Lexis Five

1.    I’mfinethankyouandyou?

Ah, here we go. Now we really get to the meat of it.

I don’t think Japanese (the language or people) is/are necessarily any more formal than English (the language or people). There does seem though to be a greater willingness to acknowledge and codify the formalities, and thus introduce more explicit ‘rules’ governing behaviour and communication that we might be expected to understand more implicitly in the UK. Maybe.

Which is all by way of introducing aisatsu. Aisatsu are a rigid group of expressions used primarily when people meet and part from each other, and the word itself is usually translated as ‘greetings’. The kids get the importance of performing them properly drilled into them at every stage of the school system, and this carries over into their English classes.

They’re taught that ‘How are you?” and “I’m fine thank you (and you?),” are the call and response equivalents of introductory the aisatsu in Japanese and use them accordingly. As the subheading above attests, they’re usually processed and used as single lexical items. Which is fair enough, it took me an embarrassingly long time to unpick the Japanese equivalents into their constituent parts.

Regardless, at the start of each class the kids will stand up and chant their aisatsu with all the enthusiasm you’d expect from bored students in one of the most inflexible, impersonal, and anonymising education systems in the world. This in turn has driven a generation of English teachers (both foreign and native) up the wall. And so you’ll always get a few kids whose previous teachers have taught them to respond to “How are you?” not with “I’m fine thank you,” but “I’m hungry/sleepy/happy etc.”

To my mind this represents a massive misdiagnosis of the problem. If you ever did meet another native speaker, ask how they were, and receive the answer ‘I’m hungry,’ you’d wonder what else was wrong with them. “Yeah, thanks for sharing Buddy. TMI.”

It’s a ritual. You go through these little rituals before getting on to the real stuff at hand. The problem isn’t what’s being said, it’s how it’s being said. The glassy-eyed vacancy with which the words are droned betrays the fact that, more often than not, they’re really not fine at all.

* * * * *

On a related note, I spent my teenage years in rural Derbyshire, where the correct form of greeting for males over the age of about 14 is as follows –

              A – “Y’rit.”

              B – “Y’rit.”

Obviously enough it’s a contraction of “(Are) you (all) right?” and it’s probably worth noting that the answer to the first question (which may or may not be uttered with a rising intonation) is also a question (which will always be flat). Formality is a funny thing.

2.    Islands

I digress. I spent most of this unit circling round the idea that multi-word units are perhaps the most obvious indicators of (native) fluency. Moon finally gets to it when she quotes Gairns and Redman on L2 students,

              ““[I]t is worth considering whether an idiom can be incorporated … without seeming incongruous alongside the rest of the language.””

(p60)

From my experience with lower-level learners the answer is a resounding ‘No.’ You can always tell when a dictionary has been employed in a student’s search for an exact match to the L1 equivalent. It almost never works, producing only islands of relative fluency looming like Atlantis out of the raging seas of choppy grammar and storm-tossed syntax like. Very alluring to the desperate mariner/student, but it’ll sink again all too soon and probably drag them down with it.

Likewise, as G&R also allude to later in the above quoted passage, one of the best indicators of native fluency is an ability to confidently play with established idioms and cliché. In fact, it’s often considered a sign of good writing.

* * * * *

I love it when academics try to explain humour. Jokes always work so well when they’re picked apart, don’t you find? Plus, I’d have thought that if you’re going for a line from Anchorman about misunderstanding idioms then there are more obvious ones to choose –

3.    “Doctor who?”

On the subject of explaining humour, I tried to outline the principles of Knock Knock jokes to my wife a while back. Or first attempt went like this –

              “Knock knock!”

              “Yes? Who is it?”

There hasn’t been a second attempt.

* * * * *

So many marginal notes on the Widdowson reading, and the knowledge/ability division/continuum. For me a main thread linking all the reading this time around, and not really answered in any of it, is who is this for? The preassembled chunks (Willis, p 88. Also a great name for a prog-rock band) approach certainly seems superficially attractive in the L2 classroom, as does the focus on collocation in learners’ dictionaries described in the second part of the Carter reading. But given the ‘treacherous island’ effect I mentioned above, at what stage does this actually become useful to the learner, as opposed to merely seeming like a good idea to the teacher?

If Preassembled Chunks is a great name for a band, then The Possibility Parameter (Widdowson, p131) would be perfect for a SF novel. In fact large tracts of this reading, and p131 especially, put me in mind of attempts create computer programmes capable of passing the Turing Test. “Pragmatic ability… without grammatical knowledge” (ibid) right there.

* * * * *

              “There are other fixed expressions which are not idioms but in some of their features behave almost as if they were.”

(Carter, p66)

Well, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…