Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 2; April 1999

INTERLINGUAL TRAINING AND TECHNOLOGY

Peter Wilberg, Language Engineering Services

Page 1 of 3

Interlingual Training is a new approach to language learning and teaching developed in one-to-one work with managers needing English for business and special purposes. It enables even low level students to rapidly master complex grammatical structures, and trains them to make use of the language benchmarks provided by (a) their own native-language professional discourse, and (b) authentic texts related to their own professional communication needs. "Interlingual Builder" is a pioneering innovation in CALL authorware designed to complement this approach to teaching. With it, the teacher can create customised interlingual exercises from parallel texts generated in class or already available in the form of translated corporate documentation. These exercises train the learner to identify the target language equivalents of important terms and phrases highlighted in a matching native-language or L1 text. This helps learners to bring their own interlanguage - their existing, limited version of the target language, closer to the benchmark lexis and structures contained in the target language or L2 text. Called "Interlingual Trainer", the learner interface thus builds on the learner's knowledge and expertise of their own vocational language or "L3", transferring this in stages from its expression in the L1 to the L2, and using the language benchmarks provided by authentic oral or written texts to upgrade their interlanguage. Learners can use Interlingual Trainer "on the job" as well as for self-study. It's built-in Interlingual Term Finder allows them to search the corpus of company documentation for the terms and phrases relevant to a specific communication task, and in this way prepare themselves for meetings, presentations etc. By encouraging the proactive use of language resources such as bilingual documentation, it promotes learner independence.

A knowledge of the learner's native language can provide the language teacher with invaluable shortcuts for teaching important structures in the target language, whilst at the same time avoiding the need to explain these structures with complex grammatical jargon or 'metalanguage'. Passive verb structures, for example, can be taught with reference to German verb patterns with werden, since the German structure modal + participle + werden (e.g. sollte benutzt werden) is used in the same way as the English passive form modal + be + past participle (e.g. should be used). Given this, there is then no need to present elaborate explanations of the English passive voice and its functions. Such grammatical explanations easily foster a dangerous myth - the myth that English (or any other target language) is uniquely endowed with linguistic structures that serve particular functions. The teacher may even believe this myth: giving deep philosophical explanations of the differences between the various English tenses, for example, as if other languages had absolutely no way of make similar distinctions between actions at different points and periods of time.

For several decades now, it has been regarded as pedagogically and indeed politically incorrect to have recourse to the learner's mother tongue in the language classroom or in teaching materials. I believe this to be a largely Anglo-American attitude, born of the fact that teachers, especially in England, usually have to deal with multilingual classes of students with different mother tongues. And yet the prejudice against interlingual teaching is one that has been exported around the world, and inculcated in many non-native teachers of English - even though the latter generally teach monolingual classes in which an interlingual approach would be ideal. The main charge levelled against interlingual teaching methods is that they encourage learners to speak by consciously translating words from their mother tongue. I would argue that the very opposite is the case: namely that teaching which pays no heed to interlingual features (important similarities and differences between the native and target language) allows learners to fall into the trap of unconscious mistranslation - thinking that something can be said in the same way in the target language as in the native language when in fact it cannot, or not realising when it can.

In the last analysis, no two language are wholly similar or wholly different in any given respect. Rather, they reveal differences in the very areas where they are similar and reveal similarities in the very areas in which they are different. The methodology of Interlingual Training is based on interlingual 'simference' i.e. on an intimate understanding of the similarities-in-difference and differences-in-similarity between a given first language or L1 and the target language or L2. Simference arises for two reasons. One is that all languages are in their own way 'interlanguages' - that is to say, they combine elements from other languages. English is simferent to both German and French because it is itself an evolving interlanguage compounded of elements from both the Germanic and Romance languages. Interlingual Training exploits this intrinsic interlinguality in language learning and teaching.

Another reason for simference is that, as Chomsky showed, there are indeed common structures uniting most of the world's languages. The noun phrase is one such structure, as is the combination of such phrases with verbs and verb groups. Linguistics is an endless quest to perfect an academic "metalanguage" by which to represent and describe such universal structures. But one does not need to be an expert linguist, nor possess a whole arsenal of abstruse linguistic terms, in order to learn how to intuitively perceive the common phrasal constituents of sentences in two or more languages. I term these common multi-word phrasal constituents or "chunks" meta-lingual units; a category which includes noun phrases, verb groups, and their respective adjuncts (eg. post-modifying and adverbial phrases).

Interlingual Learning is not learning by translation but learning by discovery. To begin with the learner is presented with matching sentences in both their native language and the foreign or target language. For example (a) 'I want a coffee.' (English) and 'Ich will ein Kaffee' (German), or (b) 'I don't want any coffee' (English) and 'Ich will/möchte kein Kaffee.' (German). The learner then has to identify the exact equivalent of a particular native item in the target language sentence. An English speaker learning German, for example, may be asked to (1) find the equivalent of the English verb want in the German sentence 'Ich will einen Kaffee.' (2) find the equivalent of the English phrase don't want any in the German sentence 'Ich will keinen Kaffee'. Conversely, a German speaker learning English may be asked to find the English equivalent of will in the English sentences 'I want a coffee' and to find the equivalent of will keinen in 'I don't want any coffee'. The structures and expressions that the learners find in this way will often conflict with their own personal interlanguage - their current "half-way house" way of speaking the target language- helping them to bring this interlanguge closer to the target language.

The fundamental linguistic principle on which Interlingual Training methodology is based is the understanding that speaking or writing our native language is itself translation - the translation of meanings into words. Using parallel texts as the basis of language exercises raises the learner's awareness of the different ways in which equivalent meanings are translated into the target language. This is a quite different from encouraging learner's to translate words from one language to another - a common misunderstanding of the work of the translator. The purest form of verbal or linguistic translation is essentially literal, word-for-word translation - of the sort that, in its end results, reveals in full clarity the enormous differences in vocabulary, syntax and word order between languages. Only hermeneutic translation - the translation of meanings - reveals in its end result truly equivalent words, structures and expressions. Hermeneutic translation involves not only replacing individual native language words with target language ones, but re-placing them - reordering them in new sequences and regrouping them in new phrasal chunks. It also involves the replacement and re-placement of these larger multi-word chunks. For this purpose it is of great help to straight away learn the target language equivalents of these multi-word chunks, something which is possible because they constitute meta-lingual units - phrasal sentence constituents common to both native and target languages.

The increasing availability of parallel texts, whether in the form of multi-lingual websites, internationally published books or translated corporate documentation, provides an ideal resource not only for comparative linguists but for interlingual teaching and learning. It allows textual corpora to be searched for interlingual simferences: contrasting multi-word structures in two or more languages which are semantically equivalent. Once identified, these provide a basis for interlingual language exercises, giving learners the essential keys and shortcuts for restructuring and improving their interlanguage. The Appendix that follows shows some examples of contrasting but semantically equivalent structures in German and English, the mastery of which can significantly accelerate the learning of both English and German, and upgrade the interlanguage of learners studying either tongue. More authentic examples of each of these Interlingual Keys can be found in plenty by searching bilingual text pairs and corpora using a parallel concordancer. Once found, they can provide the basis of interlingual languages exercises and drills for both learners and trainee translators.

Many of the examples shown have to do with fundamental contrasts between English and German word order as defined by the basic meta-lingual categories of Subject / Object / Verb and Auxiliary verb. In practice these differences can be graphically represented in a way that avoids the need even for such basic grammatical meta-language. Subject and Object are both nouns or multi-word noun phrase "blocks" - the basic components of the sentence and can be represented by the symbol �. The Verb and Auxiliary elements of the sentence has to do with the relationship between these blocks or components and can be represented by a linking line -. Represented this way, many structures in German can be graphically represented by the symbol �-�-.

But in English, auxiliary and main verbs are usually combined in a single multi-word verb group, that is placed after the Subject and before the Object. The pattern in English is thus �--�. By teaching learners to

1. identify multi-word noun-phrase blocks such as "that wonderful bread I saw in the supermarket yesterday", and
2. identify all the elements of the verb group including modals and auxiliaries, the block-and-line symbolism can be used to show graphically how the sentence chunks (including block and lines) need to be rearranged in accordance with English word order rules - in this case by putting auxiliary and main verbs together to form a single relational line between the nominal blocks. The block-and-line symbolism allows the learner to check their own syntax and rearrange sentence chunks in accordance with a graphically represented target language structure.