M. S. Thirumalai worked as a Professor-cum-Deputy Director at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India for many years. Presently, he serves as the Professor of Missions and Linguistics at Bethany College of Missions, Bloomington, MN. He also is the Dean of Academic Affairs of the college.

Thirumalai may be contacted in his e-mail address thirumalai@bethfel.org.

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• Verbal Communication with CP Children by Shyamala Chengappa, Ph.D. and M.S.Thirumalai,Ph.D.
• Bringing Order to Linguistic Diversity - Language Planning in the British Raj by Ranjit Singh Rangila, M. S. Thirumalai, and B. Mallikarjun
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• Languages of India, Census of India 1991

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Copyright © 2001
M. S. Thirumalai

LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow.

1 : 9 January 2002

HOW TO LEARN ANOTHER LANGUAGE?

by

M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1. What Is Language?

Chapter 2. Language Learning

Chapter 3. Learning the Script of Another Language?

Chapter 4. Learning the Sounds of Another Language

Chapter 5. Learning the Words of Another Language

Chapter 6. Learning the Sentences of Another Language?

Chapter 7. Learning the Meanings

Chapter 8. Learning Nonverbal Communication

Chapter 9. Aspects of Translation

References

PREFACE

This experimental lecture text introduces the undergraduate students to some aspects of linguistics and some methods of learning a language other than their own. The course is intended to be taught in a single semester with 3 credits (meeting three hours per week for 14 weeks).

Students are introduced to the basic principles, techniques, and methods of learning a second or foreign language using modern linguistic principles and methods of linguistic description. The goal is to equip the students with the perspectives and the resources they need to successfully learn another language and to minister effectively in another culture. It is expected that through this course the students will develop a basic understanding of the processes, techniques and methods of first and second/foreign language acquisition.

The focus is on helping students to acquire some important concepts and tools to start learning another language on their own.

Students at Bethany College of Missions have found this course to be a useful introduction to the subject. I plan to bring out a revised edition of this text in due course, giving more information from the South Asian languages.

I am thankful to my friend and colleague, Mike Leeming, a missionary to Mexico for many years, presently on the faculty of Bethany College of Missions, who cheerfully read the entire text and helped improve its presentation in many ways. I am thankful to Kelly Stuart who helped to put the pages together in order so that the text could be brought out in a book format. I am thankful to my wife Swarna, who read parts of the book and encouraged me to complete the work with several suggestions.

Thanks are due to Professors Ed Dudek, Paul Hartford, Tony Hedrick, Mike Leeming, Tom Shetler, Nita Steiner, and Paul Strand for their love and unfailing encouragement in my academic ministry.

Learning a language is always a complex activity. Because it is often “difficult” to learn another language, we soon give up learning the other language, or feel satisfied with what we have accomplished and make no further progress. I would like to encourage our students that learning another language is a great and rewarding experience. Indeed, we can succeed in our effort to learn another language! Language learning is also culture learning!

M.S.Thirumalai

CONTENTS PAGE

CHAPTER 1
WHAT IS LANGUAGE?

DEFINITION OF LANGUAGE

What is language? All of us know what language is, just like we know the palm of our hands. We all acquired a language early in life. There is no human being, ordinarily speaking, who does not “have” a language of his or her own. There are societies which do not have a written language, but there is no society which does not have a spoken language.

The word language is often used to refer to several kinds of human activity, such as the language of music, language of circus, and so on. However, in its ordinary sense, it primarily focuses on the oral and written medium that we use to communicate with one another. We use it especially to refer to human language and thus we tend to distinguish between language and other forms of communication.

A general definition characterizes language as a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which members of a society interact with one another.

This definition points out several of the essential characteristics of the human language:

1. Language is a system.

There is always some orderliness about the use and function of language. Sounds occur in some order within a word, words occur in some order within a sentence, and the sentences occur in some order matching the intent and content of the sentences in speech. Moreover, the elements of language such as sounds, words, sentences and combinations of sentences, and the meaning constitute their own systems within the overall system of language. In fact, language is a system of systems. Each system has its own building blocks and may often function independent of one another.

2. Language consists of vocal symbols.

In day to day language, language manifests itself more often than not through vocal symbols. In this sense, language consists of sounds. The sounds used in human language are produced through the vocal organs. The sounds which we may produce through other means are not considered part of language communication. When we mention language, we generally mean the sounds produced by the vocal organs.

3. Language is symbols.

The sounds (and the words) we produce stand for something else. They are symbols for objects and phenomena in the external world. They stand for the mental images. We use the sounds and the words to refer not to themselves, generally speaking, but to refer to other objects and phenomena.

4. Language symbols are arbitrary.

Consider the relationship between you as a real person and a photograph of yourself. The relationship between you as a real person and your photograph is an iconic relationship. There is some semblance between you as a real person and the photograph which represents you.

Now, consider the relationship between the object tree and the word tree. Is there any semblance between the object tree and the word tree? There is no semblance between the two. The relationship between the word tree and the object tree is an arbitrary relationship. The object tree is referred to as tree in English, maram in Tamil, thingphung in Thadou, and ped in Hindi, and so on. There is no one-to-one correspondence or relationship between the word and the object referred to by that word. All the words used in a language are arbitrary symbols.

5. Language is used by a social group.

It is true that a language may be used by a single person and still could be considered a language in its proper sense. There were several Native American languages in the past which disappeared when the last few speakers died. Anthropologist A. L. Kroeber and Linguist Edward Sapir worked with a Native American who was the only survivor of his tribe. That language now “lives” only in printed form and in phonograph records.

Even when there was only one speaker, the speaker’s internal thought processes and his inner speech always assumed the presence of others. Language in monologue is also social. In ordinary circumstances, language is always used by (and for) a social group.

6. Language is a means to the interaction between members of a social group.

While there may be also other ways of communicating what one thinks and what one wants to do, and so on, the chief means of communication between members of a social group is language. Language is a social institution. It reflects the social values its speakers have. Niceties of speech spring from and reflect such values. A language may have geographical and social variations reflected in the varieties of speech (dialects) used in the language. Professional groups may speak specific profession-oriented speech variety. In some languages the speech used by men and women may differ so drastically that there may special women’s dialects.

SOME IMPORTANT CHARACTERISTICS OF LANGUAGE

Inter-translatability. All languages are mutually translatable. Communication between persons and diverse communities becomes possible because of this trait. Progress in civilization is made possible because of this trait.

Linearity. No one speaks an utterance all at a time. We begin with one word and then proceed to complete the utterance in all its parts. We begin with a sound and then proceed to complete the word with all its component sounds. There is a progression from one end to the other in all linguistic utterances. Because of this trait we are able to organize our thoughts and words, compose them in some order, and produce them one after another.

Discreteness. This characteristic is related to the characteristic of linearity. It is possible to dissect an utterance into smaller units. A sentence may be decomposed into discrete phrases and words. A word may be composed into discrete sounds. Every native of any language has this ability.

Patterning. Utterances of a language fall into set patterns. There is some orderliness about the occurrence of words in a sentence, the occurrence of sounds in a word. The pattern adopted by a language is often peculiar to itself and distinguishes it from another language at the outward, surface level. The sentence pattern in English follows the Subject-Verb-Object order, whereas the sentence pattern in Kannada, a language of the Dravidian family spoken in South India, follows the Subject-Object-Verb order.

Levels. This characteristic is related to the characteristic of language as a system. Language is, indeed, a system of systems or a system consisting of several levels. The sounds of a language constitute a level by themselves. Likewise the words of a language constitute another level. The sentences of a language constitute yet another level. The sounds go into the making of words, and the words go into the making of sentences, and so on. Each level has its own constituent units (such as sounds, phonemes, morphemes, phrases, sentences - we discuss these concepts in subsequent chapters).

Displacement. More often than not, only in the human language are we able to talk about someone or something that is not present in time and space. This is a very important characteristic. Because of this it is possible for us to have history. This characteristic makes language a powerful medium of communication.

Prevarication. We can lie deliberately using a human language. Imagine - if we did not have the capacity and an adequate medium to “lie,” inventions, art, and literature would not be possible at all.

Creativity. You can be very creative in a human language. You can generate an infinite number of sentences in a human language. Your life span is the only limitation, generally speaking. Creativity allows us to generate novel and innovative responses to the new situations. In every language, things that have not been said before could be said.

Meaningfulness. Sentences uttered in a language always have some meaning. There is a durable or stable, identifiable and isolatable association between the linguistic utterance and the real world.

Recursiveness. Using this property, a short sentence can be made into a longer sentence. Each sentence has a potential to generate still longer sentences. Sentences of a language can be made into sentences of infinite length.

Reflexivity. We can talk about a language using that language.

Learnability. All languages are learnable. There is no truth in the statement that one language is more difficult than another. Every language is complex, equally complex. Every language meets the needs of its speakers.

It is important for us to recognize that “all languages have developed to express the needs of their users, and that in a sense all languages are equal…. All languages are arguably equal in the sense that there is nothing intrinsically limiting, demeaning, or handicapping about any of them… there are (no) such things and ‘primitive’ languages - languages with a simple grammar, a few sounds, and a vocabulary of a few hundred words, whose speakers have to compensate for their language’s deficiencies through gestures… The fact of the matter is that every culture which has been investigated, no matter how ‘primitive’ it may be in cultural terms, turns out to have a fully developed language, with a complexity comparable to those of the so-called ‘civilized’ nations. Anthropologically speaking, the human race can be said to have evolved from primitive to civilized states, but there is no sign of language having gone through the same kind of evolution… All languages have a complex grammar: there may be relative simplicity in one respect (e.g. no word endings), but there seems always to be relative complexity in another (e.g. word-position)…… Simplicity and regularity are usually thought to be desirable features of language; but no natural language is simple or wholly regular. All languages have intricate grammatical rules, and all have exceptions to those rules….. Similarly, there is no evidence to suggest that some languages are in the long term ‘easier for children to learn’ than others - though in the short term some linguistic features may be learned at different rates by the children of speakers of different languages” (Crystal 1987:6-7).

Effability. Humans can express all their thoughts through their language.

ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

There are at least three major theories of origin of language: divine origin, evolutionary development, and language as human invention.

All religions and mythologies contain stories of language origin. Often these stories end up giving a place of primary importance to the language in which the sacred texts were composed. They also claim, more often than not, that the language of their sacred texts is not only the original language of the humans but also is the very same language used by the gods, Supreme Being, etc.

In some communities, language was considered to be a fundamental force in the creation of cosmos. Language or speech comes to assume the role of the Creator in some religions. “The supreme deity of Hindu Tantrism, Siva, is pure consciousness and thus silent. But in his first manifest form he unites with his consort, Vaac “speech”, who is also termed Siva’s sakti “power”, the female agency through which the process of creation will proceed. Creation begins with a subtle vibration that develops into the “mothers of the letters” of the Sanskrit alphabet, then into the words of speech, and finally into the referents of those words, namely, the concrete objects of the word” (Wheelock 1985).

The Thadous living on the Indo-Myanmar border have their own myth to explain why their language does not have its own script whereas a community living in the plains has retained the same. God called the three communities living in Manipur to the heavens and gave each a script system in a leather scroll. On way back from the heavens, the Thadou was so hungry that he ate the leather scroll, the Naga was so lazy that he forgot to remove the leather scroll and went to sleep with the scroll still on his back. In the morning he found that the termites had already finished eating the leather scroll which contained the script system. It was only the diligent and miserly Meithei who carefully preserved the leather scroll and brought the script system safely to his country, Manipur.

“In Egyptian mythology, the god Thoth is the creator of speech and writing. It is Brahma who gives the knowledge of writing to the Hindu people. Odin is the inventor of runic script, according to the Icelandic sagas. A heaven-sent water turtle, with marks on its back, brings writing to the Chinese. All over the world, the supernatural provides a powerful set of beliefs about the origins of language” (Crystal 1987:384).

Contrary to common belief, there is no specific story or process mentioned in the Bible which tries to explain how human language was created. There is an initial naming process initiated by God when he called the light “day” and the darkness “night” (Genesis 1:5). The first naming process had the function of separating the good (light) from darkness. A process of knowing begins with the naming process. This process is continued when the Lord God brought the beasts of the field and the birds of the air “to the man to what he could name them; and whatever the man called each living, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field” (Genesis 2:19-20). The episode assumes that Man had the ability to use language, that this ability was inherent, and that language was not created separately and given to Man. Language is part of Man.

The story of Babel is the story of how the multiplicity of languages came into being, not a story of how language itself came into being. The whole world had one language and a common speech at that time. (Note the distinction between language.) To bring humility and obedience in humans to God, God confused their language so they would not understand each other, says the Bible (Genesis 11:7).

The coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of the Pentecost and resultant speaking in tongues was a sign unto all of us that what had been lost had been restored in the Holy Spirit, what had been confused could be re-possessed with clarity in the Holy Spirit. The multiplicity of languages is no more a barrier if we anchor ourselves onto the leading of the Holy Spirit.

Language plays a very important role in Christian theology. The Son of God is called the Word. “When one speaks a word, it comes from within and reveals his thoughts. The second person of the Trinity is called Word because He is the Son of God, begotten of the Father from eternity; He reveals thoughts of God about us, for example, His love and gracious plan of salvation” (Lutheran Cyclopedia, p. 477).

As the theological history of the Israelites unfolds in the Bible, there is a progressive recognition of the multiplicity of languages. Consider the references to Syrian language in 2 King 18:26, to the Jews’ language in 2 King 18:26, to the scripts of every province and the language of each nation in Esther 1:22, to the people of obscure speech and difficult language in Ezekiel 3:6, and the use of the phrase every people, nation, and language in Daniel 3 and subsequent books.

Israelites mastered many languages especially Greek and Latin, the languages of power in the Roman empire. The world was no longer a list of unconnected nations. Learning languages other than one’s own, and translation from one language into another for various purposes had become normal. Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. It read: JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS. Many of the Jews read this sign, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and the sign was written in Aramaic, Latin and Greek (John 19:19-20).

Finally, in the Book of Revelation, we see the phrase every tribe, people, language, and nation often used. From the Unity of language, we go to the diversity and multiplicity of languages, and, from there with the ministry of the Holy Spirit, oneness of humanity is restored.

Evolutionary Development. Not satisfied with the Biblical position that language is a distinguishing part of Man, so-called scientific approaches have tried to reconstruct the human language from various animal communication systems, without success. There is a qualitative gulf between human language and the animal communication system which cannot be bridged with available evidence. So several scientists have suggested that there must have been a mutation which led to the emergence of human language capability in humans.

Scientists have also approached the problem from other angles - to reconstruct the bony cavities within the skulls which have been found as fossils. They raise the question: “Might it be possible to deduce, from the fossil record of early man, the point at which speech began?” (Crystal 1987:290). They also raise the question “whether primitive man had the physiological capacity to speak.” They conclude that there is no evidence to infer that speech in its richness existed even in Neanderthal man, who is assumed to represent an intermediate stage in the gradual evolution of speech.

The physiological mechanism used by humans in the production of speech is not matched in its elegance, details, structure, and functions in other species. While the so-called scientific approaches acknowledge this fact, the effort is still on to find an evolutionary chain for the emergence of human language.

The organs used for speech are used also for breathing, eating, and swallowing. Speech is not incidental to breathing, eating and swallowing. It is a primary function for the humans. The survival value of speech outweighs the other functions. (Remember what Jesus said, “Not by bread alone”.) Animals have better provisions for breathing, eating, and swallowing. For example, “man can choke from food lodged in the larynx; monkeys cannot” (Crystal 1987:291).

The Bible does not visualize the existence of Man without language even for a moment. More than anything else, the use of language distinguishes humans from animals. “The gap between human language and the communication systems of the nearest primates remains vast, and there is no sign of a language-like increase in communicative skills as one moves from lower to higher mammals” (Crystal 1987:291). While “scientists” acknowledge this, their paradigm of science allows them only to talk and do research within the bounds of the theory of evolution.

Language as Human Invention. Crystal (1987:291) speculates that cultural development necessitated the use of some “way of transmitting information about skills from one generation to the next. Any degree of social interdependence……. would seem to require a communication system…. An elaborate gesture system is one possibility. The early development of language may well have been assisted by some kind of signing…… such as how to use tools….. in an indirect way, tools could have promoted the development of speech. Sounds made at the same time as the gestures might have come to be associated with various activities…”

There are five other theories of origin of language: the bow-wow theory suggests that “speech arose through people imitating the sounds of the environment”; the pooh-pooh theory suggests that “speech arose through people making instinctive sounds, caused by pain, anger, or other emotions”; the ding-dong theory suggests that “speech arose because people reacted to the stimuli in the world around them, and spontaneously produced sounds, which were in harmony with the environment”; the yo-he-ho theory suggests that “speech arose because, as people worked together, their physical efforts produced communal, rhythmical grunts, which in due course developed into chants, and thus language”; and the la-la theory suggests that speech arose “from the romantic side of life - sounds associated with love, play, poetic feeling, perhaps even song.”

Modern linguistics is not concerned with the origin of language. It is concerned more with the study of the structures of languages.

Since views about how one’s own language came into existence is widely prevalent, and since such views are often tied to the theology of the people group, we need to have an understanding of the basic issues relating to the origin of language.

At present, almost all the linguists believe that “language” is innate to human beings, and that the human language cannot be reconstructed from the animal communication systems.

DIVISIONS OF LINGUISTICS

Modern linguistics is descriptive linguistics. Descriptive linguistics is the study of the structures of a language without reference to its history. Description of a language is made as it is spoken, and not as it should be spoken. On the other hand, the school grammars often seek to study and present the structures of a language from a prescriptive point of view. Prescriptive linguistics or prescriptive grammars do not aim at describing the rules people know, but to tell them what rules they should know and use. Descriptive linguistics is also called synchronic linguistics.

Historical linguistics, also called diachronic linguistics, describes the historical stages of a language. It studies the description and explanation of language change. Comparative linguistics aims at making a comparative analysis and description of two or more genetically related languages. In contrastive linguistics, we contrast the structures of two or more languages, generally not related genetically, for the purpose of identifying points at various levels of language which might prove difficult for those who wish to learn it as a second or foreign language.

Sociolinguistics is the study of the social aspects of language use. It studies the interaction between language and the structure and functioning of society - how social parameters affect the acquisition, use, and functions of language in social contexts. Psycholinguistics studies the interrelationship between language and mental processes.

There are several other inter-disciplinary fields such as biological linguistics, computational linguistics, educational linguistics, ethnolinguistics, geographical linguistics, mathematical linguistics, neurolinguistics, philosophical linguistics, statistical linguistics, stylistics, lexicography, language teaching methods and theoretical linguistics in which the concepts and theories of linguistics are applied with great insight.

Our focus in this brief introduction to linguistics is on the methods of description and principles of analysis followed in descriptive linguistics as an aid to learn a language other than one’s own. We avoid elaborate theoretical discussions, but focus on basic facts about language and on practical use of linguistics for learning a second or foreign language.

We approach the study of language and linguistics in several incremental stages: the study of the sound system is called phonology; the study of the rules of word formation is called morphology; the study of the rules of sentence formation is called syntax; the study of the meaning system is called semantics; and the study of the vocabulary of words is called lexicon.

KNOWING A LANGUAGE

A language consists of all the sounds, words, and possible sentences. Knowing a language means knowing what sounds are in that language. It also means knowing what sounds are not used in that language. When you know a language, you know the sounds, the words, and the rules for their combination. You know which sounds may start a word, which sounds end a word, and which sounds follow each other. Knowing a language means knowing that certain sound sequences signify certain meanings.

Knowledge of a language enables us to combine sounds into words, combine words to form phrases, and phrases to form sentences. It enables us to judge what sentences are appropriate in various situations. Not all strings of words constitute sentences in a language, and knowledge of a language determines which strings of words are sentences and which are not. It enables us to produce new sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before. This is called the creative aspect of language use.

Linguistic knowledge is, for the most part, not conscious knowledge. The linguistic system is learned subconsciously with no awareness that rules are being learned. Linguistic knowledge is linguistic competence. On the other hand linguistic performance is how we use this knowledge in actual speech production and comprehension. Performance is conditioned by factors such as memory span, mood of the speaker, the characteristics of the audience, the topic of focus in a particular context, and so on. Grammar of a language focuses upon the linguistic competence, and not on linguistic performance.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT LANGUAGE IN GENERAL?

1. Wherever humans exist, language exists.
2. There are no “primitive” languages – all languages are equally capable of expressing any idea in the universe. The vocabulary of any language may be expanded to include new words for new concepts.
3. If something can be expressed in one language or one dialect, it can be expressed in any other language or dialect.
4. All languages change through time.
5. The relationship between the sounds and meanings of spoken languages and between the gestures (signs) and meanings of sign languages are, for the most part, arbitrary.
6. All human languages utilize a finite set of discrete sounds (or gestures) that are combined to form meaningful elements or words, which themselves form an infinite set of possible sentences.
7. All grammars contain rules for the formation of words and sentences of a similar kind.
8. Every spoken language includes discrete sound segments n or a, which can all be defined by a finite set of sound properties or features.
9. Every spoken language has a class of vowels and a class of consonants.
10. Similar grammatical categories (for example, noun, verb) are found in all languages.
11. There are semantic universals, such as “male” or “female,” or “human,” found in every language of the world.
12. Every language has a way of referring to past time, negating, forming questions, issuing commands, and so on.
13. Speakers of all languages are capable of producing and comprehending an infinite set of sentences.
14. Any normal child, born anywhere in the world, of any racial, geographical, social, or economic heritage, is capable of learning any language to which he or she is exposed. The differences we find among languages cannot be due to biological reasons.

*** *** ***

CONTENTS PAGE

CHAPTER 2
LANGUAGE LEARNING

LANGUAGE LEARNING

Neuroscientists, the people who study the form, structure, and function of human brain, tell us that human language capacity is ingrained in the cerebral cortex which is a grey wrinkled mass. The human cerebral cortex is like a cap over the entire brain. Reptiles and amphibians have no cortex at all, whereas other animals do not have as rich a cortex as the humans do. is like a cap over the entire brain. Reptiles and amphibians have no cortex at all, whereas other animals do not have as rich a cortex as the humans do.

Generally speaking, the human brain may be divided into two hemispheres, left and right. The left hemisphere controls and regulates the muscle movement and sensation in the right half of the body, and the right hemisphere controls and regulates the movement and sensation in the left part of the body. Again, generally speaking, the left hemisphere is identified to be the control center for human language capacity for most of those who are right-handed. However, recent researches show that not all the aspects of human language are represented in the left hemisphere. Jokes and metaphors in every day conversation seem to be represented in the right hemisphere.

Children learn their first language without much effort. However, children must be exposed to the language. They do not acquire a language without being exposed to it. Early on children have an ability to distinguish between some speech sounds. They distinguish between human speech and other sounds. However, they do not have an ability to distinguish between meaningful words. The child’s babbling is his launching pad to acquire the language of his environment.

The child seems to follow some order in his acquisition of speech sounds. For example, vowels are acquired before consonants by age three. Stops (such as p, t, k) are acquired before other consonants. Among the consonants, labials (sounds produced with lips) are acquired first, followed by velars(sounds produced with the back of the tongue such as k and g), alveolars (t, d, s, z), and alveopalatals (ch, j). Interdentals (th in nothing, thank) are acquired last. Such orders are not much relevant when we learn a language subsequent to the learning of the first language.

Exposure to the second or subsequent language and continuous practice to use that language are highly essential, however. When we first hear another language it all sounds gibberish. When we listen to the utterances several times, we slowly begin to recognize at least some of the sound combinations or structure to some extent. In this process we match the sounds we hear with those sounds we are familiar with in our first language or in the languages we are comfortable with.

Children master the contrasts between various sounds more easily in the word-initial position. The child finds it easier to master a sound that occurs in many different words than those sounds which occur only in fewer words. Another interesting fact that is highly relevant for learning a subsequent or second language is that chidren recognize more sounds than they can produce. They recognize more words than they can or actually use. They understand more sentences than they can actually produce and use on their own. Recognition always precedes and is greater than production even while learning another language.

The utterances produced by children do not closely resemble the structures found in the adult speech.They seem to extract from the utterances they hear what perhaps seems to be essential elements for them and produce those elements as their sentence. The role of imitation and correction in first language acquisition seems to be very limited. Parents do not correct the speech of their children as a routine. They know that their children will be able to produce correct sentences in their own time. They seem to be more concerned with appropriate terms of address, etc., than with the correctness of sentence patterns, since errors are seen to be an integral and inevitable part of acquiring the native language. Children have great difficulty in imitating the structures that they have not yet learned.

The speech addressed to children (caregiver speech or Motherese) has some special characteristics which help in children understanding the language of the adult. For example, the caregiver’s speech is often clearly articulated, with exaggerated pauses between phrases, exaggerated intonation contours to signal questions, imperatives, and statements. Moreover, the parental speech tends to concentrate on the here and now. Second language learning may be facilitated if we adopt some of these features in teaching methods and materials.

Apes have many of the cognitive skills of two-year-old children, but they do not acquire language even when they are exposed to speech. This suggests that the humans have some inborn capacity to acquire, and use the intricate and highly complex system of human language and speech. The capacity to acquire the native or first langauge is universally found among all the human beings. Related to this is the capacity to learn a language other than one’s own.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

The term second language is used to mean a language that is learned after the first or native language is relatively established. It is not applicable to the case of a child learning two languages simultaneously, during a bilingual setting.

This term is used also to refer to learning a foreign language. Learning a new language in a foreign language context (studying English in Japan) as well as learning a new language in the host environment (learning French in France) are covered by this term. This term may refer to a second, third, fourth, or even fifteenth lanauage.

Some distinction is maintained between learning and acquisition.

Learning is defined as a deliberate, conscious attempt to master a language. Acquisition is defined as a less deliberate, subconscious process of mastering a language, and is often associated with the manner in which children acquire their native or first language. First language is also referred to as L1 in the 1iterature. L2 is the second language. Source language is the first language/native language of the learner. Target language is the second language, the language being learned by the learner.

Some important questions

It is common knowledge that children learn another language effortlessly on the play ground, or some such similar contexts. They seem to be less inhibited in learning the second language to which they are exposed in natural contexts. There may be some initial hesitation, shyness, reluctance and/or irritation on their part because in the beginning they may find themselves frustrated with the exposure to the new language. Their pronunciation soon matches that of the other children who speak that language as their native language.

1. What makes it possible for the young children to learn another langauge effortlessly, and what makes it more difficult for the adult to learn the very same second language?
2. Is learning a second language at all similar to learning the first or native language?
3. What is the effect of age on the language leaming process?
4. How is the L2 learner’s progress affected by the language leaming environment and the type of linguistic input he or she receives.

Researchers report that there is a critical period or optimal age for second language learning. This period ends around the age of puberty, aound 13 years of age. Beyond this age or critical period, individuals demonstrate or face difficulty in learning another language with ease and in an effortless manner. This is also the time during which the left hemisphere of the human brain comes to be the center that more or less controls language use.

There are three different arguments presented regarding the optimal issue. The biological argument says that a child’s brain is more “plastic” and thus is more receptive than the adult’s brain. Thus, certain aspects of language acquisition especially in the area of pronunciation are facilitated by this plasticity. The adult’s musculature is hardened in some sense or set in place in some manner after puberty and this makes it difficult for the adult to acquire a native-like pronunciation.

However, the cognitive argument says that an adult is superior to a child when it comes to abstract thought. Learning another language involves generalization, discrimination of differences and similarites, and abstract categories, and mastery of patterns. Since the adults seem to have an edge over children in this, language learning is done better with reason. At the same time, children are generally less inhibited about mimicking sounds than are adults, and this may positively affect their pronunciation. Normally, children do not have negative attitudes towards the second language culture, and they usually have a strong desire to be part of a group or community, which enhances their desire to learn the language. In my opinion, this could be rather the best conclusion: The number of years of exposure to the second language and the starting age of the learner affect the ultimate level of success, especially regarding pronunciation. Although children learn more slowly than adults, they eventually surpass them. Both the contexts share similarities and differences. It may not be possible to replicate all the conditions of learning that a child is exposed when we as adults learn another language.

There are a variety of language learning environments: natural, classroom or a combination of both. Learning a language in the host country or in an immersion program (in which no language other than the one being learned is allowed to be used) involves natural environments because the focus is on communication.

Learning a second language in a classroom situation or in any situation where a prescribed course of study is followed involves formal environments. The combination of a formal and a natural environment might entail studying the second language in a classroom in the host country.

Motivation is the need or desire the learner feels to learn the second language. Integrative motivation is defined as a desire to achieve proficiency in a new language in order to participate in the life of the community that speaks the language. Instrumental motivation is identified as the desire to achieve proficiency in a new language for utilitarian reasons. Most language learning situations involve both types. However, the notion is helpful in choosing the content and focus of our study.

L2 learners’ attitudes are said to reflect their beliefs or opinions about the second language and culture, as well as their own culture. The extent to which learners prefer their own language over the ones they are learning is an important attitudinal factor. Negative attitudes may lead to decreased motivation and in all likelihood failure to attain proficiency.

Empathy is defined as the ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes. An empathic L2 learner has the capacity for participation in another’s feelings or ideas, to project his or her personality into the personality of another. Empathic people are favorably predisposed to learning languages in a natural environment. They may more easily emulate a native-like pronunciation since they are usually less inhbited than others.

The most traditional method for teaching/learning is the grammar translation method. This method emphasizes reading, writing, translation, and the conscious learning of grammatical rules. Memorization is the main learning strategy. The students often spend more time in talking about the language or the rules than in talking in the language or using the rules through producing sentences. While this method does not appeal to many these days, we should remember that neither grammar nor translation nor memorization can be altogether done away with. Some people may dislike mechanical recitation or repetition of patterns. But this cannot be avoided, because just by a single reading or performing a sentence one is never able to retain it in memory and use it appropriately when the need arises.

The users of the direct method say that adult L2 learners can learn a second language in essentially the same manner as a child. Natural settings are created for the learner to talk. The major emphasis is on communicating. Classes are carried out totally in the second language with no reliance on the first language of the learner. No translation is used. Since adults do not learn exactly like children, they express the need for explicit instruction in grammar and other aspects of the second language. Direct method in these situations becomes less effective.

The audiolingual method has been a very popular derivative of the direct method. The goal is to develop a native-like speaking ability in the learners. Translation and reference to LI are not permitted. Language learning is treated as a mechanistic process of habit formation. Audiolingual learning comprises dialogue memorization and pattern drills, thus ensuring careful control of responses. Patterns are not explained. Patterns are learned through mechanical drills. Repeated and mechanical of patterns that are graded from the simple to the complex and from the familiar to the unknown are given to students. Through this intense repetition students autamatically internalize the structures. The method has several points that could be of great help to us in learning another language.

There are several methods which fall under the catecory of Communicative Language Teaching/Learning. Merely knowing how to produce a grammatically correct sentence is not enough. A communicatively competent person must also know how to produce an appropriate, natural, and socially acceptable utterance in all contexts of communication. An illustration given in Fromkin and Rodman (1993) illustrate this point effectively. Hey, buddy, you fix my car! is grammatically correct but not as effective in most social contexts as Excuse me, Sir, I was wondering whether I could have my car fixed today. It is assumed that if the students interact with second language speakers using real-life subject matter, the language will be acquired subconsciously.

Total Physical Response takes into consideration the silent period deemed necessary for some L2 learners. During the first phase of total physical response, students are not required to speak. Instead, they concentrate on obeying simple commands in the second language. The commands eventually become more complex. For example, Walk to the door becomes Scratch your head while you walk to the door at the back of the classroom. Students later become more actively involved, verbally and creatively. The objective of this method (Total physical response) is to connect physical activity with meaningful language use as a way of instilling concepts. Proponents claim that it is very effective in the initial to early intermediate stages of L2 acquisition.

L2 teachers and researchers are realizing that one method alone will not satisfy the demands of language learners of different ages, different learning styles, diverse backgrounds, and varying degrees of motivation.

Research studies reveal that L2 learners, whether children or adults, follow a developmental route, experimenting with their linguistic knowledge. Achieving fluency in a second language is evidently a creative process, one of trial and error, revision and reconstruction.

Early researchers came to believe that by comparing and contrasting the learner’s native language with the second language. new insights could be gained into the language leaming process. This approach is known as contrastive analysis (CA). It was claimed that the errors produced by the learner would occur at those points at which the two languages were dissimilar. Contrasting structures of two languages would help predict the potential trouble spots and to focus on them in the L2 lesson.

Interlanguage is the language of approximation that a learner actually uses when he learns another language. This is similar to but not identical to the native speakers’ speech. Thorugh a series of approximations or interlangauge the learner progresses through a theoretically infinite number of states of grammatical development along a continuum. The learner starts with his own native langauge and continuously revises and extends rules until fluency in the second language is attained. Each L2 learner’s interlanguage is unique. As learners progress towards native-like proficiency in the second language, their interlanguage is characterized by fewer and fewer errors.

Interlingual errors are the result of L1 interference, implying that some structure from the native language has been transferred to the second language. A comparison of adult and child L2 learners shows that adults tend to exihibit more first language influence in their errors than do children – about 30% of adult errors are from the influence of their first language. Thus L1 is not the only or primary cause of learner errors. Development errors result as part of the learning process. These may be caused by the inadequate mastery of the structure being learned. These may be caused by the strategies the learner has adopted to learn the stuctures. Sometimes one may not be able to find a reason for the developmental errors.

Within the interlingual and developmental errors categories, errors can also be classified according to the grammatical subsystem involved: phonology, syntax, morphology, and semantics.

Errors can be further classified as errors of omission, addition, or substitution (the L2 learner may omit certain items, add unnecessary ones, or exchange one element for another). Items may also be misordered or misformed.

LANGUAGE SKILLS

There are four language skills: Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing. Often it is recommended that we begin with the listening skill before we focus on the speaking skill; and begin with the reading skill, before wefocus on the writing skill. Some researchers divide the langauge skills into two broad groups: receptive and prductive skills. Listening and reading are considered receptive skills, and speaking and writing are considered productive skills.

Language learning is largely a mastery of the four language skills, in terms of the phonetic, phonological, morphological (word), syntactic and semantic aspects of the target langauge. It must cover also the communicative appropriateness of the structures used, in addition to a mastery of related sociolinguistic information.

The best way to learn a language on the field is to use it unhesitatingly on all occasions. This demands a lot of nerve on the part of the learner, though. There are several ways to prepare oneself to meet the linguistic deluge in the field!

1. Look for a linguistically graded textbook which teaches your target language as a second language.
2. Many languages in the world have been described by competent linguists. Many well-known and populous languages have several second language teaching textbooks.
3. Most of these books are available in several university libraries in the United States. Get on to some university library online and get the relevant information.
4. Look for a second language teaching textbook with the gloss and introduction in English. These books are generally well-graded. And thus you are better advised to follow the textbook lessons in the order in which they are presented.
5. Most books are accompanied by language teaching tapes. Try to get a set of these tapes. Listen to every lesson several times before you begin to produce the sentences on your own. In the absence of these tapes, try to locate a language speaker who could pronounce the words and sentences of some of the lessons at least. If you are not able to get a native speaker to pronounce the words and sentences for you, follow carefully the phonetic descriptions given in the textbook and produce the words and sentences on your won. You should, however, be always willing to modify your pronunicatiation whenever you come across a native speaker who could produce these utterances for you.
6. Note that pronunciation is not every thing in learning a language. There is more to language learning than impeccable pronunciation. What you should aim at is “a tolerably good” pronunciation, which would communicate easily what you mean to say.
7. Remember that language learning is a laborious exercise. If you do not have a consistently high motivation you will have difficulty in learning your target language. Motivation must result in a daily routine of doing some langauge as demanded by your textbook. Daily and routine contact with the material will result in better learning of the target language.
8. There is no room for being shy, when it comes to learning another language! You must “blurt” out all the time in the target language. If you do not have someone to speak to, please set up an imaginary character andand involve him/her in conversations you!
9. I strongly recommend that you memorize the words and their meanings. Memorization is important, although many may not approve my strong insistence on it. Words must be memorized and sentence patterns must be practiced over and over again.
10. Simultaneously learn the culture represented by the language, in its words, in its sentences, in its idioms and phrases, in the stories given in your text book, and begin to make a contrast between yours and that of the target language. This contrast is pursued not to make yourself feel superior but to caution you where you should be extra careful.
11. Developing a conscious contrast between English and the target language structures is another area which would help you understand the target langauge better.
12. Voice of America and BBC broadcast in many foreign languages. These are free materials for listening in the absence of a native speaker of your target langauge. Also look for ethnic stores in the big citites. These may even carry video casstes of culture of your target group. If you can get some movies, watch them. This will be total immersion for you.
13. If you get any reading material in your target language ( you can get them in ethnic stores, or int he university libraries), try to read headlines, headings first.
14. I can go on listing so many practical ways by which you not only acaquire some aspects of the target language but also strengthen what you have learned. It is only your common sense and diligence that would guide you to success. Put your trust in the Lord to give you abundant common sense and diligence.

So, now we will go on to the next possibility - that is, what would you do when you are confronted with a language which may have no second language teaching textbooks.

Any self-initiated language learning process should necessarily revolve around the methods of linguistic data collection and analysis. Several researchers have worked out methods of learning a second langauge using these techniques. Language Acquisition Made Practical by Brewster and Brewster is a popular book among the missionaries who venture out to learn the language of their field on the field. The method adopted in this book is often called the LAMP Method.

Brewsters base their method on what they call the Daily Learning Cycle. “Each day’s work, whetehr for six hours or two hours, should contain four general activities. They may be thought of as four parts of a learning cycle. As the cycle is repeated daily, your language will spiral upward.

The four parts of each daily cycle are:

1. Prepare what you need for the day.
2. Practice what you prepare.
3. Communicate what you know.
4. Evaluate your needs and your progress, so you will know what to prepare for tomorrow.”

Some of the suggestions made by the Brewsters are as follows:

1. From the first day, you should start using your new language as a means of communicating and interacting with people.
2. You will need the help of a native speaker who understands some English.
3. The Preparation part of the learning cycle is made up of six specific activities:

1. Obtain: Get the phrases to express the message you want to learn to say today.
2. Check: Make sure it sounds natural to your helper, and is suitable for your use.
3. Transcribe: Write down the phrases.
4. Understand: find out the general meaning of each phrase.
5. Note and Classify: Make careful notes of opportunities andproblems. In the Practice part you can design drills to respond to the opportunities and overcome the problems.
6. Record: Make a tape recording of the message, in various ways, for use in the Practice part of the cycle.

There are three stages in Practice what you prepared.

1. The first stage is listening.
2. The second stage is mimicry.
3. The third stage is production.

There are a number of drills suggested for the three stages.

1. In Communicate what you know, you will first demonstrate to the nationals that you really want to learn their language. You may become the talk of the town! You may feel shy and reluctant. But you should gather courage and talk! Every person you see is a potential individual to talk with with, on the field!

Give your talk to your landlord!
Talk with children.
Talk with people in the park or town square.
Talk in the market.
Talk with many vendors.
Talk with the shopkeepers of manys tores near your house and so on, and so on!

In the Evaluate your needs stage, make an evaluation of your methododlogy every day, note and classify problems, decide on the next step, and prepare to organize material.

Brewsters give us a list of topics that would be useful for the collection of data and for the organization of the daily learning cycle lessons. Note that following the list would give you most of the basic words in your target langauge, most of your sentence patterns and would help you monitor your progress.

BAREFOOT LEARNING APPROACH/GLUE METHOD

Donald Larson, an author of several reputed manuals which help individuals to master the method of learning languages other than their own, suggest a barefoot learning approach to learning languages. He quotes Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, televison preacher of the 1950s, who said, “There are certain things that man has to do for himself, like make his own love, say his own prayers and blow his own nose.” And Larson goes on to say that “I would add one to his list– - learn his own langauge. No one can do it for you.”

“Barefoot langauge learning is not what children do. Nor is it the kind of langauge learning done by people in warm climates who run around without shoes. ... Barefoot language learning depends on wht you do for yourself to learn from people who know the langauge that you need to know, not just to study from people who are trained to teach it. Barefoot language learning is ‘learner-intensive appropriate technology’ for use in communities where an outsider needs to know the language of its insiders. ... It is a wedding of the best of human potential for langauge learning to insights into language developed by linguists and other specialists ” (Larson 1994, “Barefoot: A way to learn another language,” Training for Cross-cultural Ministries, Volume 94, Number 2).

Larson’s barefoot language learning approach is similar to that of the LAMP approach we discussed earlier. Larson calls his method a GLUE method (Larson 1984: 72-73):

G “Get what you need: As a rule-of-thumb, spend 10% of your time in getting the new material that you need. If you get more material than you can learn or use, you will increase your frustration needlessly.”

L “Learn what you get: Alow 40% of your time for learning what you get in the first hour. If two hours isn’t enough, you are getting too much material. If you can’t fill these two hours with profitable drills and exercises, sooner or later it will ahve a negative impact on your use of the language.”

U “Use what you learn: Allow 40% of your time for putting what you have learned to use inthe community. allow another hour for passive listening and reading.”

E “Evaluate what you use: Allow 10% of your time to make a systematic evaluation of what you have used.”

FIELD METHODS IN LINGUISTICS

These approaches take their cues and ideas from the field methods adopted by linguists in collecting and analyzing the linguistic data mostly from unwritten languages. Several factors that help the collection and analysis of data from and learning of unwritten languages on the field may be fruitfully used in our efforts at learning another language.

The linguist on the field is constantly exposed to the langauge which is spoken around him. He hears the language constantly. He is interested in hearing the natural language, not a language tailored to suit his learning levels. He is faced with the problem of recognizing and producing sounds, sound patterns, words, and sentences he has never heard before. He has to listen carefully and makes sense of the patterns that underlie the speech he is exposed to. It is a very personal effort.

This personal effort can become successful only with the cooperation and colloboration of the people, the native speakers of the language, around him. The linguist needs to develop a personal rapport with a few people, who would be willing to work with him and supply the data in some graded fashion. That is, from short sentences to longer sentences, from words for familiar and concrete objects less familiar objects and relations, and abstract notions.

He needs to listen, talk and write down what he has just heard. He needs to imitate the speaker, repeat after him for the speaker’s benefit, elicit the native speaker’s assessment of the quality of reproduction, did it approximate the native speaker’s utterances, and how could he further improve this approximation, and what is the meaning of this utterance, and how and under what contexts the utterance could be used, what are the social implications of this utterance, could he (the linguist-student) use the same utterance for this or that, how about this word in place of that word, how about adding, deleting, or changing the words, or the word order, I am making some new utterances based on the words and the word order in this sentence, tell me whether these new utterances make any sense, and whether such sentences are acceptable to you, how about an elliptical sentence like this one, do you think that this is understandable and acceptable, and so on.

A series of questions which help the learner to approximate his performance to that of the native speakers of that language. It is not easy for every one to imagine and ask questions of this nature. However, by trial and error and with sufficient motivation one could really learn another language.

The linguist on the field listens to the people, talks to people, and invariably writes down what he heard in some form for his recollection, and analysis. Hearing the language helps the learner to improve his pronuncation even as it gives him or her a subconcious introduction to the structures and sounds.

Without talking, one can never learn to use another language. Talking helps improve the pronunciation, helps you to work out the necessary sentence patterns to meet your needs, and projects a friendly image of yourself to the native speakers.

It is also important to memorize useful phrases and sentences which could beused in your day to day interaction with the people around. It is difficult to remember everything that was said to you, and in the manner it was said. So, it is important to write down what you hear in your native script perhaps to begin with, and then to switch over to the phonetic script, and finally when you are ready you can write down the expressions in the script of the native speakers.

Remember that no cut and dried method can ever be suggested. You need to take a broad view of the problem and devise methods that suit your time, goal, and your your inclination. Good pronunciation is not the ultimate goal, as we explained. But at the same time one should not ignore the goal of acquiring good pronunciation in the target langauge., because it helps in establishing a good image of yourself and helps in the communication process.

SOME BEHAVIORAL GUIDELINES

Elson and Pickett (1988) suggest that we smile, talk, gesture, listen, and use what we hear while working with the language helper on the field. Their practical suggestions include the following: The language helper is not a machine, like a cassette tape. He has real feelings. So, treat him with great concern for his time and comfort.

1. “Imitate the pronunciation of each utterance. Ask the speaker to correct your pronunciation; insist that it would be a favor to you. accept any correction with appreciation and laugh at yourself for your mistakes. If you show any unhappiness or even embarrassment over your mistakes, people may soon stop correcting you."
2. Ask for repetition and make any necessary corrections in the firsttranscription. But don’t ask for a specific form to be repeated too many times at one sitting. if you can’t get it easily, leve it until later.
3. Don’t work too long at a time. Be careful to waatch the helper’s reactions to ascertain how much he can take.
4. In determining areas of meaning, ask questions that will lead to usage in the local language–not just equivalents in a second language.
5. Expect minor differences in the same form when elicited from different speakers. Make careful notes of these differences, as they may represent area dialects, male vs. female speech, or simply individual differences.
6. Expect differences in specific forms or translations from one day to the next as given by the same person. Alternate forms may be possible; or the speaker may be focusing on a different area of meaning of the same form. Remember that the native speaker is always right. ...
7. Don’t ask why the language helper says things the he does. he probably doesn’t know. every language is a unique and complex system. The fact that things are said differently thant he analyst expected should not require explanation from the native spaker. ...
8. If the langauge helper seems confused by one of your questions, leve the subject and go on to something else. We should nto leave the impression that the speaker ought to know something which he doesn’t seem to know. Or if the question seems to embarrass him, it may be you have said something which is not said in polite society ofthe culture. Later, as one learns more of the langauge, one can probably find out what it was that embarrassed the speaker.”

SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR ELICITING UTTERANCES

Consider also the following important steps when you start eliciting utterances from the target language. These steps are suggested by Elson and Pickett (1988):

1. Get some useful phrases that you should babble in order to get used to the rhythm of the language.
2. Get the expressions which that are used to continue the conversation, and elicit more words. Greetings and leave takings, etc. will be useful. Translation of these expressions may not be natural, so you need to actively enact the situation to get these expressions
3. Questions and answer-frames such as What is this? and This a . . . ., How do you say . . . ? What am I doing? What is s/he doing?
4. Elicit nouns first. Local situation and local context should be the background from which the names of objects should be elicited. Be aware that words that are common such as newspaper may not be found at all in a preliterate language. What is apparently relevant for the culture you are in should decide what words you would elicit.
5. Ask for the names of natural objects: sun, moon, star, sky, cloud, stone, tree, leaf, branch. flower, water, mountain, stream/river, . . . .
6. References to people or animals: man, woman, boy, girl, baby, horse, dog, snake, bee, etc, . . . .
7. Articles of food: bread, meat, fish, corn, beans, rice, fruit (or specific fruits), vegetables (or specific vegetables) . . . .
8. Names of parts of the body are usually easy to get. In some languages these words will always have some prefix to indicate possession. For example, in place of hand, the expression may be his hand, her hand, my hand, etc.
9. Get the words other than nouns in context. For example, noun phrases for numbers, adjectives, etc., are better collected in linguistic contexts.
10. Never ask for verbs out of context. You will see that the verb form may change according to the context more frequently, and that there may not be pure and simple verb roots in some languages.
11. Ask for simple sentences first. Then use these simple sentences to derive other possible elicitation sentences, "beginning with transitives and going on to intransitives and statives." Herebelow are some model derivations using a simple sentence, and these sentences are based on the market scene.

That lady is selling apples.
Thatlady is selling chickens.
That lady is selling corn.
A chicken is eating corn.
A dog is chasing the chicken.
The chicken is running.
The dog is barking.
The lady is yelling.
The chicken is fat.
The lady is fat.
The dog is skiny.
The apples are small.

TO CONCULDE

To conclude, the learner needs to get actively involved in the collection, analysis, and use of sentences, phrases, and words. He or she should master the sounds and their combinations, and suprasegmental elements such as stress or tone. Start with the simple element. (Although it is difficult to define what is simple and what is not simple, still you can start with something and be watchful as to whether your procedure could be further simplified. Length of the element or elements may be used as a simple criterion to begin with.) If you are not actively involved in the processes of learning, your performance and competence in the target language will not be impressive. Remember that language learning is easier for children, but, if you are an adult, you need to have better motivation and empathy for the target language.

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CONTENTS PAGE

CHAPTER 3
LEARNING THE SCRIPT OF ANOTHER LANGUAGE

SCRIPT IS A HUMAN INVENTION

How do we learn the script of another language? How did we learn the script of our own language? Did not our parents, teachers, and siblings hold our hand and help us to draw the letters? Did they not show that p and d are different, that g and q are different, when we failed to notice the difference? How many times we wrote s the wrong way? How we were confused when good is pronounced one way, but cool is pronounced in another way? We knew all the twenty six letters of the English alphabet, and yet were unable to write or pronounce some words correctly! Was it not frustrating?!

Remember that not all the languages spoken in this world are written. There are hundreds of languages still out there which do not have any script system. In the past, individual enterprising missionaries took devise script systems for many of these unwritten languages. Printing was introduced into many languages by these missionaries. Presently, Summer Institute of Linguistics, Wycliff Bible Translators, and Bible Societies all over the world are the premier missions agencies involved in the scientific study and description of unwritten languages in order to give these languages suitable writing systems. In addition to translating and publishing the Word of God in lesser known languages with or without script systems, mastery of the written language helps us to be meaningful participants of the culture of the society.

While language is the gift of God, writing systems are invented by the humans. Writing systems may or may not have focused on the representation of the spoken language when human groups had begun to fashion the “scripts” and to use them to express and communicate their ideas and actions. In other words, although we often seem to correlate writing to speech, in their origin the scripts may have had nothing to do with this aspect of correlation between speech and writing. There is no society which does not have a spoken language, but there are hundreds of societies which do not have any writing systems at all. It is also a fact that many societies had borrowed writing systems from other languages they came into contact in some way or the other. Sometimes a language may have borrowed some letters from another script system while maintaining its own script system. The script system of a language may include the signs for the numerals. It is also a fact that a script system may include some special symbols such as @, #, $, %, &, etc. Furthermore most languages may need punctuation marks, which also need to be learned. Another interesting fact is that the script systems may allow certain variations for the individual letters and their combinations. For example, cat is the same as cat, or Cat, or CAT, or cAt, or caT. We shall see some other variations a little later.

THREE TYPES OF WRITING SYSTEMS

Three types of writing systems appear to be widely in use. The logographic writing system is followed in languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The characters are not individual letters representing individual and distinct sounds. These stand for words or parts of words. Sometimes there may be some visual similarities between words or parts of words and the object or objects they refer to. Often the pronunciation of the words cannot be inferred from the characters by the learners. We need to learn the character as a whole, and associate the pronunciation of the word with the character. If you are learning modern Chinese you may have to learn about 2000 characters to meet the needs of day to day use. About the same number of characters (1850) needs to be learned in Japanese. Japanese children learn around 900 characters in their elementary school stage.

We often use logographic symbols along with the alphabet of the English language. For example, the signs for plus, minus, multiplication, division, equivalent/equal, lesser than, greater than, plus or minus, etc., are all logographs. These are logographic symbols, these do not indicate in their shape their pronunciation.

In syllabic writing, each letter stands for a syllable. The syllable is usually a combination of consonant and vowel. For example, the Japanese katakana syllabary, which may be used along with the karanji script, follows the syllabary system: ka, ga, sa, za, ta, da, na, ha, ba, pa, ma, ra, wa, fa, ki, gi, shi, ji, chi, ji, ni, hi, bi, pi, mi, ri, etc. Learners are required to master the character for each of the distinct syllables used in the language. They will spell a word not in letter as we do in English or German, but in syllables. And each syllable functions as a “letter.”

In the semi-syllabic and semi-alphabetic writing systems such as the ones followed in most languages of the Indian subcontinent, the learners are required to learn the symbols for vowels, consonants, and the combinations of vowels and consonants. In these languages the primary letter of the consonant may be so modified as to indicate its co-occurrence with the vowels. Each vowel has a simpler form which is combined with the consonants to form syllables. In this semi-syllabic and semi-alphabetic writing systems, we may be required to learn about 12 to 14 or even 15 primary vowel symbols, about the same number of their secondary symbols, and 18 to 30 primary consonant symbols. A total of about 250 to 350 symbols may be involved. Since these fall into a general pattern which is easily discernible, and since each syllable has the constant and unchanging pronunciation, depending upon the vowel it has, it may not be too difficult to master such systems in a short while. In fact studies indicate that one can master a script system of this type in about 2 to three weeks.

In the alphabetic system such as the one we use in writing English, there should be direct correspondence between the letters and the sounds they represent. While it is true that “instead of several thousand logograms, or several dozen syllables,” the alphabetic “system needs only a relatively small number of units, which it then proves easy to adapt to a wide range of languages” (Crystal, 1997:204), often the script systems tend to acquire complexity in several ways. We will illustrate this in a moment using the English alphabet. “The smallest alphabet seems to be Rotokos, used in the Solomon Islands, with 11 letters. The largest is Khmer, with 74 letters. In a perfectly regular system, as in some of the alphabets that have been devised by linguists to record previously unwritten languages, there is one grapheme for each phoneme. However, most alphabets in present-day use fail to meet this criterion, to some degree, either because the writing system has not kept pace with changes in pronunciation, or because the language is using an alphabet not originally designed for it. Languages vary greatly in their graphemic/phonemic regularity. At one extreme we find such languages as Spanish and Finnish, which have a very regular system; at the other, we find such cases as English and Gaelic, where there is a lack of correspondence between graphemes and phonemes is inevitably reflected in the number of arbitrary ‘spelling rules’ that children have to learn” (Crystal 1997:204).

“There are also many alphabets where only certain phonemes are represented graphemically. These are the ‘consonantal’ alphabets, such as Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic, where the marking of vowels (using the diacritics) is optional” (Crystal 1997:204).

Reading and spelling are closely related. It is my personal experience that reading does help spelling. However, it cannot be asserted that one leads to the other. In the past, there had been great insistence on mastering spelling, with the assumption that if one mastered spelling, reading automatically followed. In recent times, the trend has been to assume that if children are taught to read, spelling would automatically follow. Neither position seems to be wholly true.

While reading and spelling are somewhat connected with one another, research indicates that one does not necessarily entail the other. For example, “there are many people who have no difficulty in reading, but who have a major persistent handicap in spelling…. It is commonplace to find children who can read far better than they can spell” (Crystal 1987:213). However, in the early stages of learning, children tend to spell more correctly than they read correctly.

There are several reasons as to why the spelling in English seems to be nearly chaotic. There are more letter alternatives for a sound than there are sound alternatives for a letter in English. “For example, sheep has really only one possible pronunciation . . . ; whereas the form could be written in at lest three different ways – sheep, sheap, shepe (Crystal 1987:213). Researchers have suggested that in English there are 13.7 spellings per sound, but only 3.5 sounds per letter (Dewey 1971).

There are other reasons as well why spelling and pronunciation appear to be so divergent from each other in English. The history of the language, and the history of borrowing and printing provide many reasons for this divergence.

It is easy to teach the letters of the English alphabet, but very difficult to teach the association between letters and sound, mainly because a letter may represent many sounds, and a sound may be represented by more than one letter. I learned all the 26 letters, their sequence, and their citation pronunciation within a few days when I was in my fifth grade, and I also concluded that by this act I had completely mastered the English language! Soon I recognized how foolish and hasty I was in coming to such a conclusion! Even today I wonder how children all over the world are able to succeed in learning spelling in any language!

It is a good strategy to keep in mind the characteristics and the complexity of our own language when we attempt learning the script system of another language. This does not mean that we should expect the same types of difficulties and characteristics in the writing system we try to learn. For one thing it would help us to frame our questions about the script system we learn in an intelligent manner. We will compare and contrast our script with the script of the language we try to learn, and in the process we will have a better understanding and appreciation of the script systems in general. For another, through a proper understanding and analysis of our script system and how it operates, our ethnocentric ideas of our language (that it is the easiest to learn) will be kept under check. Mastery of every script system requires some disciplined approach and hard work. Moreover, we do not just learn the script, we learn the spelling of words, and how words might change shape and pronunciation under certain contexts (for example, sign and signature, idiotic and idiocy, electric and electricity).

Let us consider some of the complexities of the writing system used in English.

More often than not, the letters of the English alphabet are taught associating with a word in which the sound (or one of the sounds) represented by the letter is prominent. Ultimately, however, the students need to associate a primary sound with the letter, and to master the order in which the letters are presented in the alphabet.

Mastering the alphabetical order of letters is of practical importance. Without the knowledge of this order, students will not be able to use the dictionaries.

English has adopted the Roman script as its script. Long ago there were 27 letters used in the English alphabet. Now we have only 26 letters.

This number is small indeed when we consider the other languages in which the letters of the script may run into several dozens, if not more. However, in spite of the small number of letters in the English alphabet, the writing system presents several complexities which a second or foreign language learner may find hard to cope with. Diligence is certainly needed when you wish to learn spelling in any language.

The following are some of the features of the Roman script used in English. Because you are used to these features you may expect the same in the language you are about to learn. However, it is possible that the language you are about to learn may use a different set of features and this difference may cause some difficulty in learning the new writing system.

1. Left to Right direction. Languages in the Middle East, such as Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian, and languages of Afghanistan, India and Pakistan such as Pashto, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Urdu, Sindhi, Baluchi, and so on, with a variety of dialects, covering millions of people, use the right to left direction in writing their words, phrases and sentences. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean use top to bottom direction. Thus, there is a need for you to identify this distinction in the beginning. If you are learning a language which adopts a different direction in writing you will have some initial difficulty.
2. Writing on the line. English is written in straight line. A four-lined notebook helps students to learn which letters go above and which go below. Chinese characters or Persian/Arabic/Hebrew letters will demand a re-orientation in this respect from you. Perhaps you should find out how native children learn or are taught writing the letters. Perhaps you may be able to adopt the same strategy to some extent. There may be specially devised copy writing books in the language. Remember that a small change in the curve may lead to a different pronunciation. Compare d and b, o and p in your alphabet.
3. Shape and size of letters in the handwritten form. You may find it difficult to form the basic shape of some letters. You may have some difficulty in distinguishing between the shapes of some letters. Before you practice learning any letter, give yourself some practice with the special characteristics of the shapes of letters in the language. For example, second language learners of English benefit by practicing the curvy lines which closely resemble i, u, l and t. They are taught to look for the distinction between o, p, b, and d. They distinguish between p, g, and q, between l and t, between n and m, between l and k, between u, v, and w, and between y and g.
4. Hand movements. English uses both clockwise and counter-clockwise movements, top to bottom, and bottom to top movements. For every letter, there is a conventional way of moving the hand while writing the same. This conventional way is taught, and students encouraged not to deviate from it as much as possible. Following the conventional hand movements helps in joining letters and in gaining a good speed in writing. Likewise, you should identify and learn the conventional hand movements in writing and joining letters in your target language. Do not try to devise your own hand movements. As far as possible follow the steps and hand movements used in writing the letters in the target language. There may be some freedom allowed, however such freedom is not unlimited.
5. Subscript and Superscript. Many traditional script systems in Asia employ subscript and superscript additions to their normal writing. Handmovements may be confusing, but with a little concentrated effort such problems may be overcome easily. In addition, the order in which the subscript or superscript sound should be read would also pose some problems.
6. Capital letters. There is a complete set of capital letters in English. Except in the case of a few letters, capital letters and their corresponding small lower case letters are quite distinct from each other. As a result, the second or foreign language learners of English are taught to recognize the capital and small letters. Many languages may not have any provision for capitalization of letters. They may use some other ways to highlight the prominence of letters for meaning and/or ornamental purposes. In some languages, there is a clear distinction maintained between the handwritten form and the printed form of the letters. A diligent conversation with you language helper will bring out such differences and peculiarities. What is most important is that you develop a keen sense of pattern perception of the printed, display, and handwritten materials.
   The first word of a sentence in English must begin with a capital letter. Some words such as I must be written only in a capital letter whether it occurs in the beginning or middle or end of a sentence. Proper names must begin with a capital letter. There are several such important conventions which require the second/foreign language learner to master the use and writing of capital letters. Hand movements for the capital letters are different from the hand movements used for writing small, lower case letters. Students need to practice using capital letters by writing their own names and the names of towns, countries, months, etc. Look for any such conventions in the target language.
7. Small/lower case letters. More often than not, the beginners in English are first taught the small/lower case letters. By far these letters are more frequently used than the capital letters. Once again, the small letters form a set by themselves. The main focus of teaching the script revolves around the mastery of recognizing, writing small letters and associating them with their sound or sounds in English. What is the main focus of teaching the script of the target language you are about to learn? Is it that each letter be written distinctly, or is it that letters are to be joined in a word as in English? Is each letter pronounced clearly and prominently, or is it some letters are simply silent? Is the linear order maintained in writing the letters of a word the same as their order of pronunciation of these letters?
8. Joining letters. Conventional way of writing letters in English is to join them within a word or word-like unit. Joining one letter with another requires practice and adoption of hand movements conducive to joining. There are several combinations of letters which are more frequent than others. For example, combinations of ta, ti, et, ot, th, nt and dt appear to be more frequent than the combinations found in words such as scythe and shotgun. A traditional way to teach joining is to ask students to join all the 26 letters of the alphabet. Students were asked to write the model provided by the teacher many times, so that the students mastered the joining process. These days teachers prefer to give any and every language learning task in meaningful contexts. Accordingly, individual words are given to students and while they copy the word, they learn the letter joining process as well. Remember that it is important to show clearly how we make joins from the end of one letter to the beginning of the next. And this joining is not always the closest point. “You may follow the following model steps: Write c and h separately on the board. Point to where c ends and h begins and draw a line joining them. Then draw the joined letters several times, and describe the shape … then up to the top of the h, then down…. Ask students to copy the joined letters several times. ” Can you adopt some such method for the mastery of the letters of your target language, or for the mastery of characters in Chinese and Chinese-like script systems?
9. There are three styles of handwriting: Printing, Simple Cursive, and Full Cursive. In printing, we keep the letters separate, and they look the same as in printed books. In simple cursive, most letters are joined, but the same basic shape as in printing is maintained. I understand that in Britain most children learn this style, and most adults use it. However, in the United States, full cursive continues to be more popular. Is there any such distinction between styles of writing in your target language? In full cursive, all the letters are joined, and many have different shapes from printing.
10. Italics is another style used in printing for achieving certain effects. This style or convention also needs to be learned by the second or foreign language learner. Does your target language have any system of italics? If italics is not followed, is there any other devise applied in your target language to show emphasis.
11. Ornamental writing is hardly practiced these days. However, it continues to be used in the titles of movies, mastheads of newspapers, in degree certificates, etc., in English. What is the position in your target language?

When do we start learning handwriting?

My suggestion is that we start learning to write the letters and words as early as possible. Do not wait until you have learned enough of the language to speak and read. You should begin to learn individual letters from the very beginning. This will help you not only to get more practice in learning to write your target language but also to reinforce what you have learned. If you have learned to speak and comprehend some words and sentences, you should transfer these to the written level through copying exercises. And this process will reinforce what you have learned. Copying and writing is another form of memorization. Early mastery of the alphabet will help you to develop your reading skill.

What order to learn the letters?

It is not absolutely necessary to learn the letters of your target language in alphabetical order. Some have introduced letters, rather groups of letters, based on the similarity they have perceived in shape, and hand movements in writing the letters. For example, they may first introduce o, then p, then b, and then d. The basic underlying shape is assumed to be a circle in these letters. Or letters may be introduced based on the hand movements – how one letter can be extended from a simple hand movement to another.

The most popular way to learn the letters is to associate the first sound or the prominent sound of a word with a letter and then introduce the letter: a for apple, b for bat, c for cat, etc.

Yet another way to learn the letters is to associate the letter with an object in which the letter can be easily embedded. For example, the letter S will be embedded in the picture of a swan, and taught/learned.

Sesame Street TV program uses some of these techniques.

All these methods are useful for one reason or another. However, you need to choose that method with which you and your language helper are comfortable. The traditional methods of teaching and learning the letters of your target language may be sometimes “too difficult and laborious” to you. You may not be convinced about the efficiency and appropriateness of such methods. You may be even tempted to tinker with the script and offer some instant improvements to the system! You may also become involved in how to adopt your English alphabet in the target language so that the burden of learning the target language could be reduced or eliminated.

All these things may have been motivated by your frustration with learning a strange script and language! So, do not rush to make any drastic judgement of the traditional methods. Do not focus on script reform. Focus on learning and mastering the script. Remember that a script is a human invention. So, naturally like all human institutions it is subject to change and be left with the relics of the past which may or may not be relevant for the present. However, it is a historical and social product. It becomes deified in some sense. The Qur’an is no Qur’an if it is not written in the Arabic script. Hindus refused to write their languages in the Perso-Arabic script, when the Mughuls encouraged using that script to write the languages of north India. Buddhists consider the Pali script as the most authentic script for their scriptural texts. Of all the linguistic reforms, the script reform is the slowest and most difficult to accomplish.

An adult class would prefer a straightforward teaching of the letters with the citation pronunciation for each letter. On the other hand, children would be more interested in learning through games.

Generally speaking, letters with similar shapes are taught together. This helps students see important differences between them (for example, between “n” and “h”). Vowels are introduced near the beginning. This is useful as they are common, and can be joined to other letters to make words. Remember that whatever method is to be adopted, you must ultimately master the alphabetical order of the script system. Without this you cannot use reference materials such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesaurus, phone books, bibliographies, etc.

When do we learn the name of the letter? Just like knowing the alphabetical order, knowing the name of the letter is also important. When spelling words aloud, we need to use the name of the letter.

Copying is the best form of exercise for handwriting. You don’t have to worry about producing the words. You simply focus on copying the letters one after another to write the words. You will have good practice joining the letters while copying. Let you language helper write words on the blackboard, and/or in your notebooks and ask you to copy the words several times. Let him check. You may write the letters and ask the language helper to judge whether your hand movements are appropriate. Let him not focus on the final product. Let him closely observe how you arrive at the final product.

Doff (1988) suggests a technique called delayed copying. The teacher writes a word on the board and asks students to read it. Then she erases the word and students are asked to write the word from memory. Students think of the word as a whole in this process. You may adopt this process also. Explain it to the language helper and let him devise a suitable strategy for this session.

Handwriting includes not only the mastery of letters but also the styles in which the alphabet is written. You will continue to commit several errors such as mixing small and capital letters within a word, mirror image problems, wrong joins, failure to insert the necessary elements of a letter, failure to keep the words separate, introducing gaps where not needed, especially within a word, improper slanting of letters, improper use of capital letters or non-use of capital letters, etc.

Exercises should be devised to reduce, if not eliminate, such errors. For example, if your target language has the distinction between capital and small letters, your language helper may write a list of words on the board, including some names of towns, people, etc., but all with small letters. He will ask you to decide which words should begin with a capital letter, and say why. Then he may rub the words from the board, and then dictate them. You will write them down.

Very soon you will begin to recognize the problems you face and the problem letters and words that you should focus on. Remember to maintain a diary of your errors. This will help you avoid the errors in future.

KEEP THE FOLLOWING IN MIND:

1. There are many methods of learning the script system of a language. Choose the one that best suits your ability and needs.
2. These methods may or may not follow the traditional arrangement as the focus of teaching. However, ultimately you need to learn the traditional arrangement of the letters in your target script, because without a mastery of the traditional arrangement you will not be able to use reference materials such as dictionary, phone books, etc.
3. Sometimes it may be better to follow the method of learning the letters based on the shape similarity of the letters being learned. In this method you will learn a few limited number of letters as a single group, but you will use these letters immediately because the words will be simultaneously introduced along with the letters used in these words. So, you not only learn the letters but also a number of words.
4. Letters may be learned based on the arrangement of their frequency of occurrence also. It is not necessary that all the letters of a script system will be equally used. For example, the letter s occurs more frequently than many other letters of the English alphabet. In other words, the words beginning with or using s may be more numerous than many other letters in the English language. If there is already a study on the frequency of letters in your target language, then based on such study you may first learn the most frequent letter followed by the learning of less frequent letters of the target script.
5. In syllabic script systems and semi-syllabic and semi-alphabetic systems it may be useful to focus on the derivations of vowel and consonant combinations. A consonant may be suitably modified and in a consistent manner when a vowel is attached to it. Learning such patterns is easier and will help learn the script faster and better.
6. You should always focus on the hand movements used in writing the letters. As already pointed out, left to right, right to left, subscript, and superscript features need to be learned.
7. If the script system focuses on the classification of letters into vowels and consonants, learn the distinction. In some languages there may be some overlapping between the consonant and vowel letters. This overlapping must be learned. A separate chart for the consonants and vowels with illustrating words would be good help.
8. Each letter has mnemonic pronunciation attached to it. These pronunciation or citation sound for each letter may or may not be identical to the sound it represents on most occasions. Yet you need to learn the mnemonic pronunciation attached to each letter along with the other real pronunciations attached to the letter. For example, the letter c has the mnemonic pronunciation si, but its real value on most occasions is k or ch.
9. A letter may have different shapes depending upon the context of its occurrence with other letters. The primary letter as well as its secondary representations should be learned.

SPELLING

A few points at the outset itself: variation in pronunciation within a society is tolerated, but variation in spelling within a society is prohibited. If you spell words wrongly, you will be committing a “serious social error.” You may be considered as an illiterate or an ignorant person. So, it is important for you to master the spelling of words.

O’Grady et al (1993) list the following as illustrative of the problems with English orthography:

1. Some letters do not represent any segment in a particular word. Thorough, sign, give.
2. A group of two or more letters can be used to represent a single segment. Think, ship.
3. A single letter can represent a cluster of two or more segments. Saxophone, exile.
4. The same letter can represent different segments in different words. on, bone, one.
5. The same segment can be represented by different letters in different words. /uw/ in rude, loop, soup, new, sue, to, two.

Remember that such problems may not be found in other languages. You should, however, look for problems of spelling specific to your target language. Many languages display alternative spellings for the same word. One and the same sound may be represented by two different letters. Two sounds may be represented by one letter. The letter may be pronounced in one way in the beginning of a word, in another way at the end of a word, and still another way when the letter is associated with another letter.

The relationship between the oral and written language (including the relationship between the sounds and their combinations, and their representation in writing) is rather complex. Fortunately for the native speakers of English, there is greater similarity between the oral and written styles, if these native speakers are educated. However, in many other languages, especially the languages spoken in the Third World countries, the gulf between the oral and written styles is often very wide. We talk about the implications of this gap for speaking in our chapter on how to learn the sounds of another language. Often it is better to start learning the spoken style first and then switch over to the written style. The spelling to be learned in such contexts poses some complex difficulties. You should anticipate such problems. There are possibilities for inconsistencies: one letter -- many sounds, many letters -- one sound, etc. No script system is ever perfect; script is a career of culture, both secular and religious. There are sociolinguistic rules relating to the use of script systems. You need to ask for and identify these rules, and then learn to use them.

Look for the possibility of deriving one letter from another. Look for the similarities and differences in the shape of letters introduced. Look for the hand movements: clockwise and anticlockwise movements, crisscross movements, etc.

If you are charged with the responsibility of devising a script for the target language, prefer to go for the alphabetic writing. However, there may be political, sociolinguistic and religious considerations which may pose the need to adopt the script of the dominant language of the area. Use some modified form of the Roman script because of the advantages it would bestow upon the people group in terms of technology of all sorts.

Always remember that learning a script system is not just learning the letters of the script. You need to learn the spelling as well, apart from other tasks.

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CONTENTS PAGE

CHAPTER 4
LEARNING THE SOUNDS OF ANOTHER LANGUAGE

REMEMBER THE FOLLOWING

1. No two languages have the same set of sounds.
2. No two languages have the same sounds which occur in the same positions all the time.
3. Spelling may hide the sound values. Spelling may misguide you as to their pronunciation. sign, clap
4. Contexts may change the value of the letter/sound. electric/electricity
5. Native speakers’ pronunciation is the correct pronunciation, not yours.
6. It may be easy to pronounce the sounds correctly in isolation, but it may be difficult to pronounce them correctly when they are used in words and sentences. azure
7. Exact and native-like pronunciation is never the goal of learning another language.
8. Using a language for communication is the goal of learning that language. However, good pronunciation is important for communication.
9. You will never be able to speak another language if you do not open your mouth, if you feel shy, or feel afraid that you will be mimicked and laughed at, and that you will be committing errors in your speech.
10. Signs, gestures, and written language have their own limitations. They may not be an effective substitute for the oral language. So, open your mouth and blurt out in the new language.
11. Get as many minimal pairs as possible and practice using them.

SPEAKING

On most occasions, speaking in a language is synonymous with the knowledge of that language. For most of us, learning and mastering another language means mastery of speaking in that language. Speaking is the most natural thing to do in our first langauge. When you want to learn another language also, we generally tend to emphasize speaking over reading or writing.

While speaking in our first language comes to us in a natural manner, speaking in another language past our childhood often requires some conscious effort in recognizing, identifying, producing, combining, and using the sounds of that language. Without sounds no real speech in the ordinary sense takes place. Language is often transmitted and received via sounds.

IMITATION AND REPETITION

In learning the sounds of another language, the following three steps are highly useful: imitation of the sound or sounds, repetition of the sound or sounds, comparison and contrast of the sound or their combinations being learned with the sound or sounds of your first language.

As you begin to get exposed to and learn the new language:

1. You will notice that some new sounds not found in your first language are used in your target language.
2. Some sounds that you consider to be simple and essential, for example, the sounds sh and z in English, may not be used in your target language.
3. You may have only two or three nasal sounds in your first language such as [m] and [n], but your target language may have six or seven nasal sounds such as [m], [n],[ñ],[η] etc., posing great challenges to your capacity to discriminate between and identify distinct sounds. similar things may happen to other groups of sounds such as s-sounds, r-sounds, and l-sounds.
4. Some sounds that are used in your first language may assume certain colorings in the target language which are not common in your first language.
5. You may also notice that the sounds that are to be kept distinct in your first language, for example, k and g in English, may not be kept distinct and may be used interchangeably in your target language, following some context-sensitive rules. For example, if you are learning Tamil, a language spoken in south India and Sri Lanka, k may be used in the word intial position, and g may be used immediately following a nasal sound.
6. Certain sounds that are commonly and easily combined and used in words in your first language may not be combined at all in your target language.
7. The target language may have entirely different types of stress patterns, or tones, or even intonations.
8. You may also find that the number of sounds in your target language may not be the same as the number of sounds in your first language.

There are many other features by which the sound patterns of your first language may differ from the sound patterns of your target language.

You must approach the new language with the assumption that it may be different from your first language, but you should also assume that there may also be similarities. It is possible to use your first language speech habits to master and use the common sounds between the two languages, but the new sounds would demand developing new speech habits.

Imitation of individual sounds and their combinations is best done by obtaining minimal pairs of words from the target language. For example tin and din, sip and ship, fill and full, mud and mad, pit and bit, mill and kill, pill and bill are minimal pairs of words in the sense that each pair has contrasting sounds in the same position in the words, and this contrast results in or signifies the meaning difference.

By imitation, you try to produce the words with some acceptable pronunciation. By repetition, you are able to internalize the procedures to produce these sounds. By contrast and comparison, you become aware of the similarities and differences and begin to use the sounds in an acceptable manner.

AUDITORY DISCRIMINATION

It is important for you to develop correct and acceptable auditory discrimination of the sounds used in your target language. That is, when you listen to the sounds, words, phrases and sentences in the target language, you should be able to discriminate and correctly recognize the individual sounds and their combinations. For example, if a second or foreign language learner of English has difficulty in auditorily discriminating between [r] and [l], words such as rice and lice would seem to be the same to him. And he will have great difficulty in producing these two as distinct sounds. In other words, correct auditory discrimination and recognition of sounds helps you to produce these sounds correctly. Remember that not every sound in your target language would be a stranger to you. However, each language has a few sounds “peculiar” to itself, or so think the native speakers of your target language. Sometimes success in learning and mastering the target language may be measured by the native speakers of your target language in terms of your skill in using these “peculiar” sounds and their combinations!

Auditory recognition and discrimination of the sounds and their combinations is better achieved by attentive listening with help from your language helper as to the distinctions you should look for. This help is better presented through a list of minimal pairs, with meanings for the words specified in some manner. Sometimes the linguists do not encourage you to focus on the meaning of words used for auditory discrimination. While there is a lot to recommend for this approach, some indication of the meaning is always helpful. So, ask for some gloss, but do not worry about the exact nature of the meaning of the words used for auditory discrimination and recognition.

Learners are generally discouraged from trying to learn to produce and recognize the target language sounds in isolation. They are encouraged to imitate and repeat meaningful words, phrases or sentences for every language exercise.

Auditory discrimination and recognition of sounds and their combinations should be done every time you meet with your language helper or teacher, perhaps in the beginning of your “class.” Record the minimal pairs on audio cassette and at home, listen to the tape repeatedly until you feel that you are comfortable with the recognition of the target language sounds and their combinations.

MINIMAL PAIRS

Minimal pairs are hard to get for all the sounds and their combinations in the target language. Sometimes your language helper may have difficulty in understanding the concept of minimal pairs of words/sounds. You may have to demonstrate what you mean by minimal pairs of sounds/words by giving some simple examples from English, and/or by drawing pirctures of objects which these words mean. It will do good if you can make it a habit to list the minimal pairs of words as and when you come across these in the target language.

Some minimal pairs from English are given below. Can you add to theis list? pill, bill, mill, nil, fill, till, dil, pill, sip, ship, kill, bill, gill, lip, lid, lick, slip, grip, trip, fight, sight, night, might, east, feast, nap, nab, tap, top, seal, chill, Jill, zeal, leaf, reef, feel, veal, shill, cap, gap, gab...........

How many minimal pairs of words you can make from out of the following Tamil words?

APPROXIMATION

From minimal pairs, you may go to the production of meaningful short phrases and sentences. Imitate and repeat after your language helper. Ask your language helper to judge your pronunciation/production of these sounds as to their comprehensibility and acceptability. It is possible that your language helper may not like to offend you by saying that your pronunciation is awful. You should ask him to let you know whether the way you produce the sounds would be comprehensible to average native speakers of the target language.

It is possible that in spite of many repetitions you may still be unable to approximate the native speakers’ pronunciation with regard to some special sounds of the target language. You should not linger on to solve this problem once for all. Move forward to the other items for imitation, repetition, and comparison and contrast.

SOME HELP FROM LINGUISTICS

When you find out that your pronunciation of some sounds, their combinations, and other aspects of pronunciation is not up to the acceptable and comprehensible level, you need to discuss the matter with your language helper in some detail.

Your helper may recognize the differences in pronunciation, but may not be in a position to specify why this happens to be so. In other words, he may have no technical tool to pinpoint the problem and help you with some techniques to master these sounds. If you have some knowledge of the general principles and techniques of phonetics and phonology, you will be able to offer suggestions or alternative explanations to your helper and then he would choose the best that describes your problem. This would help you to work on the problem you face and solve it ultimately.

Suppose that you are learning one of the languages of the Indo-Aryan family or of the Dravidian family spoken in the Indian subcontinent. You will come across t-like sounds and you will often be unable to pronounce these sounds correctly because your first language [English] does not have these sounds. These t-like sounds are pronounced by curling back the tip of the tongue and making a closure of the air passage in the middle part of the palate. On the other hand the t-sounds (t, d) in English are pronounced with the tip of the tongue touching the fleshy part immediately behind the upper teeth. You describe in general terms where your tongue is placed, whether you make a complete blockade or closure of the airstream, and how you release your tongue from the position it took at first instance. Ask your informant what he does when he produces the t-like sound. Then try to emulate his description in the production of that particular sound. You may not succeed at first instance. You will make several attempts approximating the description given by him or elicited by you from your language helper. Approximation is the key word. Your goal is not perfect production, but approximate production! Perfect auditory combination is desired, but not perfect articulation of the sound!

VOWELS: PLACES AND MANNER OF ARTICULATION

Sounds in every human language may be classified into various categories based on the manner these are produced and on the points or places inside the mouth where the speech is produced. For example, two overarching major classification of the speech sounds in any language is between the vowels and the consonants.

In the production of the vowel sounds, there is practically no interruption of the air stream. The air pumped out of the lungs is released with out interruption.

The tongue takes several levels such as high (for [i] and [u]), mid (for [e] and [o]), and low (for [a]) in broad terms.

The quality of the sound produced may be modified by the fact whether the lips are protruded in their production. For example, the vowel [i] uses the same height of the tongue (high) as the vowel [u], but in the production of the latter the lips are rounded.

In the production of the vowel i, in addition to the high position the tongue is placed within the mouth, the front of the tongue is employed. On the other hand, in the production of the vowel [u], in addition to the high position the tongue is placed in the mouth, the back of the tongue is employed along with the rounding of the lips.

The production and auditory recognition of the vowel sounds are usually more difficult than the production and recognition of the consonants in the target language. That is one of the reasons why most second language learners, whose first language is especially from the non-European families of languages, often have difficulty in correctly mastering the vowels of English. The dipthongs (combination of a vowel and a vowel-like sound in English), the subtle reduction in vowel quality, for example, the [i] in alimony), the rules relating to the placement of stress, and the rules relating to aspiration in the beginning of a word, etc., often pose problems to the adult second/foreign language learners of English.

The vowels [i], [u], [e], [o], and [a] may be considered as "basic vowels." languages do make changes inthe quality ofthese vowels to derive their own peculiar brands of vowels. Often the vowel [a] is not rounded, but in several languages there may be adisticntion made between this unrounded [a] and a rounded version of the same. Similarly, languages do make changes in these 'basic' vowels in terms of the height of the tongue, part of the tongue used, and lip rounding to derive additonal vowels for use in them.

The golden rule in such cases is that we make our best efforts to approximate the native speakers’ pronunciation in order to make our speech sufficiently comprehensible to the native speakers. Sometimes, poor or approximate pronunciation could still be used if you can supplement it with writing down the word in question for the benefit of your listener. Or you can show the picture of the object whose name you are trying to pronounce! There are other ways of supplementing your poor and indequate mastery so that communication between you and the native speakers of your target language is made more efficient for the moment until you consciously overcome your difficulties with specific sounds and words. The point is that you should never allow yourself to be discouraged, because that would lead you to silence and reluctance to use your target langauge.

CONSONANTS: PLACES OF ARTICULATION

In English the following places of articulation are used in the production of consonant sounds:

Bilabial sounds are produced using both the lips. For example, p, b, and m are bilabial sounds.

Labiodental sounds are produced when the lower lip touches the upper teeth. For example, f and v are labiodental sounds.

Interdental sounds are produced by placing the front part of tongue between the upper and lower teeth. For example, the word intial sounds in words such as think, thank, thigh, this, that, thought, and the word medial sound in words such as nothing, soothing, mouthing,seething, and the word final sound in words such as moth, math, path, mouth, Seth, etc., are prduced by placing the front of the tongue between the upper and lower teeth.

Palatal sounds are produced by raising the front/middle of the tongue towards the roof the mouth. For example, the ch in church, search, torch, champion, etc. are produced by raising the front of the tongue (not the tip of the tongue to touch the roof of the mouth (hard palate). In some languages it is the middle of the tongue that is raised towards the roof of the mouth. Other examples of the palatal sounds are the initial sound in words such as jump, jar, James, just, etc., and medial sound in words such as Ajax, ajar, etc. In the following words the word final sound is a palal sound: orange, garage, judge, nudge, package, etc.

Alveolar sounds are produced by raising the tip of the tongue to touch or make a constricted passage with the teeth ridge behind the upper teeth.The initial sounds in the following words are alveolar sounds: time, dime, lemon, nip, fill, sip, zip, rib, etc.

In some languages a clear distinction between the alveolar, interdental and dental sounds are made. Dental sounds are produced by raising the front of the tongue and touching or making a constricted passage with the back of the upper teeth. Note that the tip of the tongue is not used here. Tip of the tongue is used in the production of the alveolar sounds, whereas the front of the tongue is used in the production of the dental sounds. Note also that the tongue is not kept in between the upper and lower teeth as done in the production of the interdental sounds. The front of the tongue is clearly behind the upper teeth in the production of dental sounds.

Another sound type using the front/tip of the tongue is called the retroflex sound (not used in English). In the production of the retroflex sound, the tip of the tongue is