An Open Letter to Foreign Teachers of Speaking Skills
By: Peter Ackroyd

"What do you want!?" The voice speared through my dreams and shattered my rendezvous with Miss World. I was strapped in a chair- I looked up at the impassive face, then wildly round for the white hot interrogation lights and thumb screws. The Korean Airline steward was offering me a drink. I remember how often I have suppressed the desire to rearrange the countenance of the last student who said to me, "Ackroyd, I want to see you". Miscommunication is a fancy way of saying that someone, in the above cases me, got the wrong message, instinctively reacting to totally unintentional "rude" speech habits. I experience these knee jerk reactions to intonation despite all my years of travel and teaching experience. Am I the only one? Isn't this miscommunication much more likely with apparently correct English as in the examples above, than with students making all the technical and pronunciation errors we are used to hassling them about? Common sense can make us take a deep breath and say to ourselves, "Never mind, he�s not a native speaker," when students say something that is not correct or doesn't make sense.

"Correct" English is another matter. We seem not to have the same tolerance of explosive, flat toned but grammatically perfect English emanating from an impassive face. We assume that because the English words are correct, the speaker knows what is being communicated. Why not separate out the real dangers - causes of genuine misunderstanding � from the technical mistakes that would lose points in an exam but which the common sense of any listener will usually compensate for automatically. Think of the hapless victim of informal language instruction who blurts out to his new, ever so formal, German boss - "Hi Fritz! Wanna drink?" We are supposed to be teaching international communication through English, and whether we like it or not, there is some serious miscommunication going on that we are not addressing in our lessons.

One of my "best" students has been in danger of losing his job because all his company's business is with China. He speaks with native speaker speed, has been totally incomprehensible at business meetings, and is afraid to interrupt the garbled delivery of Chinese interpreters to get them to spell the words he can't understand, since it's rude to interrupt in Korea. He's a great example of the failings of native speaker English teaching. Bearing in mind that English long ago ceased to be the property of the US or even the English, perhaps we teaching professionals - and since we're accepting money for our services we have to be classified as professionals despite considerable evidence to the contrary - should ask ourselves the following questions about:

1. Clarification Strategies

Are we teaching students how to clarify the non native English they are most likely to encounter - from Korea's immediate neighbors and major commercial partners - e.g. China, India, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Japan?

2. "Musical" Training

Just try and get students to practice polite high / low stress and intonation of very polite English and see how much embarrassed laughter you get. The "music" of Korea is so much flatter than that of English that it may have helped earn Seoul the title of Third Rudest City in the World [after Moscow and Paris] according to the votes of the magazine "Business Traveler". The linguistics experts say that Korean has three tones to the four of English, but that does not take into account how frequently and to what effect intonation is used in the two languages. Have we taught them the dangers of appearing rude if they use flat/descending command intonation?

3. "Physical" Training

Try a set of repetition drills and see how student's mouth muscles ache - the movements of English enunciation are foreign enough to cause considerable pain. On the one hand, do we give lower level students enough drill work to train their speech muscles for the unfamiliar sound sequences and muscle actions? On the other, could a non native speaker, say from Thailand, understand our more advanced students? As students gain in confidence, I have observed how they speak in blurred rushes, becoming less rather than more comprehensible. There's actually some research on this degradation of clarity[Prof. Kim Yong-Chul - Korea Maritime University] if anyone is interested. Are we helping our lower level students to speak more confidently while getting our higher level ones to slow down and speak clearly? Why is native speaker speaking speed so mindlessly pursued over here?

4. Formality

Is the informal social English of most teaching material appropriate to meeting with the above Asian cultures? Do our students respond to situations with appropriately formal or informal English according to whether they are speaking to US friends or Japanese business guests? In Korean, just one year difference in age is enough to change the form of address. I used the terms "formal" and "informal" in talking about ways of conversation for two months before one of the better students asked me to explain what the two terms really meant. Koreans have so many different classifications of speaking that the two terms are difficult to equate to their own language. There are no direct equivalents to formal or informal. Can our students really get a feeling for the equivalent in Korean for what they are saying in English? I can't think of any other way than presenting them with situations so they can say to themselves, "This is what I would say in Korean, [e.g. to a formal guest / best friend]; here is the English approximate equivalent".

5. Cultural Conversation Conventions

Would our student's English responses be socially acceptable to other Asians? Bear in mind that if a compliment is given such as "That's a nice jacket. Where did you get it" The reply "Thanks, glad you like it." would be considered quite boastful in Asia. "Thank you very much, but it's nothing special" would be more appropriately modest Asian convention.
Koreans left to themselves would say nothing at all in response to compliments. The language may be English but what about inter-Asian cultural conventions?

Damon Anderson, director of the United States Information Service in Jakarta, presented a set of what he considered useful functional phrases for discussion skills at the TESOL conference in Seoul 1990. Among the phrases proposed were: Silencing: "Someone else should have a chance." "You are talking too much." "You've talked enough." "It's my turn now."
While these phrases may have been appropriate for informal US student class discussion, the material shows no appreciation of the way social conventions would apply within an Asian environment, where even within Korean student society, a freshman speaks up to older students, using honorifics when calling the class register. But, more importantly, such interruption would be intolerably rude and grounds for dismissal in a professional environment.
Anderson's perception of the need for functional rather than grammatical presentation is a commonly held one. The list of textbooks (Impact, Functions of American English etc.) with functional claims is testimony to this, but this example illustrates the all too common imposition of very inappropriate American conventions, not only of lexis, by not giving guidance on levels of formality, but also of behavior in assuming informal American student group needs and conversation conventions to be generally appropriate.

6. Asian Name Culture

Is it right to encourage use of given names when such use in Asia is restricted to very close relatives and long standing friends? The adoption of Western names by many Asians has much to do with escaping awkwardness. Family names are too formal for most Westerners; given names are too informal for Asians. The "Western" adopted name provides a psychological compromise. Unfortunately, no one tells students the effect when you call someone by the family name without Mr. / Ms. Ask students if they would like to be called just "Kim" or "Lee" without an honorific, and watch how shocked they are, yet they call foreigners by their family name alone and think they are respectful. 7. "Cultural Imperialism"

Do any students actually have any real interest in going to our countries or in learning about our culture? Ask your students, as I have done, and the chances are you will get responses like "internationalization in Korea". You might get the occasional student with ambitions to work or study abroad, but I would be surprised if you get more than one or two in any class. Is lesson time well spent teaching or in some cases preaching, our cultural attitudes, idioms and references? They are more likely to see English phrases in the same way a mechanic sees a box of tools - communication tools, each with a set of specific potential applications. The more applications a single tool has, the better.

8. Unnecessary Grammatical Variety in Teaching Speaking Skills

Finally - since when has it been necessary to have the same range of grammar and vocabulary for speaking as we do for listening? Where is there teaching material that really teaches practical situational oral English based on simplicity [rather than aping native speakers idiosyncrasies], separate from more wide ranging vocabulary for listening and reading? We are ignoring the fact that it's not really necessary to emulate the full range of native speakers's vocabulary or grammar usage in order to manage situations appropriately. The English spectrum of formality for any language task can be taught without so many of its possible forms. For example, "Tell me" and "Could you tell me", are enough for most formality levels for obtaining information - no messing around with verb inversions. Intonation and the magic sentence ending "please" [rising intonation needs emphasis!] can do the rest. "You should" and "Perhaps, it should be" can be used for informal and formal recommendations and "You should have" and "Perhaps it should have been" can work adequately for direct and gentle diplomatic criticism respectively. At the same time, we can reduce the confusion Korean students have over "must" and "should" to some extent at least.
Why should we burden struggling beginner students with all the other ways of doing the same job when English can provide one simple structure for speaking [listening is another matter] that can be used quite acceptably for more than one language task? The fact that the language may not mirror predominant native speaker usage becomes irrelevant in an Asian context. What can be gained are prompter, yet appropriate responses even from basic beginners.

If anyone finds any books that help, please let me know. Then I can stop making my own material. The BBC TV "Person to Person" video course may be a good example of very perceptive linguistic presentation, but also shows us how to make formality far more complex than it need be to "get the job done" in Asia.

Perhaps the questions above may lead to some English being taught according to student's actual Asian needs. As professional educators of a world communication medium in Korea, have we the right to impose linguistic and cultural "gospels" just based on our faraway "Western" worlds?
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