Coffee Bake and Runtime

In my previous post, I mentioned the work I am doing on misunderstandings in the English used by people from different backgrounds.

I am currently working on the speech of someone from Laos being interviewed by someone from Brunei. After the interview, the Bruneian listened to the recording and told me what she was unable to understand. From this we can work out what features of pronunciation the speaker from Laos might focus on.

Crucially, there are four things that caused a problem:

• use of [r] in place of [l] in initial position in a word such as like
• omission of [r] in a consonant cluster such as at the start of present
• omission of final fricatives and affricates, so there is no [s] at the end of nice
• use of [n] instead of [l] in the coda of a syllable, so old sounds like own

The first three of these combine when the Laotian said:

the food they serve in coffee break or the lunch time

but the listener heard 'coffee bake or runtime'. In fact, the only way we could work out what he had actually said was by asking him to come back and tell us.

flutes

At the moment, I am doing some work on misunderstandings in conversational speech, specifically to try and work out what features of pronunciation result in loss of intelligbility and which ones do not matter so much. If we can determine this, we can help teachers to know what they should focus on. Some sounds are more important than others, and it is important for learners to know which are the most important.

One would think that context can help resolve most issues, and indeed it usually can. But sometimes even in context one gets confused. And occasionally this confusion can be quite surprising.

When I was at Guangxi University in Nanning, I recorded lots of students talking to me. One of the questions I asked is, "What do your parents do?" One of the students told me that her parents sell flutes; and it took me quite a while to work out that they actually sell fruit, not flutes. Initially, I visualised them selling bamboo musical instruments to tourists or something like that.

Afterwards, I felt really stupid, as I know full well that [l] and [r] tend to get confused in word-initial consonant clusters in the English spoken in south China; but this is the kind of misunderstanding that is common for listeners. And it is valuable for speakers to realise that distinguishing [fl] from [fr] at the start of a word is important.

ELF-based Academic Writing

I have one final observation about the ELF conference in Hong Kong that I discussed in my previous two postings.

Jennifer Jenkins told me that she never corrects the written English of her PhD students. In fact, she claimed that forcing them to write "proper" academic English, with a clear topic sentence for each paragraph and so on, makes it harder for her to understand what they are trying to say.

In contrast, I insist that my students use standard English grammar in their writing, and I always correct any deviations from standard usage.

Now, I admit that I am being inconsistent: I advocate the acceptance of local variation in English, but at the same time I do not tolerate it in the writing of my students. In fact, it can get even worse: I insist that my students adopt non-judgmental terminology when discussing language use, so they must talk about "features" rather than "errors" or "mistakes" in the patterns of language they are describing; but at the same time I highlight such errors and mistakes in their writing and insist that they are avoided. So I acknowledge that I am being hypocritical, and this has troubled me for some time.

My defense is this: I allow variation in pronunciation, but I insist on standard grammar in writing. You must write according to the worldwide norms of English, but you can pronounce it how you like so long as the way you pronounce it is easily intelligible. In other words, I accept localised accents but not dialects (at least, for writing). However, as I said, I realise that this is not truly consistent with my approach towards World Englishes.

One further observation: some people advocate accepting localised grammatical usage in order to avoid imposing native-speaker norms on the rest of the world. But I would argue that academic writing is nobody's native language. Everyone has to learn to adopt the rather strange ways we write about research, and native speakers do not really have an advantage here. It is part of the training for academic writing for everyone, not just for those whose English is learned as a second or foreign language.

So is Jennifer Jenkins right in allowing her students to write in their own style? Only time will tell, but my guess is that one day her approach will be widely accepted. However, I still believe that, in the present world, I am benefitting my students best by guiding them towards a proper academic style of writing.

Paying Attention in Class

In my previous post, I mentioned the recent ELF conference in Hong Kong. During the conference, I attended an interesting panel session with Jennifer Jenkins, Barbara Seidlhofer and Anna Mauranen as panellists, dealing with questions submitted by the participants.

After reading out the first question, the panellist said, "I think the best person to answer that question is David Deterding, who is sitting at the back." This was a bit unfortunate, as I had not actually been paying attention very closely, so I was not too sure what the question was. In actual fact, I'll admit that I had been reading my email on a laptop computer when the question was being read out.

Of course, this was rather embarrassing, and it serves me right for not paying attention. But then I thought about it some more, and in reality I don't believe that we should expect people to pay close attention all the time, either in class or when they are attending lectures. Multi-tasking is the norm nowadays, and we should expect and even encourage our students to do this.

In my previous post, I discussed how the concept of getting rid of native-speaker norms for language teaching is hard for teachers to deal with. Now I am proposing something even more radical: don't expect your students to sit there listening to you all the time in class. Let them read something else, or do whatever they want.

And I would like to emphasise that I myself do not expect my students to sit there like complete zombies listening to me all the time in class. I encourage them to bring a book and read it if they want, to look at their SMS messages or answer their email if they choose so long as they don't disturb others, or even go to sleep so long as they don't snore. If I teach at a pace that is suitable for the weaker students, then the brightest ones will find some of the material rather easy, and then they should be doing something else. We all need to use our time effectively, and this includes the time we spend in class.

It seems to me that classroom teaching tends to be stuck somewhere in the middle ages. We could be achieving so much, enabling effective learning to take place with varied, exciting materials, but instead we insist on our students sitting in rows, passively and obediently. When I was in school, I was bored stiff in class every single day, and I find it tragic that education has not improved very much since then. But maybe the real aim of school-based education is not actually to encourage learning but rather to ensure that young people are trained to be passive and obedient.

During the conference, I attended an interesting talk by Henry Widdowson, and he asked how much of our teaching is geared to the needs of the learner and how much is actually centred on the demands of the teacher. Or at least I think that's what he said. Actually, I admit I was quite tired at the time, so I may have dozed off once in a while. I just hope I didn't snore.

ELF-based teaching

I am currently in Hong Kong, at a conference on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) organised by the Hong Kong Institute of Education. It's lots of fun.

Among academics such as me, ELF seems to be all the rage at the moment, and everyone at the conference was in complete agreement that it makes sense, that teaching should be based on ELF, that native speaker norms for English are not a good idea, and so on.

With so much agreement among us, it is sometimes hard to remember that these ideas are not widely accepted in society as a whole, and if you try and tell learners of English that they do not need to aspire to native speaker norms, they tend to be horrified. I guess that most teachers out there would be really shocked to know that over 200 academics spent three days discussing ideas like this that most educators don't want. It would confirm to them that university academics are completely divorced from the real world.

So what is the point of promoting ways of teaching that teachers do not want? I believe we should always be considering fresh ways of thinking, and even if some of these new ideas might not become accepted for many more years, that should not stop us considering them. Furthemore, if we, as academics, just continue to talk about ideas that are already accepted, then what is the point of that?

But at the same time we need to acknowledge that the ideas we are promoting are not widely accepted. I believe that ELF-based teaching is absolutely right, and that we have to move away from native-speaker norms, but we must realise that we have a huge amount of work to do to convince others about it.

Learning Chinese in Two Days

There is an interesting article in the on-line Guardian of 18 May 2011 (here) in which the author, Tom Meltzer, took a course designed to teach him to speak Mandarin Chinese in just two days. (For more about the course, see here.)

Of course, this is quite a bizarre thing to try and do, especially for a language such as Chinese which many people in the West find rather difficult. However, what is interesting is the methodology. For example, the course does not try and teach vocabulary, as that is regarded as a waste of time, and it also does not try and deal with grammar, which is similarly not considered useful. Instead, it trains the learner in the use of a few chunks of language which can be re-used to express a wide range of things.

I would have to agree that learning lots of vocabulary is not helpful. A few years ago, I took a course in Malay run by the Centre for British Teachers (CfBT) here in Brunei, and we were asked to memorise long lists of vocabulary for body parts, vegetables, and modes of transport. This was not helpful. A beginning learner simply does not need to know the Malay for knee or cabbage.

What about grammar? I agree that detailed analysis is not helpful for the learner. But would a little bit of grammatical knowledge help? Some of the comments of this Guardian writer suggest that it would. For example, he claims that, at the end of his two-day course:

I can, however, convert a verb into the past and future tenses

Really? That's pretty impressive! I've been learning Chinese for 35 years now, and I have never found out how to convert a verb into the past and future tenses.

Chinese, of course, does not have tenses, and I would have thought it might have been a good idea if this chap had been told that. (It does have aspect particles, such as the perfective 过 guo and the progressive 着 zhe, but that is something different.)

Nevertheless, despite his lack of awareness about the language he was supposedly learning, it is quite impressive that, at the end of two days, he was confident enough to go and order a meal in Chinese and even try to chat to the waitress, and the focus on practical language skills offered by this course is splendid.

Smuggling

See if you can guess what items are most often smuggled into Brunei. Alcohol is an obvious guess, given that its sale is forbidden in Brunei, and that is indeed true. You might also guess tobacco, especially as Brunei has recently implemented a heavy tax on the sale of cigarettes while Malaysia has not, so they are much cheaper over the border. And once again, you would be right. But what else?

Here is an extract from an article on page 1 of the Media Permata of 16 May, 2011, discussing the seizure of contraband goods:This might be translated as:

After investigation, the authorities found 412 cartons of cigarettes and two kilos of chicken wings which were hidden inside the vehicle.

Yes, chicken wings is the third major type of goods smuggled into Brunei. I have no idea why. It must be something to do with the cost of halal chickens or something.

crews

Have a look at this extract from an article on page 13 of the Borneo Bulletin of 13 May 2011. Note how crews is used as a plural noun, where I would use the singular crew.This is a bit like the use of fruits as a plural noun, something I have mentioned before (here). It is also similar to the use of staffs as a plural noun to refer to a number of members of staff. I suspect that these usages will become the norm in World Englishes in the future.

Note also in the extract above the repetition of cruise ship in the first paragraph. I don't think I can have this kind of lexical repetition in my English, and I would have to use a pronoun. But lexical repetition is allowed in Malay, so it is not surprising that it also occurs in the English found in Brunei.

Language Mixing and Pronouns

I am currently watching a Malay film called Stilleto. One notable feature is the degree of mixing and switching between Malay and English. In fact, the higher the status of the speaker, the more that person tends to use English. It seems as if the ability to mix languages or switch into English regularly is regarded as an indicator of education.

Here is an excerpt, where a suave playboy is talking to the heroine on their first date. The Malay words are in italics, while the English words are in regular font:

I nak bawak you pergi yang mak bapak pun tak tau. It's happy hour time.

"I want to take you where your parents don't know. It's happy hour time."

Apart from the switch to English for the final sentence, note the use of the English pronouns I and you. One reason for this use of English pronouns is that it avoids decisions about which Malay pronouns to use, for example saya (formal) or aku (informal) for the first person pronoun.

Note also the use of 'k' at the end of bawak ('take') and bapak ('dad'). This is not standard Malay and it seems to indicate a glottal stop at the end of the word rather than a full [k].

Census

The government of Brunei is currently implementing a population census. The letter accompanying the census form is printed on one side in Malay and the other in English, and this offers some interesting insights into differences in expression between the two languages. For example, take the salutation at the top. Here is the Malay version:Let us compare this with the English:Note how much more elaborate the Malay is. Instead of 'Dear Sir/Madam', the Malay lists all the possible ranks of the recipients (Pengiran, Pehin, Dato, Datin, Tuan, Puan), and this is preceded with the appropriate form of address for each one.

Now let us look at the final paragraph. This is the Malay version:And here is the English:Once again, we find that while the English has 'Your', the Malay uses the rank of each of the potential recipients (Pengiran, Pehin, Dato, Dato, Tuan, Puan). It is really important in Malay society to show proper respect to high-ranking people.

In addition to this, the Malay has an extra sentence:

Saya dengan tulus ikhlas menunjung kasih/mengucapkan berbanyak terirmah.

which means:

With all sincerity, I would like to say thank you.

I am not sure why it is apparently unnecessary to include this sentence in the English version; but it certainly reflects the greater need for polite expressions in Malay.

Dropping Things

If you accidentally dropped something, what would you say?

I think I might say something like: "Oops, I dropped it!" (Well, all right, I admit I might use something a bit stronger than oops; but never mind.)

How would you say the same thing in Malay?

My colleague Malai Ayla reports that she would say, "Gugur!" ('drop'). Or, if she wanted to emphasise the accidental nature of the incident, she might say, "Tergugur!", using the ter prefix.

And if she was speaking English, she would say, "It fell down!". If the first-person pronoun were included, it would indicate that the dropping was deliberate; and this may reflect some influence from Malay.

Sic Transit Gloria

Apparently, some royal prince is getting married soon in the UK. I am afraid I have no interest in the event, though it seems that lots of people will enjoy it, so that is splendid.

Something that interested me in this connection was an article by Marina Hyde in the on-line Guardian (here) which discussed some of the absurd ways that people in the UK have chosen to celebrate the royal wedding. In describing someone from Bristol who has decided to have his teeth tattooed, thus eclipsing the efforts of someone else who has made a commemorative statue out of toothpicks, she ended her article with the phrase 'sic transit gloria imbecili'.

Now, I admit that I did not know what this means, so I looked it up. Apparently, the original phrase is 'sic transit gloria mundi', which means "thus passes the glory of the world", meaning that everything we encounter is temporary (see the Wikipedia entry here). But the writer has changed mundi ('world') to imbecili ('idiots'), so the phrase instead comes to mean "the glory of idiots is transitory".

This is an allusion, and the writer expects people to know the original phrase in order to appreciate her clever play on words. If you don't know the original (and if you don't have any knowledge of Latin), then it remains completely opaque. But, thankfully, in the modern world it is quite easy to look things up.

It is also possible that the modified wording is commonly used but I am too far out of touch with usage in the UK to be aware of it. But a Google search of 'sic transit gloria imbecili' only offers the occurrence in the Guardian article, which suggests that it is indeed not a common phrase. A search in the COCA corpus (here) for the phrase 'sic transit gloria' returns 10 hits. 7 of them are followed by mundi, and none of the other 3 have imbecili, which confirms it is not a common phrase, at least not in the USA.

rizab

When I saw this extract from an article about electricity generation in Malaysia on page 9 of Media Permata of 26 April, 2011, I knew that rizab must be a borrowed word, as /z/ only occurs in borrowed words, such as zakat ('tithe'), and zaman ('era') that come from Arabic, and zon ('zone') and zink ('zinc') from English, and also because /b/ cannot occur at the end of a native word in Malay.But what does rizab mean?

It turns out that it comes from the English reserve. Note that the final /v/ in English becomes /b/ in Malay, just like in arkib ('archive').

What contributed to my failure to identify the word as coming from reserve is the omission of the second 'r'. If arkib keeps the 'r' from English, why does rizab not?

My colleague, Adrian Clynes, suggests it is because 'r' is fine as a part of a medial cluster, but not as part of a final cluster. So maybe that is the explanation.

One other thing about rizab: I showed it to some Bruneian students and colleagues, and none of them knew what it meant. Maybe it only exists in Malaysian Malay, not in Brunei.

Quotative macam

The occurrence of "quotative like" is widely reported in Englishes around the world. The Cambridge Grammar of English (Carter and McCarthy, 2006, pp. 102, 823) gives the following examples from their corpus of spoken British English:

So this bloke came up to me and I'm like 'Go away, I don't want to dance'.

He keeps coming and trying to kiss me, and I'm like, 'Go away! Go away!'

I was like, 'Oh, thank God for that!' you know.

This usage of like to introduce direct speech is reported to occur mainly among young speakers, so it would sound quite strange if anyone over 40 tried to use the pattern.

It seems that the same pattern occurs in Malay, at any rate the variety found in Brunei. My Masters student, Ish, suggested the following example:

Ia   macam, 'Apa   kan   tu?'
She   like     what (particle) that
"She was like, 'What's that?'"

It seems probable that this use of macam ('like') to introduce direct speech is directly influenced by English, though I have no evidence to confirm this.

tenacity/fatalistic

In my previous post, I discussed the merging of the TRAP and FACE vowels in Brunei. Here is the attempted transcription of the words tenacity and fatalistic by one of my first-year students.Note that her transcription is pretty good. It is all completely right apart from /æ/ and /eɪ/ being the wrong way round.

TRAP/FACE in Brunei

The other day, I saw one of my first year students walking along the corridor. When I asked him where he was going, he replied that he was looking for a cable. But he pronounced cable as [kæbəl] instead of the expected [keɪbəl]. Using Wells keywords to represent vowels, he had the vowel of TRAP rather than that of FACE in the first syllable. As a result, I couldn't understand him.

This conflation of TRAP and FACE seems to be very common in Brunei. Indeed, my UBD colleague Salbrina Sharbawi noticed that many of the subjects she studied for her PhD thesis used TRAP in the first syllable of safety.

I have just graded a test for my first-year students, and 9 out of 25 of them transcribed the vowel in the second syllable of notations as /æ/ instead of /eɪ/, even though we had practised the transcription of the ation suffix many, many times in class. My guess is that nearly all of them would have made this mistake if we had not practised it.

I have not heard of this conflation of TRAP and FACE in other varieties of English. I never encountered in in Singapore, and my students in Singapore never used /æ/ in the transcription of -ation. This seems to be unique to Brunei.

Mandarin

What do you think is the origin of the word Mandarin (the language spoken by Chinese people)?

The surprising answer is that it comes from the Malay word menteri ('minister'). Originally, mandarin was used to refer to high officials in China, and then it came to refer to the language that they used. See the Wikipedia article (here).

I don't usually rely too much on Wikipedia, as so much of it is flawed. But Webster's Dictionary confirms that Mandarin does indeed come from menteri (via Portuguese), so maybe this time Wikipedia is right:I am only aware of a few words that have been borrowed into standard English from Malay:

• amok
• orangutan (lit. 'forest person')
• durian (lit. 'spiky thing')
• rambutan (lit. 'hairy thing')
• parang (though perhaps the word machete is more common in English)
• compound (as in police compound, from the Malay kampung, 'village')

Do you know of any more?

Onion/Garlic

Are these the same species of plants, or are they different?My guess is that, if you showed these two pictures to a range of people, speakers of Malay might classify them as the same while speakers of English are more likely to classify them as different. The reason for this is that, in Malay, they are bawang besar (lit. 'big onion') and bawang putih (lit. 'white onion'), but in English there is no link between the names onion and garlic.

This is a simple illustration of how the language we speak may influence our perception of the world. This is known as Linguistic Relativity, and it is sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. A strong form of this hypothesis is that our language determines and constrains our patterns of thought.

This strong form is not generally accepted by most linguists nowadays, as it is perfectly possible to conceive of ideas for which we have no language. However, a weaker form of the hypothesis, that our language may have some influence on the way we see the world, is more tenable. And the different ways of looking at onions and garlic may reflect this.

Language of the TV News

As part of my effort to learn Malay, I try to watch the news in Malay every day, especially the 8:00 pm news on the Malaysian channel, TV1. (My apartment is in a valley, so I can't receive the Brunei RTB channel.) But one of the things I find irritating about the TV1 news is how much of it is in English.

Take, for example, the 8:00 TV1 news on 1 April 2011. There were five segments in English (accompanied with subtitles in Malay):

• 15 sec: an extract from a speech by Rosmah Mansor, the wife of the Prime Minister of Malaysia
• 14 sec: an interview with an economist
• 9 sec, 19 sec, 20 sec: three extracts from a speech by the Head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Malaysia

Well, OK, I guess that a total of 75 seconds is not a huge amount in a one-hour news bulletin, so I shouldn't really complain.

I also need to admit that the TV1 news is not broadcast for my amusement; and in reality, the inclusion of a few segments in English is actually quite enlightened, for two reasons:

• It is helpful to remind viewers that knowledge of foreign languages, especially English, is rather important in the modern world.
• It is valuable to allow people to hear the original tone of voice in the speech of people from around the world.

In contrast, most channels in the UK, including the BBC, usually dub all non-English material into English. This is really unfortunate for two reasons:

• It reinforces the belief among people in England that there is no need to learn a foreign language. It kind of suggests that folks around the world who aren't speaking English should be.
• It prevents people from hearing the actual words of world leaders, including the President of France (Nicolas Sarkozy) and the Chancellor of Germany (Angela Merkel).

That is one reason why I never ever watch the BBC news. It annoys me too much. And, in the end, I can accept and even applaud the approach adopted by the Malaysian channel.

pieces

I have previously discussed the use of pieces in Brunei (here), particularly whether it is influenced by the occurrence of measure words such as buah in Malay and 个 in Chinese (here).

Here is an extract from an article in the Brunei Times of 27 March 2011, discussing the use of plastic bags in Brunei shops. Note the use of pieces even though bags is a count noun.

In Standard English, pieces is used to let one count noncount nouns, such as information, advice, and furniture (e.g 'three pieces of information', 'two pieces of advice', ...).

However, in many New Varieties of English such as that of Brunei, pieces can be used with any noun, including count nouns such as bags and apples.