice a little bit so I you know, of course did feel sort of self conscious and shy which I think a lot of people feel when it's not their native language. So, I did try speaking but I did have many experiences when I would speak in French and they would just speak in English back to me so it didn't work that well. I didn't get much practice and since then I really haven't spoken any French. Steve: You know that's an interesting point too. People can be easily discouraged. You know, you're trying your best to speak French and the other person decides that their going to speak English to you instead. Jill: Well and quite frankly, in France my French was better than a lot of their English so it was more difficult for me to try to understand their broken English than I'm sure it would have been if they had just been willing to accept my imperfect pronunciation and whatever. Steve: Right. So, at any rate, there we are. You're in France; you're speaking with some French people. You're trying to speak French; they're coming back to you in English. Both of you are less than totally fluent, less than totally fluent in each other's language. Now, that is kind of what the term interlanguage is supposed to refer to, that you are not quite yet at this level of fluency.
The problem I have with that is, with the concept is that I believe a person can be fluent and not perfect. I don't believe there is a magic point where you all of a sudden master the language. And, I like to feel, even when I'm at a beginner level in Russian which I'm studying now, I'm speaking Russian. I'm not speaking interlanguage, I'm speaking Russian. I'm listening to Russian. I'm reading, in fact most of my activities are input activities. I'm not listening to interlanguage, I'm not reading, Jill: You're listening to the real language. Steve: I'm listening to Russian. Jill: And even though you're language, your vocabulary may be limited, what you are, the words you are speaking are still Russian. It's not some other language. Steve: No.
Jill: It might not be perfect Russian. And you know, Mark, Mark and I were actually talking about that this morning for a minute and he said, it's just like children when they are learning to speak. Children can't speak their native language perfectly at first. They speak you know, two word sentences, one word, two words, three words and it gets better. Their vocabulary increases and we don't call that interlanguage. Steve: No.
Jill: They are learning.
Steve: Now, the linguists here would argue that they call it interlanguage because your native language is influencing what you are saying but to some extent yes, but to a far greater degree, like this morning I was trying to speak Russian with our Russian programmer Mike here. And, I was trying to remember Russian phrases. I wasn't trying to remember English phrases or trying to translate English phrases, I was looking for Russian phrases that I have been listening to and I was hitting some of them right and some of them wrong. I was getting, you know, I was taking a stab at it, you know, just hoping that I got the endings right because as you know when I study I don't study the grammar but I do listen over and over to texts, to audio content and so I have a sense of roughly what those phrases should sound like, quite a lot of them and I just you know, say them trying to get some, Jill: Try to use them. Steve: and I get some right and I get some wrong but I don't consider that to be interlanguage. And, I know people who are absolutely fluent in English you know. For example I have a very good friend, Swedish supplier who speaks, I mean flawless English and yet there are certain expressions that he will not quite say the right way. Now, you can argue that that is because of the influence of Swedish on him but that's his English. It's English. So, in other words, yeah you can describe, you can have a special word for people who always tie their right foot, tie their shoelaces on their right foot first and have another term for people who tie their shoelaces on their left foot first and one's called right laces and the other one's called left laces. You know, but like, so what?
Jill: It seems that we, that many people have the need to sort of categorize, Steve: Yeah. Jill: people and why do we necessarily have to fit into a category?
Steve: Well that's right and so I think the term interlanguage doesn't do much and the same with the term fossilized. I mean I remember, you know, when I was 16, 17, 17 I guess, I was hitch hiking home from university which I used to do daily. People don't do that anymore but in those days that was the standard and there was this fellow, an Italian guy, a recent immigrant, a construction worker and I started talking to him and we became friends and we hitch hiked home together that day and then I said I'll help you with your English. And, I mean he could not say small and I was trying to get him to say small and he would say jmall, he was from southern Italy. So I would say, ssssss, go like this, go ssssssssss, and he would go sssssss, and then I'd say go small and he'd go sjmall. I just couldn't get him to you know, to say it properly. Now, is that interlanguage? I mean he's no where, he hasn't even started. Yeah, there are certain things that take a while to learn. There is that whole process. And I mean, the way I see it is you know, here you are with your French. Number 1 you have to believe that you can go from being an intermediate French speaker, probably intermediate reader, listener and maybe lower intermediate speaker today because you haven't used it. You have to believe that you can get to be fluent and that making mistakes here and there beyond an English word or phrase that slips in there is not a problem. And you have to believe that you can do it. And that's very important that that process of change and even the so called fossilization to the extent that people are fossilized, I think it's because we force them to speak too early and we put too much pressure on them. And, if you were going to go off to France I would recommend that you do a lot of listening and challenge yourself with some easy stuff but also some more difficult stuff, a lot of reading. You'll have all these words bouncing around in your head and then when you speak to people even if they come back at you in English you go back at them in French. Jill: Yes. I think that's a big thing, is just confidence. You have to have confidence in yourself even if you're not perfect and I think that was my problem and probably a lot of people's problem is when I was there I was already sort of unsure of myself and then to have people come back in English just made me think, ok, well, clearly they can't even understand me or something so, so then I just felt stupid and you know, then I really didn't want to speak French anymore. Steve: Right. So therefore, telling a person you are speaking interlanguage or even for the teachers to tell each other that they're speaking, these students are speaking interlanguage, I don't think it's very helpful and to talk about fossilization is not very helpful. I think if a person wants to improve, wants to change, we're always talking about change, change their pronunciation, change their use of words or phrases, they can and it's a gradual, it's a continuum from when you start and no matter how good you are you can continue to improve. There's no magic point where you start speaking interlanguage then some point when you become fossilized unless you want to. And, yeah, I know people like that. They've basically stopped improving. They don't think they can improve, they probably don't invest the time in listening and reading. Jill: That's right. Steve: And they don't believe in themselves, they can't visualize themselves. Jill: But it doesn't mean that they couldn't improve, it's that they are choosing not to improve. Steve: Well that's kind of my feeling. So, I don't know if this discussion is not very academic. I don't know if it's helpful to our learner but we, at the Linguist, have very little patience for most of these linguistics terms. We think that learning a language is a very simple idea. It depends not on linguists, not on teachers, it depends on the students themselves and as I said in one of my podcasts they've got to do things that they can control. You can't always talk to people. Like you were in France, you wanted to talk to people; they didn't want to talk to you. They wanted to practice their English, they didn't want to talk to you in French. Or you could be in a situation where you are with a bunch of French people and they are all speaking very quickly ad they don't want to take the time to talk to you. You're a nuisance. You know, every so often they smile at you and say, would you like another beer, ok, now leave us alone because we want to talk in our language.
Jill: Right.
Steve: And we've all been in those situations where we are the fifth wheel on the carriage as we say and we can't control that. We can't control that. Some people are going to be very patient and speak to us in the language that we plan to learn but we're also very often going to be in situations where we're basically a nuisance. Jill: That's right. Steve: And you can't control that. But what you can control is your listening activities, your reading activities, your vocabulary accumulation activities, all of these things you can control so spend time on things that you can control and believe yourself, believe in yourself and do the things that you can control and don't worry about what people call you into the language, fossilized or people answer you in English when you're speaking French. Those things you can't control. Don't even let them worry or bother you. Jill: And that's the thing I think, labeling people and saying ok, you're at this stage or you're at that, you know, you're fossilized or how ever you'd say it or you're at the interlanguage stage. I don't know that that's actually very encouraging. Steve: No.
Jill: I, I think that it's more encouraging just to say ok, you know, you started here, now you're here and you can still get to here. Steve: You can continue to improve.
Jill: Exactly and so to say you know well you're fossilized, your stuck there, that's kind of well, gee, thanks, then why am I going to bother anymore? Steve: Well, of course part of the problem then comes back to this whole motivation issue. If the person if fossilized something has demotivated them.
Jill: That's right. Steve: They have either been persuaded that they can't speak or this is good enough and they needn't speak any better or maybe they had some experiences like you had where every time they tried to speak the language that the other people would speak back to them in English or whatever. So there's obviously, ok, call it fossilized, call it they've stopped in improving but the issue there is motivation. There's nothing sort of intrinsic to the process of language learning that says that for a while you will speak interlanguage or for a while you will be fossilized. No.
Everyone can, with the proper motivation and doing some very simple exercises like we do at the Linguist can continue to improve.
Jill: Right.
Steve: I think we've beaten that subject to death. Jill: I think so.
Steve: Alright. Let us stop here. Thank you.
Jill: Thank you.
End.
