Learning Languages at Their Feet, or Meeting my Expectations

November 5, 2009

Learning Languages at Their Feet, or Meeting My Expectations

Harvard’s alumni mag this quarter has an article on Harvard students doing service learning in Africa. I read it and gave it to Allie Conlay, who has traveled in Kenya and knows Swahili. There was an inset blurb about the Professor of the Practice of African Languages.

The professor of the practice is a relatively new rank in American universities. The duty of this professor, who may be a scholar in any discipline, is primarily to coordinate all the foundational (introductory, or basic) courses in the discipline at the school so that they are all working to achieve the identical or very like goals. It’s a tiring job, since he or she has to teach a lot of classes and review a lot of course plans and testing instruments. Mostly the P of the P is not expected to do a lot of independent research, since she doesn’t have much time for that.

But not Professor Z at Harvard, we read. He is a steely-faced, obviously engaged and brilliant young man who, intrigued by how certain weirdo, or, rather, amazing Harvard undergrads — I guess they are Africans and maybe also African-Americans — exhibited an unnatural precocity for learning more and more different and exotic African tongues. He wanted to observe how they did this: what techniques did they have and how did they learn so fast? No doubt his curiosity was stirred by his own monstrous linguistic talents. He is said to command an unknown (read: huge) number of ALs himself. How does it come about?

How to learn a language? That is the question. Now, first, a distinction. These wildly proficient African speakers were not linguists doing field work. They weren’t trying to make an exhaustive description of the phonology, morphophonemics, and syntactic structures of the languages; not at all, at all. This is principally what linguists used to do in the outback of Australia or in the American deserts and jungles. Sometimes these people, these pathetic ‘linguists’, with all their knowledge, didn’t even speak the languages they described.

So, what did the students do to learn to speak? They took down copious notes of useful words and expressions as they talked to native speakers. They spent much time repeating and practicing the speech that they wanted to learn. They wrote down what they needed, presumably in their own IPA shorthand, or phonetic characters, or whatever. They picked what they wanted to learn, and they repeated and practiced, and, above all talked with the native speakers. For the details on what they did, we’ll have to wait for Professor Z’s book to come out.

I wonder what it will have to say to the theory of second language acquisition. What would Noam Chomsky say about this? How could an adult be capable of using ratiocination and a sharp attention span to the extent that the person can speak? What is this? We can only speculate now.

As I speculate, I note, first of all, one thing that distinguishes this kind of language learning from what we do in universities. There’s very often no elaborate written culture in this speech, even perhaps not an alphabet. So there’s no long tradition of literature and cultural heritage; all this book learning is replaced by the people who speak it, and whatever they choose to tell about where they come from, what life was like for their parents and grandparents, and the like. The learner picks and chooses his "culture", his interests, and literally “gets what he wants out of it,” as students so often say about classes. “I didn’t get anything out of it,” or “I got a lot out of it.” In this case, though, it’s not a professor spoon-feeding you what you get, it’s you the learner prying out of the speaker what you want. Or something like that.

If the learner, in the end, really learns to speak from one or several informants, that’s amazing and beautiful. And although I don’t know yet exactly how it happened for these students, or what their ‘speech’ is really like, I can see the tremendous advantages of the method. No political, cultural, or literary theory. No maps, no lectures, only what you can learn. Very much like what you did as a thirteen-month-old, but with at least two critical differences: you are using your brain to intentionally learn, and you face the enormous handicap of not being immersed in the target speech environment. These two attributes, or rather one positive attribute and one negative, we have also in the university. We are asked to ‘think’ about the process of speech and to organize our thoughts, and we lack a speech community until Study Abroad comes around, if ever.

The big difference is that in the uni, we structure the whole ‘learning process’ for the student, and woe betide her if she fail to meet our expectations. President Cowen told this story when he came to Tulane in, I think, 1999, to introduce himself as the new prez. Yogi Berra was asked, told Cowen, about the up-and-coming young player Don Mattingly. “Did he have a good year, Yogi?” “Yeah, a great year.” “Did he meet your expectations?” Yogi thought a while about this one. “Well, he didn’t meet my expectations, but he was better than I thought he’d be.” That’s what these learners of African languages do. They don’t meet our enormous preconceived cultural expectations, but, croyez-le ou non, they are better than we thought they’d be, much, much better.

The analogue in Slavic language teaching in American universities is the heritage student. We have three of them in 203, Alan, Elliott, and Regina. These three people came from Russian-speaking environments and have a subtle, highly developed speaking facility, but less literacy. Regina is an extreme example, for, while Alan and Elliott can write more or less pretty well, Regina needs lots of practice in writing, as I tell her a lot in class, while, on the other hand, she can analyze the literary situations we’ve been studying with great expression, individuality, wisdom of understanding and marvelously relaxed Russian fluency. In fact, when Regina was talking about her own “take” on Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov, the lady-killer in Дама с собачкой, I had the sense that many of our American 203-ers couldn’t follow her; they didn’t have enough oral Russian. Their writing and spelling skills outstrip Regina, but our American method hasn’t, yet, taught them how to communicate on the “Superior” level, as in the professors’ association description: “They [Superior level speakers] discuss their interests and special fields of competence, explain complex matters in detail, and provide lengthy and coherent narrations, all with ease, fluency, and accuracy.” Well, this is still academic-speak, but it comes close to what Regina can do. 

So I feel terrible that I am waving my professorial finger at R. and asking her to “learn to write better.” Would I could transfer her wonderful gift into the academy so that it would be available to all of us.

In the meantime, maybe she isn’t meeting my expectations, but she is much much better at Russian than you or I thought. Oh, well.
gmc