Confluence 26 February 2011

Learner Variables

Gardner and Mecintyre (1992) refer to differences in learning ability among the learners as ‘learner variables’, and they group these variables into three categories via., (1) Cognitive variables (2) Affective variables and (3) Miscellaneous variables. These variables determine and influence the levels of language learning process. One of the main claims of J.B. Carrol (1981) is that learners’ aptitude is multidimensional. In other words, the phonetic coding ability is the ability to recognize individual phonemes and to relate these phonemes with their orthographic representations, influencing the perception and production of speech sounds correctly and accurately. Consequently, the readiness in receptiveness is directly correlated to language learning. Proficiency in speaking skills is not independent of the ability in listening skills. Furthermore, other social factors, apart from the individual factors of attitude, motivation and personality, age, social environment and so on, can influence language acquisition and improve aural/oral skills in particular, to a large extent. Hence a need does arise to focus on the listening skills to develop individual speaking skills. Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, viz., Linguistic intelligence (word smart) and musical-rhythmic intelligence (music smart), play a key role in language learning, because the capacity that an individual possesses to learn a language, varies from person to person.

Developing Listening skills

At the phonetic level, learners need to focus on the areas of pronunciation of distinctive phonemes and the sequences of phonemes. There are contextual cues to identifying individual sound segments in order that the meaning is decoded clearly and suitably.

Every language has a phoneme inventory. These vary from one language to another. English has 44 phonemes, out of which there are 24 consonant sounds and 20 vowel sounds. These are represented by 24 letters of the alphabet or graphemes. Among the important features of the sound segments, English also has weak forms. Weak forms are used with structure words like prepositions, articles and conjunctions. For example, and is reduced to an, for is reduced to fo and so on, in connected speech. The use of weak forms of these structure words helps in maintaining the rhythm of speech.

It is interesting to note that when pronounced in isolation, retroflex sounds in English are the shortest, velar sounds are the longest, stressed sounds are longer and louder and unstressed are shorter. These are perceptual cues to articulation, which help develop listening skills (O’Connor, 1973).

In addition to features of individual segments, suprasegmental features of (length, pitch, loudness and intonation) give information related to perception, and convey semantic variation of lexical items and the intended or implied meanings. Suprasegmental features thus play as vital a role as the segmental features. For instance, variations in emotions are also expressed by raised or lowered pitch, increase or decrease in loudness, drawled or quick speech showing varying duration. Thus linguistically significant and important information can be conveyed by varying the above parameters. Another example of significance is length and voicing are distinctive in some languages. In Tamil /p/ and /b/ are not distinctive, but in English they are. In other words, pin and bin are words with different meanings in English, while the substitution of /p/ for /b/ does not bring about change in meaning in Tamil. Vowel and consonant length can individually contribute to meaning and so need to be focused on in listening comprehension. Vowel length as in the minimal pairs, bit and beat gives rise to an entirely different lexical item and consequently, change in meaning. To cite the Hindi word /baDa/ (big), the final vowel lengthening does not result in a significant or perceivable change in the meaning of the word, unless used to intensify the meaning being conveyed. Therefore, a learner must be able to distinguish between short and long vowels in such word pairs as fit and feet, which lead to variation in meaning, unlike in the above case of Hindi word. (However, length is distinctive in Hindi). Eventually, it proves that learners with different mother tongues must concentrate on these aspects of target language, to avoid intelligibility being affected.

English is a rhythmic language, which is based on stressed syllables occurring at regular intervals of time irrespective of the number of unstressed syllables between them and this stress-timed rhythm is the basis of the structure of English (Abercrombie, 1964). It is this characteristic rhythm of English which contributes to its musical quality as a whole. Interestingly, some languages are tonal, where the tone of the speaker conveys the meaning, in addition to words and utterances (e.g. Chinese, Thai). In such languages, tone is distinctive. Rhythm in English depends on the stress pattern of the syllables and words. Therefore the pitch of voice and the stress assigned to the syllables contribute to the characteristic rhythm of English language.

Pause is another suprasegmental feature, which needs special attention to decode the message in listening comprehension. Pause is the duration or length of silence between or across the utterances and is a parameter of intonation. O’Connor (1973) gives two functions of length of sounds (i) as a boundary marker of a sequence of sounds or words (ii) a hesitation to indicate that the utterance is not complete. Pauses may indicate grammatical boundaries or intended meaning of speakers. In connected speech, pause can indicate (i) intentional silence of speaker (ii) unintentional silence or (iii) tone group boundaries. Pike (1945) distinguishes two significant pauses. (a) tentative (2) final, where shorter pauses occur utterance medially and longer ones occur utterance finally. An intent listener pays attention to the silence that occurs between words and utterances as cues to assign extra-linguistic meaning.