Reflection # 9
Discuss the role of emotional language in your L1 and L2. Which language is emotionally richer.
Discuss the role of emotional language in your L1 and L2. Which language is emotionally richer.
Although Spanish, French and some Japanese are available to me as speech vehicles, since I lived in Germany for so many years, I would like to dwell on emotional expression in that language. Is it because English has such deep Germanic roots that I found no problem in finding an emotional voice in German? I spoke not only to the family friends, and clients / customers in German, but also to my horses, and also conversed with dogs and cats in that tongue. I rarely used English after a point, only for language lessons, or by special request. I still like to talk to the animals in German--they take to it better than Texans do!
In summary, I don't feel that there is any emotion that cannot be expressed in German fully well as I can express it in English.
As your learners acquire (participate?) in their new speech communities do you see a change in their emotional language behavior.
For the Japanese I worked with in Germany, some of the more extroverted seemed to enjoy finding that they could express "off-color" language in English. The Germans were always looking to pick up slang and swear words. In Gender Linguistics last year, I did a paper on the use of English in German-language blogs. The use of slang and swear words was the most frequent type of language used, probably derived from pop culture such as movies, songs, magazines. Also combos of German and English such as "drogenfreak," Elvisverruckt," and "Handy" meaning a cell phone, are quite common. I always felt that the students felt more liberated expressing these terms in English rather than in German.
Reflect on the notion of (re)construction of self in your own L2 or L3 learning experiences.
Since I never thought much about my identity when I was living overseas, this never seemed to be a problem. I just understood that my nationality and viewpoint were different, but that often gave me a springboard to get to know people and ask questions to find out how and why things in a particular country were different. Whether it was France, Spain or Japan, I just felt like I fit in. Frankly I feel most strange in the US, where I was faced with reverse culture shock in 2002, after many years in Europe. That is one of the reasons that I love ESL--it's international.
4 comments:
I think that you are definately geared for your international travels. I think that many times when learning a language, people tend to what to pick up the trendy lingo, so that they feel cool. I think that its awesome to speak German, what a wonderful tongue.
Carol,
I totally understand what you said about expressing yourself in more than one language, that is so fantastic!
But, I think that you are able to do that because you maybe are a fluent speaker in both languages and because the relationship between word in German and English.
Hopefully one day I can do the same as you. Well not in German, in English ;)
Juanita
Because bilinguals often say there second language feels less emotional, I decided to test this in a psychology laboratory. My collaborators and I found that skin conductance (which is sensitive to emotional arousal) is actually reduced in the second language. Our paper, published in 2003, discusses this. See:
http://www.bu.edu/psych/faculty/charris/papers/BilingualTaboo.pdf
Later I tested Spanish-English bilinguals who learned both languages from birth, and found that skin conductance levels elicited by their two languages are very similar.
http://www.bu.edu/psych/faculty/charris/papers/HarrisEmotionBiling.pdf
I'm now studying emotional reactions to a broader range of types of language: jokes, lies, emotional scenarios.
Your blog came to my attention as I searched for some evaluation of Rosetta Stone, which seems several steps up from the "Living Language" system of 4 decades back. In college in Connecticut I took Intensive Russian for a semester - 5 classes per week w a native speaker, plus a weekly session on grammar with insights from Professor Hille for whom Russian was a language he loved, but evidently learned after childhood.
In California jr. high school I'd studied Spanish and learned it well enough to score near the top in a Virginia statewide contest of some sort a couple of years later, but even with a sixth year in college, I still hadn't got to a conversational fluency.
A bad case of mono put me in hospital and I never finished the intensive Russian, but a decade later I started buying dictionaries, comic books, literature, living language tapes... Every year I would go through a spasm, pouring through all those books for 3 or 4 weeks. In Chicago, I tried talking in Russian to a Polish lady working on the Janitorial crew in a computer company where I was working. We had a brief conversation - she and her husband had been ATTORNEYS in Poland, and had recently immigrated with their kids to the US to try for a better life. I went into the Polish section in Chicago and found a Polish language version of the Little Prince, and gave it to her along with an English Language version, and a Polish-English Legal dictionary.
Anyhow, what I found is that over time, just such dabbling has made it possible to carry on halting conversations in several languages, but I really would like to do some more substantial learning.
Is the Berlitz method with its immersive approach still regarded as the best? Would you not recommend RS?
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