On Sharing the Responsibility of Communication
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P112-C6
2025-09-30
198
On Sharing the Responsibility of Communication
Both Mr. Kendall and Timothy place the responsibility of achieving this happy ending in the hands of ESOL students. It is up to them to seek out opportunities to practice English with English speakers so that they can improve their skills and increase their confidence. Such a belief, however, does not take into account what playwright Timothy Chiu understands to be at the heart of ESOL students' nervousness in public speaking activities: distracting and disturbing nonverbal signs that members of the audience are not understanding what they are saying.
Critical linguist Rosina Lippi-Green, believes that successful communication is based on "mutual responsibility" in which participants in a conversation (or, in this case, classroom presentation) collaborate in the establishment of understanding.1 One of the things that can get in the way of such collaboration is the way people respond to an accent that is different from their own.2 Lippi-Green writes that when people are confronted with an accent that is unfamiliar to them, the way that Timothy's classmates are confronted with his Cantonese accent, the first decision they make is whether or not they are going to accept their responsibility in the act of communication. What sometimes happens is that members of the dominant language group reject their role. In Timothy Chiu's play, this rejection is communicated nonverbally. Chiu talked about this in an interview that was undertaken about 8 months after the playwriting workshop had been completed. The Cantonese interview was undertaken, transcribed, and translated into English by research assistant Wing-Yee Chow. The words in bold-face are words that were originally said in English.
... My play, it brings out a message to others that when we walk up for a presentation, it seems very easy, it's done in 15 minutes. But actually, we do a lot of preparation. I wrote this piece [on the handover of Hong Kong] many times, and also rehearsed many times ... Some people don't know about this and just think, "You don't know how to speak English." Once they see that you are Chinese, they think that you're gonna do badly. I feel that this isn't good ...
[Interview, April 7, 1999]
For Lippi-Green, breakdown in communication and lack of understanding is due not so much to an accent itself as it is to people's negative social evaluation of the accent in question, and a rejection of the "communicative burden." Using linguistic research to support this argument, Lippi-Green reports that work in accommodation theory suggests that complex interplay of linguistic and psychological factors will establish people's predisposition to understand. Listeners and speakers will work harder to find a communicative middle ground and work toward mutual understanding when they are socially and psychologically motivated to do so. Based on our own personal histories, backgrounds, and social selves, which make up a set of "filters" through which we hear other people talk, we all take a communicative stance. Most of the time we agree to carry our share of the burden. Sometimes, if we are particularly positive about the set of social characteristics we see in another person, or if the purposes of communication are especially important to us, we will accept more of the burden. Conversely, if we feel negatively about particular accents and other social characteristics, we feel justified in rejecting the communicative burden, as in the case of the students who made gestures during Timothy's presentation in the play.3
Related to Lippi-Green's ideas here is Pierre Bourdieu's (1993) idea that a speaker must possess the authority to speak and that part of this authority is given to the speaker by the listener. Education researcher Jenny Miller writes that people who are considered to have the "wrong accent," nonstandard pronunciation, or faulty syntax, in Bourdieu's terms, lack credibility and an affirming audience of believing listeners.4
Returning to Mr. Kendall's advice to Timothy about how to reduce his nervousness during classroom presentations, it seems that working toward happy endings in our own multilingual classrooms requires more than suggesting that our ESOL students look for opportunities to practice speaking English in public. It also requires working with all our students to challenge what Lippi-Green calls "accent discrimination," so that all students in our classrooms have credibility as speakers. Further exploration of such work takes place in the Pedagogical Discussion.
1 See Lippi-Green (1997, p. 70).
2 Following Lippi-Green (1997), I believe that it is not only ESOL students who speak with an accent, but that we all speak with an accent. I also don't believe it is possible for ESOL students to replace a non-Standard English accent with the Standard English accent (that is most valued at school) in a consistent and enduring way. See Lippi-Green (1997) for further discussion of the "myth of non-accent."
3 See Lippi-Green (1997, pp. 70-72).
4 See Jenny Miller (1999, p. 61).
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