English from the Other Side

Elizabeth Anne, France
E-mail: Elizabeth.Anne@ujf-grenoble.fr

Most people come into language teaching because they are interested in languages. Personally, I feel very much an adopted, rather than a natural member of the English teaching community, since I started off life as a scientist from Yorkshire (UK) and crossed the channel to France as a Physicist who was "nul en langues"

I vividly remember my frustration when, at international conferences, my NNS fellow physicists, after successfully presenting their paper and effortlessly answering questions and who were also quite able to hold conversations outside the conference room, would nevertheless say to me (the English speaker) when coming out of a lecture given by a NS, "but I'm not really good at English, I don't understand "native speakers" when they speak". (my very free translation of "je ne comprends pas les anglo-saxons quand ils parlent"). Just being able to name this reaction as "language insecurity" was one of the pleasures I gained from becoming an ESP teacher.

For many years now, I have been a teacher of English to the Scientists at the University Joseph Fourier, in Grenoble (France) and, in view of my initial frustration at the effect of NS on my French collegues, I have followed with great interest the emergence of the concept of World Englishes (though the spellchecker still refuses the plural) although somehow the ELF / EIL debate rather reminds me of the Ebonics debate or Ogdens 1930's attempt to introduce Basic English as an international language.

However, even at its most basic level, the whole notion of World Englishes is totally alien to the EFL teaching "within the system" here in France. In the highly centralised French National Education system, a TEFL diploma together with a background in Physics in no way made me eligible for the job I had been doing for a long time as a "vacataire" at the University - teaching English to Physicists. The only means of becoming a fully fledged member of staff was to take a competitive exam in English Literature called the CAPES. To my great surprise I succeeded and thus gained entry to a year in a French teacher training institution (the IUFM) where I was told that teaching "Anglo-Saxon" culture was an important part of English language teaching! After the initial shock of thinking I was expected to teach the language of Beowulf - I realised that by "Anglo-Saxon" a French person means a) American, b) British, and c) Australian in that order and stopping there.
When teaching English to Scientists, a big problem is that University-level scientists worldwide are exposed to two extremes of English, one the very formal academic English of research papers, and the other, the incredibly informal register of NSs at Physics conferences. The level of informality of NS physicists is quite "shocking" to a French person, coming from a culture rife with formality, as can been seen when you compare the "Bonjour Madame" of the French customs official, with the "just sign here luv" of his British counterpart when entering the country.

On the contrary, for the British or American scientist, coming from a culture where "Public Speaking" is an art form in itself, presenting a paper orally at a conference in front of a very limited audience (a very special discourse community) is the chance to flex his Public Speaking muscles and "entertain" his audience - as I discovered when I filmed and transcribed the lectures given at "The 5th European Powder Diffraction" conference in Palme (Italy) in 1999.

At last I was able to explain my initial frustration when attending such lectures as a physicist. Idiomatic expressions such as "how did we get a handle on this", and "wrapping this all together" - followed, in the course of the same lecture, by "and now just to wrap up…" - or even the idiom used above: "flex your muscles", would never be encountered in a Physics research paper. Comparing the Acts of the Conference with what was said showed that the "volume anomaly" became "the size of this thing" etc. etc. etc. Nothing new here, now that Spoken English has finally been the object of study thanks to the progress in electronics.
But there remains this problem of English being described as "Anglo-Saxon". Whatever the status of the English language nowadays, one cannot deny that the language was born on that little island north west of Europe. And a look at the history of that island gives us a history of the English language. (This is explained for my students on their website http://dsu-net.ujf-grenoble.fr/pool/anglais/enseignants/eanne/AngloNorman/speechi.html)And who had an important influence on the language after the Saxons? The Normans of course. So if we just skip the Vikings, (sorry Historians) we can say that the plain, simple, down to earth farming communities of the Saxons were supplanted by the feudal system imposed by the aristocratic "upper-class" Normans. Once again, the idea is not new, the story being told in the first few pages of the "Précis d'Histoire de la Littérature Anglais" by Robert Escarpit (1953) and before that by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) in the opening chapter of Ivanhoe where one can read:

Therein lays the secret. For every word of "Saxon" origin - the term is used rather loosely here - there is a word of "Norman origin"; thus graveyard and cemetery.
Or take for instance the very common words mend and repair. I think it is reasonable to say "I mended my car" or "I had it repaired" and the Norman / Saxon doublet retains a flavour of its origins. Plain and down-to-earth "mend"- I did it myself, or the somewhat more upper-class "repair"- when someone else did the work. This more or less corresponds to a formal or informal register. (For the notion to be workable we have to take on-board all the concepts of vagueness, fuzziness and family resemblances offered by modern philosophy ). The point of all this is that a half an hour explanation to my classes of physicists knocks the NS as a model for international English right off its pedestal. Once the NNS has a very clear notion that the NS, by using his/her local 'dialect' in a situation of international communication, is actually hindering universal comprehension, the language insecurity can be dispensed with. What's more, introducing the history of England (with a reason) into the class opens up a whole new perspective of "What is a country /nationality" when you see the extent of the Plantagenet's domination (from the Artic to the Pyrenees) and the region dominated by the Francs (a small area around what is now Paris) in the 10th to 12th centuries. In view of the origins of the Plantagenets, is it reasonable to call one Britain and the other France? We arrive quickly at notions of dominated populations and other interesting concepts.
A second advantage is that this "review" of English gives rise to meaningful (wrong way round) dictionary work. The students look up the 'long' word they understand in a Learner's dictionary and find equivalent 'simple' words (in the definition) which they are usually not familiar with!

Although all this is relevant only to learners with one of the Romance languages as L1, I am especially pleased to air my views at a time when the "Plain English Campaign" http://www.plainenglish.co.uk is gaining momentum in the UK. Although they are doing a lot of good work, a quick check of their "words to be avoided" list gives a direct illustration of the phenomenon described here. Words to be avoided, given first with their "simpler" equivalent behind include for example: "additional (extra), commence (start), complete (fill in), etc." i.e. they hope to dispense with all the words which are "transparent" for speakers of Italian, French, Spanish, etc. and replace them with their (incomprehensible for low level students) Saxon equivalents.
My final word is for EFL specialists who persist in believing that the "long words" are the difficult ones for all NNSs. For 650 million speakers of Latin-based languages, it's the long words which are easy and the plain simple words which pose a problem.

Notes