intercomprehension prof. dr. dinçay kÖksal Çanakkale onsekiz mart university 12 th june 2004,...

INTERCOMPREHENSION

Prof. Dr. Dinçay KÖKSALÇanakkale Onsekiz Mart University

12 th June 2004, Edirne

IntercomprehenisonDinçay Köksal-ELT Conference 11-13 June 2004, Edirne

Topics to be discussed in this presentationIntercomprehesionMultilingualism and Pluralingualism Intercomprehension CompetenceIntercomprehension and Foreign Language TeachingIntercomprehesion and Foreign Language LearningIntercomprehenison and Teacher EducationEuropean Awareness and Intercomprehesion(EU+I)

IntercomprehensionOnce upon a time there was a group of European Teachers and Professors who wanted to preserve the diversity of languages and cultures in Europe...This is how our story could start. It is the story of people who aim at innovation, change, understanding, respect... people who are highly committed to what they decided to do in common. (From FILOMENA CAPUCHO’s speech EU & I - an European adventure- 20th May 2004 Palermo, Italy)


MULTILINGUALISM&PLURALINGUALISM European citizens ought to be motivated and educated to develop language skills in several languages in order to be able to understand and communicate with each other: plurilingualism, defined by the Council of Europe's Common European Framework of Reference for Languages - a handbook for language teachers and other language professionals as:

the ability to use languages for the purposes of communication and to take part in intercultural interaction, where a person, viewed as a social agent, has proficiency of varying degrees, in several languages, and experience of several cultures. This is not seen as the superposition or juxtaposition of distinct competences, but rather as the existence of a complex or even composite competence on which the user may draw.(Council of Europe, 2001: 168)


Complete proficiency in a foreign language is not always necessary; in many situations and contexts partial proficiency will do, for example listening and reading skills. These skills are frequently referred to as the receptive skills of language learning, while speaking and writing skills are referred to as productive skills. Although it must be recognised that 'receptive' skills require energy and commitment on the part of the learner too, and in this sense are active skills, as many teachers of foreign languages have experienced, it normally takes much longer to develop productive skills than it takes to develop receptive skills. In Norway, for example, there has been a tradition for good receptive skills. This could be a cultural feature, since many Norwegians want to feel confident that what they are going to say in a foreign language is correct. So, if Norwegians could be convinced that it is valuable (only) to understand the foreign language, they might be motivated to develop the receptive skills listening and reading in a number of languages. This might gradually lead to development of the productive skills speaking and writing.


In the recent documentation of the Council of Europe (e.g. the Common European Framework for languages), the notions and terms 'multilingualism' and 'plurilingualism' are distinguished in the following way: multilingualism is the collective use of more than one language (at community level); plurilingualism is the individual use of more than one language (at the individual level).

In brief, the orientation is to educate plurilingual individuals' in multilingual communities.(Shopov, 2004)


This has been the objective ever since the beginning of the Modern Languages Project of the COE in the early 1970s. Three approaches have been developed since then: (a) Threshold Level Model, (b) Partial Competence Model and (c) Intercomprehension Model. The Intercomprehension Analysis Hypothesis claims that the teaching and learning of modern foreign languages can be made more effective if Intercomprehension proficiency is developed.


Competence in intercomprehension will be regarded as a realisation of the general human faculty for using and understanding language, which

includes the ability to comprehend utterances

and texts in "unknown" languages. Doye (2004)

This competence can be developed through learning and promoted by teaching. Teachers of intercomprehension can base their assistance on two methodological principles:


Encouragement through awareness raisingTeachers make learners aware of their prior knowledge in various fields and encourage them to activate it for the understanding of "new" utterances and texts.

Support in the development of interpretation strategiesTeachers help the learners to develop their interpretation strategies on the basis of their prior knowledge. Eight main categories of prior knowledge can be identified and - consequently- eight corresponding categories of methodological devices can be used to match


Byram, M. (1990: 20): Figure 1 The language and culture teaching process


Intercomprehension and foreign language teachingIt has until quite recently been an aim in foreign language instruction to motivate the learner to develop (near) native speaker competence. The concept of native speaker competence is, however, a diffuse concept. Kramsch (1998) raises the question "Who is a native speaker?" and presents several approaches to illustrate it. She claims that ..."the dichotomy between native versus non-native speakers has outlived its use" (p. 27) and concludes her discussion by stating


In our days of frequent border crossings, and of multilingual multicultural foreign language classrooms, it is appropriate to rethink the monolingual native speaker norm as the target of foreign language education. As we revisit the marked and unmarked forms of language user ship, I propose that we make the intercultural speaker the unmarked form, the infinite of language use, and the monolingual monocultural speaker a slowly disappearing species or a nationalistic myth. (p. 30)


Byram and Risager (1999: 153) also refer to the non-native speaker as an intercultural speaker and describe him/her as " ...a person who is capable of perceiving and explaining cultural and linguistic differences, and of making use of this capability in communication".


These two descriptions see the intercultural speaker from different angles: Kramsch does not specify that the speaker should be able to explicitly state any differences in language or culture, whereas Byram and Risager include such specification in their notion of the

intercultural speaker.


This difference could be an interesting issue to iscuss from an academic point of view. However, from a practical point of view the notion of the intercultural speaker as a speaker who makes use of whatever implicit or explicit resources he/she can mobilize to understand and to communicate in a foreign language, is more fruitful and viable, and complements the Council of Europe notion of plurilingualism quoted before.


In the foreign language classroom it will be the task of the teacher to motivate pupils to make use of all their abilities in order to comprehend language, and gradually produce language. To do so, the teacher's own language and culture awareness should have reached a level where he/she is able to explain differences, without necessarily using such explanations in class. But the pupil's position is one of developing such awareness, with the teacher's constructive feedback as a strong motivating factor.


Intercomprehension and foreign language learningThe notion of the plurilingual intercultural speaker applied to the foreign language classroom makes sense if it includes the total range of abilities that a learner mobilizes. If we take this view, the learner can be characterized as an intercultural learner, for

whom it may be an aim to develop intercultural competence.


How then, can the learner develop intercultural competence?

And is the development of intercultural

competence a desirable aim?


Risager states that intercultural competence ..."refers to and supplements the concept of communicative competence, and therefore includes a skills dimension". (Risager 2000 : 161). Intercultural competence is furthermore associated with assessment criteria. The concept of cultural awareness, she suggests, may be a better term, since it is more general and non-technical, and caters for a wider set of interpretations.


If the notion of competence is closely associated with skills and assessment criteria, then this shift from "competence" to "awareness" to describe a wider range of factors in the language and culture teaching process is not only a useful shift, but offers also a better and more to the point way of labelling what actually seems to take place in the language classroom where intercomprehension ideas and methods govern the activities.


At the end of the ILTE project period, therefore, intercomprehension was defined as

a broad approach to language teaching and language learning which embraces a positive view of linguistic and cultural diversity and which aims to motivate pupils to recognize and activate their explicit and implicit linguistic and cultural knowledge, skills and experience in order to develop their general language and culture awareness.


This definition caters for awareness-raising, which we found was an essential element in the notion of intercomprehension, and also for the learner's prior knowledge and skills as a decisive factor in the process of learning

foreign languages.


It may be claimed that intercomprehension is nothing new and that it has existed as long as humans have felt the need to understand and be understood in communication exchanges with other humans speaking another language than themselves. It may furthermore be claimed that intercomprehension is not a new phenomenon in the classroom: Pupils striving to learn a foreign language have always used whatever resources they had to overcome difficulties when dealing with the

foreign language.


However, what perhaps is a new idea, is that of mobilizing one's general language and cultural knowledge, skills and experience in a more systematic way than before, by being encouraged by a teacher who acknowledges the significance of this capacity.


http://www.usz.at/eui/

http://community.eun.org/


The development of multilingualism is an obvious need in the European context, taking into consideration not only about the present situation but also the enlargement of EU that is foreseen in the short term. The notion of Intercomprehension is linked to this need. It appeared in Europe during the last decade and has from then on been subject to consistent development. In the context of several European Projects supported by the European Commission, theoretical research has been produced and concrete proposals for multilinguistic learning based on Intercomprehension were presented. However, the research has mainly focused the transferability of linguistic knowledge in the context of the three big language families (Romance, Slavic and Germanic).


In the context of EU & I, that we now present, we will start from the general concept of Discursive Competence or Global Communication Competence (as it is described in A Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). In this context, we will focus on the notion of Intercomprehension, taking it in its broader meaning, i.e. “the capacity to understand or to be understood in a unknown language, by means of different communicative modes or strategies”. As such, the receptive competence in an unknown language is to be seen, not only as the result of linguistic transfer (in-between languages of the same family), BUT (and especially) as the result of the transfer of receptive strategies in the framework of “a general interpretative process which underlies all communicative activity” (cf. the Intercomprehension Portfolio).

IntercomprehensionDinçay Köksal-ELT Conference 11-13 June 2004, Edirne

These strategies should be used as heuristic tools in order to achieve comprehension tasks in any language, and learning awareness is to be based on the consciousness of their use. It is thus the strategic component of Discursive Competence that

is to be studied and developed in the context of this Project.


Two definitions of Intercomprehension:

(i) The ability to co-construct meaning in the context of the encounter of different languages and to make pragmatic use of this in a concrete communicative situation.

(ii) To understand/make sense of something in a language you do not speak.


Therefore, the following aims have been defined for this Project:

1. Language awareness in Europe (by taking into consideration the learning of a specific language in the general framework of the acquisition of a global Communication Competence)

2. Learning how to learn abilities (by focusing more on the transferability of strategies than on the transfer of knowledge)

3. Intercultural awareness (by stressing cultural similarities and differences that support interpretation processes)

4. Receptive multilingualism in Europe (through a differentiated consideration of competencies)


Two fundamental objectives are thus to be attained:

1.To develop a specific methodology for the learning of Intercomprehension (heuristic and interpretative competence in any communicative code);

2.To create learning materials that will support this methodology.


Receptive strategiesIt’s not easy to think of receptive strategies because while the productive ones are visible and we can observe them from outside, reception is an inside process. It takes place through small and fast mental movements that not even the subject is aware of.

But after months of reflection we can say at least a few things even if they are not so original.In fact, if it’s true that some people understand better than others it’s also true that there are behaviours more useful than others, attitudes more fruitful than others.


I. MotivationThe first obvious thing to say is that we can understand

someone only if we want to. Motivation is the first necessary pre-condition for all the sensors and mechanisms of reception to work well.

II. PatienceBut there is one more thing to do, which is maybe less, obvious for people who are not used to interact with foreigners. In order to understand someone speaking in a foreign language we must accept that we will understand only single scattered pieces and these pieces will be like little islands in a wide ocean. We must learn that we can’t understand everything and we can’t understand at once, as we do, or we think to do, when communicating in our mother tongue. We can call this quality “patience”.


III. CalmnessIf we consider patience as a mental attitude, the calmness is the

correspondent quality on an emotional level. When we listen to a speech in a language we don’t know well we become confused, we panic and feel our brain and our ears get foggy. So all words are the same or rather there are no words but only an endless chain of indistinct sounds that we cannot divide into words. In fact in this situation keeping calm is the first thing we need to do.

IV. Concentration So, be calm and concentrate. Indeed, concentration is another key

word is because managing to catch some words from a foreign tongue takes much more intellectual energies than we normally use to understand. In fact after some time we feel as tired as if we have taken a math exam.


V. Multi-layers comprehension So, we will listen to the message and understand some scattered

words. If our interlocutor is using suitable productive strategies, we will understand above all the words which he consider more important since he will pronounce them in a clear way, he will repeat and underline them with his voice and his body. This is the first layer. At this point, if we can, we’ll ask the other person to repeat and we will understand a second layer. We must accept understanding just a layer every time we have the chance to listen to the same message.


VI. Exclusive attentionWhen we listen to a message in our mother tongue some

times we do other things at the same time: we listen to our friend in a pub and we look around to see what kind of people is in the same place, we listen to the news on television while we are cooking, etc. Instead when we listen to a message in a foreign tongue we need an exclusive attention we can’t do any other things meanwhile. Most pupils who we made the workshop with, after having listening to the tale in Spanish at the question “what will you do next time in order to understand some more?” said that they are going to listen to the story and nothing else. One said: “I have to change place and seat where nobody disturbs me”


VII. Importance of the visual channelAnybody knows that when we listen to someone speaking in

a foreign language we need to look at him carefully, too. We half-close our eyes trying to catch each little movement of the other’s face and to draw some help also from the labial. This has to do with exclusive attention; indeed all our senses must be involved in the same comprehension attempt.

VIII. Going aheadWe don’t have to get stuck at a piece of information we don’t

understand. It’s very important to try to go ahead. Since comprehension is a circular process something coming later could be helpful to something that was before.


At the end two interactive strategies:IX. Asking for helpAnother comprehension strategy is pointing out the

problem by saying that we didn’t understand and asking the other person to repeat that piece of message.

X. ReformulatingReformulate what our interlocutor has just said in order to

be sure that we have understood is one of the best communicative strategy we can use.


Links to other Intercomprehension projects EuroCom: Un chemin vers le plurilinguisme en Europe : Congrès Eurocom, Hagen, 9-10 nov. 2001IGLO (Intercomprehension in Germanic Languages Online): With an online-course

ILTE Intercomprehension in Language Teacher Education

GALATHEA pour le développement de l'intercompréhension entre locuteurs de langues romanesPowerpoint présentation