"Away with this old-fashioned romantic conception of language education!"

IntercomprehensionGhent, 10 August 2017, Irina-Maria Roşca and Salvatore Mauro - Oh dear, you weren't born with a gift for languages? Well, you will still have to learn French and English in school, and, if you're unlucky, even German.

You must and will learn to read, understand, write and speak these languages. Especially the latter will cost you blood, sweat and tears.

And you know what? As good as you might become with your limited amount of talent, you'll never fully master the language at a level where you understand its soul, let alone the soul of the people and the culture behind the language. It's rather a waste of all that time and effort.

The reason for your fate is an old-fashioned romantic conception of language, of which you are starting to wonder, and justifiably so, how it can still exist in this quickly evolving and globalising information society. If you and I can understand each other's language well, why should we still be able to speak each other's language?

You're right: a waste of time. Fortunately, there are alternatives: listening language or intercomprehension for example. Yes, we still have to invent a new, cool, catchy term, but the good news is that you're completely in favour of it. And, according to our experiment in the streets of Ghent, you're not alone.

 

Spreken als een native?

Trying to speak like a native? Put that out of your head. In 2017, the goal is effective communication — even if it's multilingual communication, right?

Look, it's not because you can't write or can't speak a language that there is no effective communication is possible. Really not. Very much is possible, even if you don't speak a word of French or German. It's not because you have no so-called productive language skills, that you can't have any receptive skills. On the contrary.

Your brain is a supercomputer when it comes to deciphering messages which it suspects are valuable for you. Your brain – even if it has no linguistic talent is – is great at decoding phonological, semantic and grammatical information, at seeing agreements and bridging differences – even between languages. Again, it's not because you can't encode, that you cannot decode.

There is more good news: you can train your brain in seeing similarities between languages, in the cracking of phonological, semantic and grammatical codes between languages. In other words: you can train your receptive language skills. And it will cost no blood, no sweat and no tears. You don't need to learn to speak or write a single word in French or German. And definitely not as a native.


Ghent made unsafe

Today we made the centre of Ghent unsafe. With all its sights, the so-called tub of Ghent is a tourist attraction, and thus a place where you have a variety of cultures and – interesting for our experiment – language diversity just on the street.

Our experiment? We presented two language scenarios to passers-by and looked and listened to their reactions. Would they find our language scenarios realistic? Maybe even attractive?


Here is the first language scenario.

You are a student. Dutch-speaking. You speak English as well. You understand French and Spanish pretty well, but speaking is not really easy. Now you've almost graduated and you would you like to specialise. But the course of your dreams is only available in French. The professor whose lectures you so badly want to follow, thus speaks French (and some Spanish). He also understands Dutch and English, but speaking is not really easy.

You can see it, in this scenario, there is no lingua franca that you and the prof can both speak fluently. Conclusion at first glance? You can not follow the course.

And yet. Here is our offer: you follow the lessons in French, set up your questions during class in Dutch (and the professor replies in French), and on the exam you answer the French questions in Dutch. This way, you can follow the course of your dreams.

What do you think of this offer? Will you take it? Do you find this scenario attractive?


Here is the second language scenario.

As a student you can choose between two types of foreign language courses: on the one hand language courses in which you will learn to speak and write the language and, on the other hand, language courses where you learn to read and understand a language.

If you choose the first option, then you may expect that, at the end of your studies, you'll be able to speak and write one or two foreign languages fluently. If you choose the latter, then you'll be able to understand eight or nine languages well (reading and listening).

What's your choice?


All kinds of unexpected possibilities

Most people we met in the Centre of Ghent and gave these scenarios to, had to think hard about their choice. They had clearly never thought about it that way.

In short, they found the concept of knowing 8 or 9 languages 'receptively' strange, but after some thinking, most people saw the unexpected potential for self-development.


Dessert

For the passers-by who were open to it, we still had dessert. We started talking to them in languages they did not know – Romanian and Italian for example, our native languages. Then we listened to their response in their own language.

Our verdict? A successful experiment. We felt firsthand during these talks how "the natural mechanisms of resuming receptiveness" itself activated. All our interlocutors were at least able to guess what we were talking about in Romanian.

The people gave similarities to related Romance languages (related words), but there was clearly another factor that played an important role: the context.

It occurred to us how much information is in the context. Effective communication not only with spoken language, but also with gestures, even with all the knowledge that we already have in our minds, and with our understanding of the circumstances in which we find ourselves at the time of the conversation.


Huge potential

Effective communication is a combination of various skills, but fluency in the language of the interlocutor seems effective communication to many – so multilingual communication as well – hardly a condition. Why should we shed so much blood, sweat and tears for it? Shouldn't we be better aware of the enormous potential that our receptive skills have to offer? Why should we always want to be so productive?

And you, dear reader? What choices would you make? Send your response to redactie@detaalsector.be or respond to the social media with #luistertaal or #intercomprehensie or any other cool hashtag term


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Author: Irina-Maria Roşca en Salvatore Mauro

Machine translation: SDL Machine Translation (previously SDL BeGlobal)

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Source language: Nederlands (nl)


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