Methodology in Language Learning: Informal speech

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It is necessary to draw a distinction between formal speech or 'spoken prose' and the informal speech used in most spontaneous conversation. This is not, of course, a simple binary opposition: there are many intermediate gradations, ranging from the extremely formal (ceremonial formulae, some political speeches), through the fairly formal (news-reading, lectures), to the fairly informal (television interviews, most classroom teaching) and the very informal (gossip, family quarrels)". But for the purposes of this discussion a firm division will be made: any types of discourse which fall more or less under the first two categories I will call 'formal', those in the last two 'informal'. Informal speech is usually both spontaneous and colloquial; formal speech is characteristically neither. Some intermediate types of discourse may be one but not the other: the speech of a character in a play, as delivered by an actor, may use colloquial language but is not spontaneous.

 

Most of the discourse we hear is quite informal, being both spontaneous and colloquial in character; and some of the skills the learner needs to develop are closely bound up with the peculiarities of this kind of speech. Of these there are many, but I should like here to dwell on four: redundancy, 'noise', colloquial language and auditory character. Please note that the first two terms are used here rather idiosyncratically, as defined in the two paragraphs which follow.

 

In ordinary conversation or even in much extempore speechmaking or lecturing we actually say a good deal more than would appear to be necessary in order to convey our message. Redundant utterances may take the form of repetitions, false starts, re-phrasings, self-corrections, elaborations, tautologies and apparently meaningless additions such as 'I mean' or 'you know'. This redundancy, however, is not as unnecessary as it

would seem. Just as it enables the speaker to work out and express what he really means as he goes along, so it helps the listener to follow him by providing an abundance of extra information and time to think. The message of a piece of spontaneous talk is thus on the whole delivered much more slowly and repetitiously than that of rehearsed, read or planned speech. It is also, as we have previously noted, frequently interrupted by the listener's interpolations, the responses to which may serve as further redundant material.

 

The opposite of redundancy (extra information) is 'noise', which occurs when information is not received by the listener because of interference. 'Noise', as I am using the term here, may be caused not only by some outside disturbance, but also by a temporary lack of attention on the part of the listener, or by the fact that a word or phrase was not understood because it was mispronounced or misused or because the listener simply did not know it. In any such case, a gap is left which is filled, as far as the listener is concerned, by a meaningless buzz. What the listener( has to do is try to reconstruct more or less what the information was that he missed.

 

In most languages there are marked differences between the formal (or literary) and colloquial varieties. The former is used not only for written communication but also for all kinds of formal speech: lectures, reports and so on; whereas the latter is confined to informal conversation and is rarely written. In Arabic the difference between the two is so great that children actually have to relearn their own language when they go to school. In English, as in most other languages, the distinction is less marked, but it is there all the same. The sounds a listener absorbs during a normal conversation bear only a partial resemblance to a transcript in normal orthography, which in its turn bears only partial resemblance to a corresponding version in formal prose. The difference in the first stage is one of pronunciation; in the second in actual choice of words.

 

The actual vocabulary and structures used will also be different in some respects from those of prepared texts. The reader of transcripts of spontaneous conversations is struck, for example, by the number of occurrences of items such as 'I mean', 'sort of', 'just', 'you know', which would probably not occur in prepared speech. There are also some actual changes in lexis. In colloquial speech we would be far more likely to hear expressions such as 'a lot', 'get to', 'for ages', 'stuff', 'guy', than their more formal equivalents 'much/many', 'reach', 'for a long time', 'material', 'man'.

 

There is a distinct difference between the auditory effect of a piece of spoken prose and that of informal conversation. The former is characterized by a fairly even pace, volume and pitch. Spontaneous conversation, on the other hand, is jerky, has frequent pauses and overlaps, goes intermittently faster and slower, louder and softer, higher and lower.

 

To summarize, we may say that most (but not all) of our real-life listening activity is characterized by the following features:

ü    We listen for a purpose and with certain expectations.

ü    We make an immediate response to what we hear.

ü    We see the person we are listening to.

ü    There are some visual or environmental clues as to the

meaning of what is heard.

ü    Stretches of heard discourse come in short chunks.

ü    Most heard discourse is spontaneous and therefore differs from formal spoken prose in the amount of redundancy, 'noise' and colloquialisms, and in its auditory character.

 

Sometimes particular situations may lack one or more of these characteristics - when watching television we are not normally expected to respond, when listening to a lecture we may have to hear uninterrupted speech for a very long time indeed- but it is only very rarely that none of them is present at all.

 

 

Bibliography:

 

1.    Brown, H.D. (2000): Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. White Plains, NY: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. Gass,

2.    S.M. I L. Selinker. (2008): Second Language Acquisition. An Introductory Course. New York: Routledge. VanPatten,

3.    Leaver, B.L; Ehrman, M; Shekhtman, B. (2005): Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition. CUP

4.    B. i J. Williams. (red.) 2007: Theories in Second Language Acquisition. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publisher

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