ktravula - a travelogue! » Academic

End of Classes, and More

Kola — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:00:48 +0000

My presentation in class on Wednesday was my last in this Master’s program (baring a thesis defense, of course). It focused on a hypothetical lesson plan for second language teaching in a foreign country. One of the advantages of such assignment that allows for creativity is the chance it gives the student to make conjectures on things that may actually become future research areas. I am a teacher of English language in a high school in Kigali, Rwanda. That country emerged just a few years ago from a brutal civil war that tore the country into many ethnic parts. It has now adopted a policy of English language (over French and Kinyarwanda) in order to forge a more united country free of a colonial past, and with a view to a more globalized future.

What problem does such a job pose for both the student and the teacher, even beyond the usual problems of language acquisition? Socio-cultural attitudes of parents still hung up on ethnic and cultural identities and resistant to change? Government bureaucracy and a typical political gamesmanship that might deny funding for much of the initial experimentation that could amount in success? A problem of communication between teacher and student? (It’s hard enough for students to be learning a new language. If the teacher offering guidance for such teaching does not even share the linguistic identity of the students, the baggage of his “otherness” might be a little hard to overcome). What else? There are actually far more positives to the experiment, one of which is the delight of sharing cultural similarities and differences while at the same time sharing the knowledge of a connecting international language. Cultural exchange is after all always an learning stimulant.

I have good memories of my first major teaching experiences in the Nigerian middlebelt as a Youth Corper. Students delighted in their ability to communicate in Hausa and Berom even in our English classes. It was a battle that I struggled with all through the year, frustrated that the purpose of English education is defeated when students choose instead to resort to local codes at every moment of convenience. Other linguists working in the area of Second Language Acquisition have argued that there are positives in this model of acquisition where the pressure to always be right is taken off the shoulder of students and they are allowed to subconsciously acquire the second language. The problem in the application was the reluctance of the students themselves to even try since their mother tongues provided an easy alternative. (But then, a prominent educational research in Nigeria, particularly the Ife Six-Year Primary Project of 1989, showed that students taught in their mother tongues performed better in learning other subjects).

I find Second Language Acquisition extremely fascinating, and the prospect of teaching English in another country equally enticing. Rwanda presents a fascinating example of such intervention because it combines education with social work. A country willing to ditch a dividing legacy of multilingualism for a second foreign language presents a fascinating study. One of the best rewards for teaching – as I have realized from my years of involvement – is not just in the knowledge that the teacher brings into the class, but the ones he takes out of his interactions with his students. I believe that in the next century, the language of the world will not be this English language as we know it, of course, but something richer, encompassing the form and world-view of all the peoples through which it has passed. There is something to enjoy in the process of bringing that to existence.

Fun Stuff: Google Ngram

Kola — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:44:30 +0000

Google has just come up with a great product called the Ngram Viewer (discussed in this equally fascinating TED video). What the Ngram Viewer does is to give users around the world the ability to sit at home and search through a database of billions of texts. These texts have been scanned into the Google database from all the books published in the world to date. Among other things, what this gives us is the power to discover the rate of occurrence of certain words, phrases or names in publishing history. Extremely fascinating, right?

I have been playing around with the program and here is my first experiment: to figure out which of these men in Nigerian political/social history is most frequently referenced in text, and since when. The men are Olusegun Obasanjo (who ruled the country for a record 11 years and played a crucial role in its political history), Chinua Achebe – Africa’s foremost novelist whose first 1958 novel Things Fall Apart is the most widely translated texts in English literature from Africa, Wole Soyinka – the continent’s first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and finally Obafemi Awolowo – nationalist, politician and visionary. The result is stunning and will offer nuggets for discussion among people who have argued (many times without proof) that one person was more famous than the other.

There are a few more I have tried out. This graph showed that the word “nigger” got more usage in the mid 1800s (just after Lincoln set the slaves free, which made sense), dropped in usage in the 1980s, and is now coming back into use after the year 2000. Go figure. The word “nigga” however is a totally different matter. The word “Republicans” was initially more famous than “Democrats” but eventually fell around 1900 and has remained stably lower ever since. And what about languages/cultures? This graph shows how much the African languages/cultures Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Swahili, Twi, Edo, and Zulu have featured in texts through time. Fascinating result, and not only because Yoruba leads the pack with a clear margin! Yoruba is not the biggest language/culture in Africa. The word “Nigeria”, according to the Ngram has been in use/print since around 1860 (contrary to what we have been told) although it finally gained currency at the beginning of 1900s. Finally, I did a search on my favourite comedians: George Carlin, Bill Cosby, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor. The result puts Bill Cosby on top and George Carlin at the bottom. Oh well.

What Google has done with this project called the Ngram Viewer (I say again, an extremely fascinating project) is to endow the world with a new great tool to do anthropology and study history with nothing but access to the internet. Life, and history, just became even more enlightening.

Break Time/Tone

Kola — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 23:40:25 +0000

I will not blog much this week because I feel a little overwelmed. On the bright side, I have Steve Jobs’ authorized biography to get through to take some of the stress off, along with a few other materials in my thesis development.

On that last bit, a question for language students: does anyone have a guess as to why (American) English speakers have problem with tone in language? Yes, they are not used to tone languages because English is intonational. But they never have such problem with music which also works with tone levels, so what’s going on? Here’s more, when researchers who have looked at the matter say that one of the reasons for poor tonal acquisition by American/English learners is the limited “pitch range” of such learners, what exactly do they mean? English speakers are humans too and pitch is physiological and not something tied to race or skin colour. I have looked everywhere online for information about this and I haven’t come up with much.

I can do with some brainstorming session here.

Phonetics for Dummies

Kola — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:29:38 +0000

Students of a compulsory phonetics class have often asked me what the best strategy is to get through the course. I have often always responded with the same answer: open-mindedness, and focus. Phonetics happens to be one of the most interesting subjects in linguistics, and an important base for anyone interested in moving forward in the field.

So what is special about phonetics? The answer is, everything. All the sound systems of the world are represented on the IPA phonetic chart, and even though one may not be able to pronounce all of them, it is important to realize that they are all legitimate sounds. And more, one can actually pronounce any one of them using the simple knowledge of their place and manner of articulation. Many of the sounds are not available in English – which explains the dilemma of most English-speaking and American students. The easiest way out is for them to realize from the start that they shouldn’t hope to be able to pronounce all the sounds, although it matters that they know how they are pronounced and what makes each of them unique.

[f] and [v] are different only in voicing. They are pronounced in the same place and with the same manner of articulation. It’s the same with [k]/[g], and [t]/[d], [s]/[z] etc. This makes it easy to distinguish between the fricatives at the end of “breath” and “breathe”. In text, they look alike, in sound, they sound different. A little step further into phonology, and we begin to ask what conditions exist that make it likely that a voiceless consonant becomes (or is realized as) a voiced one.

But for this phonetic beginning, let us just adjust to the fact that sounds are fascinating, and that our vocal tracts have evolved over the years to be able to make an almost infinite type of sounds. Our job in the phonetics class is to group those sounds according to stipulated categorization methods.

Picture of cake by Jenna Tucker

On African-themed Schools

Kola — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 21:53:48 +0000

This piece of news in the Dispatch of today highlights the success of a new kind of special public education in Missouri addressed mainly to black and African-American students with focus on African culture and values. According to the piece, the Missouri example follows the success of similar successful projects in Detroit, Kansas City and Los Angeles. Kinda reminds of specialized schools and institutions around Nigeria offering American-type or British-style education. With a widening achievement gap between white and African-American students, and research showing that the gap is not as much a gap of intelligence as it is a gap in teachers being able to address students’ needs, maybe this is not such a bad idea.

Call for Papers and Panels

Kola — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 10:19:49 +0000

Rethinking African Popular Culture and Performance: A Colloquium in Honour of Sola Olorunyomi at 50

In spotlighting the contributions of Sola Olorunyomi – author of the seminal Afrobeat!: Fela and the Imagined Continent and other influential texts – to literary and cultural studies, this colloquium intends to incite a debate around the ferment that Olorunyomi has generated as an idea, a scholar, a teacher within and outside the classroom, a performer, a social activist and a fifty-year-long insurrectionary event.

Popular culture and performance in Africa, more intently, are isolated as the hub around which the colloquium’s sub-themes will revolve. We also want to look, beyond the normative cultural forms, at para-artistic sites such as television reality, telephony, virtual interaction (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), open-market hawking, etc. The colloquium’s immediate objective is to update critical engagements with popular modes of culture, taking into consideration the recent emergence of new forms such as hip-hop, on the one hand, and the transformation of other forms such as home video culture as exemplified by Nollywood, on the other.

Scholars are free to account for the itineraries of borrowed forms and explore the implications of such practices on indigenous cultural modes in relation to the global political economy of culture, as well as the double layers of local and Western cultural hegemony. In this regard, highlighting the role of virtual communication and cyberculture as rallying points of counterhegemonic sentiments in the mass revolutions recently witnessed on the continent will be pertinent, given Olorunyomi’s credentials as a site of transformative action.

While presentations are not restricted to any themes or art forms, we expect participants to adequately problematize existing debates on key issues of the theory of African popular arts, the question of aesthetics, ideology, reception, as well as the place/role of technology and the media in the ongoing reconfiguration of the field. In their investigations, intending participants are encouraged to explore any national, regional or virtual community model relevant to the colloquium’s focus.

We therefore seek panel and individual presentations from scholars and practitioners that address issues relating, but not limited, to the following:

- Performance (Music, Drama, Disc Jockeying, etc.)
- Virtual Communication/ Cyberculture
- Reality Television
- Telephony
- Advertising
- Stand-up Comedy
- Slogans
- Home Video
- Football Fandom
- Body Art
- Fashion

Abstracts of not more that 250 words should be sent as email attachments to lorunyomiat50@yahoo.com.

The colloquium will hold at the University of Ibadan in late November, 2011. A festschrift of presented papers will be published afterwards. Deadline: Friday, September 30, 2011 (12 midnight, Nigerian time). We will respond to applicants regarding acceptance not later than Monday, October 3, 2011.

Direct all enquiries to lorunyomiat50@yahoo.com. Alternatively, contact Senayon Olaoluwa (PhD Wits), Department of Languages and Linguistics, Osun State University or Tunji Azeez (PhD Ibadan), Department of Theatre Arts and Music, Lagos State University.

Announcer: Olorunyomi@50 Carnival of Friends

Re: Spotting Nigerians

Kola — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 07:46:30 +0000

I got this mail from Nick about another personal peculiarity in English pronunciation in response to my recent post. Enjoy.

_______________________

I enjoyed your post about spotting Nigerian accents by the pronunciation of “man/men”

(http://www.ktravula.com/2011/08/spotting-nigerians/).

This doesn’t have anything to do with Nigerian English, but I know you like American English accents, so I thought I’d write. I ran into something similar to the “man/men” issue when I moved from my home town of Portland, Oregon to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (you should visit both cities if you get a chance). Having lived in Pittsburgh for ten
years I still find myself having to consciously use more of a “aa” sound, particularly with the word “bag”, which my wife tells me I pronounce too much like “beg”. I do it pretty automatically now, but I actually find myself exaggerating it to prevent comments. I think I sound like a sheep, going “baaaaaa-g”. The vowel sounds more open and I hold my tongue farther back in my throat than I would naturally.

This might not be exactly the same as the “men/man” thing, but it seems similar.

This is just my experience and not evidence of a regional accent issue, but at least one of my friends reported something similar after moving from Portland to the east coast. Other significant factors are that I may have picked up a bit of my mom’s New England accent, and also that Pittsburgh is home to a slight local accent and some cool local vocabulary like “yinz” instead of “y’all”.

Thanks for your always-interesting blog,

Sincerely,

Nick.

_____________________

Notes

This mail reminds me of one other distinct pronunciation difference in Nigerian and Ghanaian English. Growing up in the early to late eighties, I remember a common assumption that Ghanaian English sounded closer to the British standard than Nigerian English, and Nigerian parents paid more to send their children to private schools that had Ghanaian teachers rather than ones that didn’t. And though they paid so much for the “privilege” for us, we never understood much of the obsession beyond the fact that our teachers insisted on pronouncing “Church” as “cherch” (as it rhymes with “perch”), the as “the” (as rhyming with the “e” in “wet”, hamburger as “hamberger”, luck as “lack”, and but as “bat” rather than the Nigerian “bot” among very many others that I can list if I get the time. We students also didn’t gain much from the hubris that the teacher brought with them either. It however provided plenty moments of comic relief in classroom sessions when it didn’t come along with punishments for deviation. We had some good laughs as I am sure did Ghanaians who had listen to us speak English as well. I have been to East African and I think that the English there – along with its own amusing peculiarities that knocked Nigerian and Ghanaian versions to a corner – comes the closest to British English pronunciation standard in all of the Englishes I’ve heard on the continent. But then, I’ve never been everywhere.

Thank you Nick.

Sincerely,

Orwell on The English People

Kola — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 08:41:02 +0000

I am reading “As I Please”, a collection of essays written by George Orwell between 1943 and 1945 and edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. In the first essay titled The English People, the author explains some benefits and demerits of being an Englishman speaking English:

“But there are also great disadvantages, or at least great dangers, in speaking English as one’s native tongue. To begin with, as was pointed out earlier in this essay, the English are very poor linguists. Their own language is grammatically so simple that unless they have gone through the discipline of learning a foreign language in childhood, they are often quite unable to grasp what is meant by gender, person, and case. A completely illiterate Indian will pick up English far faster than a British soldier will pick up Hindustani. Nearly five million Indians are literate in English and millions more speak it in a debased form. There are some tens of thousands of Indians who speak English as nearly as possible perfectly; yet the number of Englishmen speaking any Indian language perfectly would not amount to more than a few scores. But the great weakness of English is its capacity for debasement. Just because it is so easy to use, it is easy to use badly.”

In the essay with parts that read like an epilogue to his earlier essay Politics and the English Language, Orwell complains about English being influenced by “American” pop culture words. Although written about six decades ago, it is fascinating how Orwell’s perception of the English life, language, and culture seems to remain as applicable now as it was then, even seeming applicable to other new post-colonial societies elsewhere.

Here is another quote:

“The temporary decadence of the English language is due, like so much else, to our anachronistic class system. “educated” English has grown anaemic because for long past it has not been reinvigorated from below. The people likeliest to use simple concrete language, and to think of metaphors that really call up a visual image, are those who are in contact with physical reality. a useful word like bottleneck, for instance, would e most likely to occur to someone used to dealing with conveyor belts: or again, the expressive military phrase to winkle out implies acquaintance both with winkles and with machine-gun nests. and the vitality of English depends on a steady supply of images of this kind. It follows that language, at any rate the english language, suffers when the educated classes lose touch with the manual workers. As things are at present, nearly every englishman, wheatever his origins, feels the working-class manner of speech, and even working-class idioms, to be inferior…”

An engaging read.

Research

Kola — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 06:49:19 +0000

I want to be able to talk about the field of Second Language Acquisition, my encounter with it last semester, and how much the questions it raises are more than the answers it provides. I am back into reading extensive materials in the field many of which didn’t make as much of a dent as they should have during that first encounter. I won’t now, not just because my knowledge is not yet as comprehensive as it should, and that a carry-over from a daunting first encounter is unhelpful in allowing me open up more to its possibilities, but also because I’m afraid of misrepresenting the extent and influence of what I already know. My MA thesis will have very much to do with SLA and I need all the concentration I can get.

But talking about what I’m doing always helps, as I have found out. Having less time to travel around the country discovering places now like I did before, all I have now is my research and the hard work of creating relevance in a field that gives me the freedom to think, and the tools to make a difference. This time, I’m looking at tonal acquisition. The fact that not much has been done in the area so far is also as positive as it is challenging. So while the research process begins to take shape, let’s see what Krashen and Chomsky have to say again.

Ramblings on Tone

Kola — Sun, 22 May 2011 04:03:34 +0000

What can be observable in the process of acquisition of tones by L1 speakers of English? Chinese (and a host of other languages in South East Asia) already gives us an enormous database of observable patterns. African languages (in this case Yoruba) occupy another level of the problematic realm for those merely accustomed to a language based on intonation, stress and inflections. Why is it funny when my friends call me in a way that rhymes my name with Cola or “caller” rather than with the uptalk mode of pronouncing the “sugar” in “sugar daddy” or the “brother” in “brotherly love”. Tone is music, rising and falling as needed. What makes it imperative that speakers of English relate to it only in one direction, viz (usually) as a high-low in a two syllable word? Why will “Bolaji” sound like “allergy” rather than the “beautiful” in “beautiful girl”?

What other nuggets are observable? How much proficiency can an L1 English speaker really acquire in a tonal language like Yoruba? With the many years of study by people like Karin Barber and (perhaps) Susanne Wenger, could they/did they pass the native-like proficiency test? What is the bar for native-like proficiency anyway?; and besides the general list of impediments across second language learning processes, what are the specifics in L2 tonal language learning that presents the greatest obstacles? And how does it happen? It is after all equally easy, equally difficult to learn any language either at L1 or L2 level given an equal and sustained level of interest and low affective filter. Jargons, jargons.

A linguist might know, or at least be neck deep in the long process of finding out.

ktravula - a travelogue! » Academic

End of Classes, and More

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