5.2.3. Learning to communicate in general

In addition to working on the specific areas where you know you have special communicative needs, you must also be concerned with your general communicative ability. When I have helped language learners do needs analyses in the manner described above, I have commonly found that people express a certain need which they variously verbalize: ability to chit chat; ability to make small talk; ability to participate in general conversations; ability to socialize with neighbors. This doesn't exactly qualify as a “specific” need. How do you learn to talk with people in general on any of the topics that people generally talk about? That would appear to mean being able to talk about “all of life”. How do you get on with learning to talk about “all of life”?

To some extent, you develop this ability through thousands of hours of being with people who are talking about whatever things people talk about, assuming you can understand them if you try hard enough. For a long time, once you can understand people at all, you can only understand when they make a special effort to include you in the conversation. Remember, it costs other people something for you to learn their language. As time goes on, less and less effort will be required for people to include you in conversation. Eventually you will be able to readily follow many conversations which you merely happen to overhear. Extensive exposure to people's ordinary conversations is essential if you are to become an ordinary conversationalist. To the extent that you can tape record people's speech for repeated listening you can accelerate your learning significantly since you can spend many hours listening to the tapes when you are not able to be listening to people, and some tapes will become increasingly intelligible to you on each hearing.

There are also more specific strategies for improving your ability to deal with “all of life”. Much of people's ease in communication derives from the fact that they share a huge bank of common knowledge and experience which is specific to members of that community. You need to accelerate your acquisition of that knowledge bank. This means going beyond your specific (and narrow) communicative needs as discussed above and doing a survey of general areas of knowledge in the community. What geographical knowledge do people have? What knowledge do they share regarding the organization of people into groups and the relationships between people? What religious beliefs are widely shared? What are the major events in a day, week, year, and lifetime? What occupational or recreational skills are generally known to members of the community? There will also be areas of specialized knowledge. For instance, motor-rickshaw drivers have a body of shared knowledge that may not be important to me unless I wish to hang around with rickshaw drivers. By contrast, everybody may share a more restricted body of knowledge regarding the use of rickshaws.