Confluence 26 February 2011

Variation in speaking

Variation in speaking can arise at different levels as follows:

1. 
   Vocabulary/word choice
   
2. 
   Sentence structures/syntactic structures.
   
3. 
   Stylistic use of language.
   
4. 
   Phonological variation/variation in pronunciation at segmental level/individual phonemes.
   
5. 
   Phonetic variation/variation in pronunciation across syllables/ supra-segmental features of stress/tone and intonation.
   
6. 
   Morphological or morphophonemic variation/ variation in pronunciation across word boundaries.
   

The paper is concerned with the variation arising out of phonetic, phonological and morphophonemic patterns of the speakers. These are those features which are directly related to oral communication. These features can affect intelligibility resulting from wrong perception of phonemes/syllables and words at the segmental level.

Language Skills and Listening Skills

Language is both creative and productive. It is the skill to communicate within and outside the speech community. Linguists have described this as the competence to use language in a given situation, in terms of the psychological and sociological phenomena involved. It is essential to understand that language is acquired and learnt in different ways, while we acquire our Mother Tongue, being able to use it effectively in any given situation, with the ability to produce infinite number of utterances at will. It is evident that Mother Tongue is acquired through aural perception of the spoken language, i.e., through a process of constant ‘listening’. But, a second language, an additional or a foreign language is learnt through the four skills of LSRW (Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing), prioritizing the aural/oral skills over the reading/written skills. Therefore, among the four skills, listening is the basic skill which develops through regular exposure and practice more easily than through a formal study. What we learn from a study of language is the distinction in usage, that is, to communicative appropriately.

The four skills of language holistically contribute to its use as a powerful tool of communication. Listening is a receptive or passive skill which involves active participation and interaction among the teachers and learners. In the words of T.C.Baruah (2001) a competent listener can exhibit the following:

1. 
   Recognize the English speech sounds in isolation and in connected speech.
   
2. 
   Distinguish new sounds similar sounds in his mother tongue.
   
3. 
   Understand the lexical meanings of words in context and grammatical meanings of structures.
   
4. 
   Understand the meaning conveyed by stress and intonation patterns.
   
5. 
   Grasp the mood of the speaker and the theme of the discourse.
   
6. 
   Anticipate words and structure from the context for understanding speech at normal conversational speed.
   
7. 
   Guess the meaning of an unfamiliar word from the context.