3.2.3. There are so many ways to talk

I mentioned the lecturer who could speak fluent English when talking about his field of expertise, but whose speech became halting when he began talking about a party he had recently been to. This illustrated the importance of learning to talk about all of the normal topics of everyday life. But there is more involved than learning the appropriate vocabulary and idioms for a particular area of subject matter. People would normally lecture in a form of language that is different from the form in which they would chat about the events of Saturday night's party. Within a single language, there are different forms of language, known as language varieties. The fact that you are good at one variety does not mean you are good at them all.

It is often noted that written language is different from spoken language. Some of these differences are related to the fact that a reader has as much time as s/he may desire to process what is on the page, whereas a listener must process speech as rapidly as it is spoken, and attempt to keep up with the speaker. One result of this is that written language may use more complicated sentences. Also, a writer can be much more careful than a speaker, since s/he can slowly edit and revise what she writes. Spoken language, on the other hand, will contain many false starts and incomplete sentences and errors of various types.

But it may be an oversimplification to contrast spoken and written language in this way. Biber (1986)shows that a more basic difference has to do with whether the language used is highly interactive, which is more common with conversational speech, or more carefully edited, which is more common with writing. But some spoken language is relatively careful, as in the case of a prepared speech, and some written language is somewhat interactive in style, as in the case of a note from a child to a classmate. Another factor that Biber shows to distinguish different varieties of the language has to do with whether the content is abstract or concrete. Abstract language occurs, for example, when someone is proposing reasons for making a particular decision, or giving explanations of why something is the way it is. Concrete language deals with specific things, situations and events in the world. Still another of Biber's factors in determining the general variety of language that is used has to do with whether the speaker is discussing some particular displaced situation, as in the case of a story about something that happened at another time and place, or is talking either about the immediate here and now, or about the world in general.

Characteristics of language of the type discussed by Biber will show up to different degrees in the different situations in which language is used. For example, a news broadcast will be quite edited, and generally concrete, dealing with specific situations, but it may contain interviews which are more interactive, and excerpts of speeches, which are more abstract. More careful, edited varieties of language, such as lectures, may seem more difficult than simple conversation, in that they involve more complicated sentences, and a larger number of distinct vocabulary items. However, less careful, unedited varieties of language may seem more difficult than careful varieties, in that they involve rapid, slurred speech, and leave the listener or reader to supply a lot of implied information. In the final analysis, different varieties of language bring their own varieties of difficulties with them, and so the key is to learn them all, by exposing yourself to comprehensible input in them all, and getting practice in the extemporaneous, creative use of the ones that are relevant to you. In some cases, as with news broadcasts, you only need to worry about comprehension ability.

You may need to look around you once again, and start making a list of the kinds of language events that occur in the community, and the contexts in which language is used. There may be somewhat different varieties of the language used for conversation between strangers, conversation between friends, conversation in a family, school room teaching, university lectures, sermons, stories by the campfire, stories for small children, telephone conversations, personal letters, business letters, newspapers, etc. You probably shouldn't worry too much about what goes into defining every different variety of language. It will have to do with a variety of features of the language including the choice of words, the used of fixed phrases and sentences, the complexity of sentences and the types of sentences and grammatical constructions. If you are a linguist, you may analyze a lot of these details, but once again, it is impossible to analyze as much as you hope to acquire, so you again must put some faith in the input hypothesis: with lots of exposure to comprehensible speech and writing in all of these different modes and situations, you will develop a feel for what variety of language goes with which situation.

Some of these varieties of language will be less important than others. You should concern yourself with the ones that are part of the shared experience of everyone in the society, and those that relate to your special areas of expertise and work. You will want to expose yourself to respectably large samples of language as used in the different situations. To the extent possible, you should tape record samples of the different varieties of spoken language.

In some cases, as with news broadcasts, that is easy. So why don't I use news broadcasts to illustrate the general strategy for learning a special variety of language. (Unfortunately, in the case of most of the world's languages, there are no news broadcasts.) If there are, and if you have not yet learned to understand them, they may impress you as representing a difficult variety of language. Record a few news broadcasts on tape and go over them with your LRP, in the normal manner. That is, discuss the recordings bit by bit, adding new words and idioms to your vocabulary tape as necessary in the manner suggested earlier, and discussing areas of culture and experience that are new to you. After going over these tapes thoroughly with your LRP, continue to listen to them privately. Once you have processed a few fifteen minute news broadcasts, you will probably find that you can now follow brand new news broadcasts surprisingly well, and can often successfully guess at the meaning of new words. So then, this variety of language turns out to be less difficult than you expected. You may find the same to be true of any variety of language you tackle.

Some varieties of language will be less easy to tape-record than news broadcasts, but it will still be worth the effort. For example, you may want to get the preacher's permission before tape-recording a sermon, and even more so the chief's permission before tape-recording his speech. Your comprehension ability has now reached the point where you can work easily with relatively poor quality recordings. It's not that you no longer care about the quality of the recordings, but you can get by with relatively poor quality ones when that is the best you can do. The hardest language to tape record is possibly the most important variety of language for you to learn. It is what Burling (1982)calls rapid colloquial styles. He testifies eloquently to the difficulty language learners can have with ordinary “street speech”.

It was relatively easy for me to gain access to formal varieties of Swedish. I learned to read, to understand the news on the radio, and even to understand the relatively formal language of a classroom lecture, but I was often baffled by the language spoken over coffee cups (p. 95).

Burling goes on to suggest that rapid colloquial speech is probably not, in principle, more difficult than other varieties of the language. But the learner needs to tackle this particular variety. The methods I have proposed will work here too. Go over tape recordings with your LRP until you can understand them easily. Collect several hours of such speech, going over it with your LRP as each sample is recorded. Once you have thoroughly gone over a sample, and are familiar with it, listen repeatedly to the tape. In addition, with this kind of language, as with any other, you need to continue experiencing it in brand new, real-life situations. In some cases the “informal” variety of the language may be essentially a different language from the “formal” variety. This would be the case with German in Switzerland, for example. With most of the world's languages, the difference between varieties will not be this great.

Granted, it is not easy to tape-record the most informal colloquial speech as used in relaxed chit-chat. And it may not be necessary. But if you find that you have the problem that Burling describes above, it may be worth the effort. You might ask your friends to talk with each other in your home about topics like “my most embarrassing moment,” or “a time when I was in danger of being killed”. With the right topics people will quickly become absorbed in what they are talking about, and forget all about the lapel microphones clipped to their collars. It is also good if you can get two strong minded individuals to interact on a topic with regard to which they hold opposing views. To work on your speaking ability, you can yourself participate in such a lively discussion, and later, with the help of your LRP, go over your own performance as captured on tape, and find ways that you might have been more colloquial. You can do the same with other varieties of language that you use, such as lectures, sermons, telephone conversations, personal letters, stories by the campfire, or whatever.

In deciding which varieties of language to specifically work on, you can use your needs list, or your list of language events that occur in the culture, or simply reflect on your life. Is there some particular variety of language that is difficult, and for which you keenly feel your lack? Perhaps it is stories by the campfire. I'll use this as an example, and you can make appropriate adjustments for your own situation. For example, with you the need might be to understand sermons, or soap operas. But let's assume that you are concerned with stories told by the campfire. You do fine with rapid colloquial conversational interaction, but you really feel left out when the fireside stories begin. Then tackle fireside stories. They may be quite lengthy at times, so you might want to look for several which are reasonably short. Tape record them, in as natural a setting as possible. If you can't record them at the fireside, try at least to have a small audience of native speakers, or at least a single native speaker, for the story teller to talk to as you make the recording. Later go over the tapes with your LRP. Each time you fail to understand something, find out why. It may be that you are lacking many of the cultural schemas which the story teller takes for granted. When you find this to be the case, stop and do a grand tour question, or a mini-tour question to help fill in this gap in your knowledge of the culture. Explore any areas of the culture which you need to understand in order to understand the stories. Work with new vocabulary or sentence patterns in the usual manner. Once you can understand most of what is on the tapes, listen to them privately many times.

As you work through tapes with your LRP, and become thoroughly familiar with what is on them, you can add any extended speech samples you record, along with the stories themselves, to your ever growing comprehensible corpus. By the end of Stage III you may have fifty hours of tape recorded speech in this corpus. You can pull any tape off the rack, and play any part of it, and listen with understanding. In Thomson (1992 )I suggested that your comprehensible corpus might contain an hour of comprehensible material covering the range of what you learned to comprehend during Stage I. During Stage II you might add another four hours of the types of predictable speech which were typical of Stage II: familiar stories, accounts of recent events known to both you and your LRP, Series Method materials, etc. During Stage III, you might add another forty-five hours of material. That sounds like a lot, but fifteen minutes of material three times a week for ten months equals forty-five hours. Fifteen minutes of material from ethnographic interviewing or other sources such as campfire stories should keep you plenty busy with your LRP for an hour or two. If the language has a writing system, and scribes are relatively inexpensive to hire, you would do well to have a lot of this material transcribed, since the written variety can provide powerful reinforcement of the spoken input. If you are a linguist or anthropologist, or folklorist, then you will clearly want to have a lot of the material transcribed, so that you can process it in various ways and archive it. As a linguist with an interest in discourse structure, you will want to attempt to collect five or ten hours of speech from people who have a reputation as outstanding speakers, speaking to real audiences of at least one other native speaker, saying things that are important to them, and which they are wanting to say to the particular audience (see Austin Hale's suggestions described in Thomson, 1992).

Friends of mine have gotten much of their comprehensible corpus by having people read written materials aloud onto tape. This way they could first practice reading, and discuss sections which they found incomprehensible, and add to their vocabulary tape, etc., as appropriate, while working on their reading skills. Then the LRP would read the material into a tape recorder. Much of the material was geared toward children's education, making this a good way for the learners to acquire a lot of the widely shared knowledge of the community.

I place a lot of emphasis on working with tapes. Obviously, most language learners in times past, if they succeeded, did so without the help of tapes. And despite my constant reference to them, you should not forget that they are a supplement to your real-life exposure to the language--conversational interaction and involvement in communication events of various types. Most of your “massive comprehensible input” will ultimately come from such real-life experiences. The value of your language sessions and your use of tapes is that they accelerate the rate at which this real-life input becomes comprehensible. But then you need to keep getting the real-life input. That is why, if you are a full-time language learner, you are devoting two hours or more per day to social visiting and other involvement in communication events. In many ways your language sessions and tapes feed into this real life language exposure. For example, if part of your real-life exposure involves listening to sermons, you use your language sessions as a means of improving your ability to understand sermons. And while you are visiting someone socially, or being visited, if you have been doing ethnographic interviewing related to “ways to catch a rabbit”, or “all that goes on in a naming ceremony”, then you attempt to engage in conversation about “ways to catch a rabbit,” or “all that goes on in a naming ceremony”. But your language sessions are not limited to things which will immediately feed into your outside communication experiences. Remember the human navel? You have a huge amount of language to become familiar with in order to be able to cope with the endless variety of unpredictable real-life communication needs that will arise. Your language sessions and tapes, in addition to feeding into specific communication needs which you face in the outside world, also contribute to your general communication ability which you constantly need in the outside world. In any case, in the midst of all of my emphasis on language sessions and tapes, don't lose sight of the fact that the main thing you are concerned about is the outside world, chock full of people communicating in this language in all its varieties.