SPLIS Newsletter - December 2021 (Plain Text Version)

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In this issue:
LEADERSHIP UPDATES
•  LETTER FROM THE CHAIR
•  LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
ARTICLES
•  TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED PRONUNCIATION TEACHING - A COMPLEXITY THEORY APPROACH
•  CREATIVE ACTIVITIES FOR IMPROVING STUDENTS' PUBLIC SPEAKING SKILLS
•  ARE YOU SERIOUS? TEACHING SARCASM, JOCULARITY, AND OTHER VERBAL IRONY
•  OPTIMIZING SPEAKING/LISTENING OPPORTUNITIES IN LIMITED FACE-TO-FACE CONTEXTS
INTERVIEWS
•  AN INTERVIEW WITH LUCY PICKERING
ABOUT THIS COMMUNITY
•  LEADERSHIP TEAM
•  CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

INTERVIEWS

AN INTERVIEW WITH LUCY PICKERING

Mara Haslam, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

The following is a selected excerpt from the interview. To hear more from Lucy Pickering, please watch the accompanying video.

MH: So if you had to summarize, what would you like English teachers to take away from your work? What are the biggest principles you would want English teachers to know?

LP: I think the biggest one from my book Discourse Intonation is a recognition that the way intonation works is systematic in the same way as any other linguistic system: syntax, morphology. We’re so used to learning those systems, to hearing the word adverb, adjective, prefix, suffix, that we think that these are transparent systems. Now in fact, as you know, as soon as you start delving into any of these systems, there are some complicated issues. The reason that the article system in English is kind of nightmarish for learners is because you can have some nice rules, but as soon as you start delving in, it starts getting complicated. All the linguistic systems are equally complicated, but they are also equally accessible in terms of systematicity. And often intonation is approached as a sort of, “Well it isn’t systematic; you just have to learn one idiomatic contour at a time or you just have to hope that somehow you pick it up,” and this is in fact not true. Obviously, there is idiomatic contours, idiomatic language in the same way that there’s any other morphosyntactic idiomatic language, but the underlying system exists with intonation as it exists with any other system, and that’s what I’m most keen on communicating, because it’s a learnable system in just the same as any other system that you’re working with as an English language teacher. If you look at the foundation of how you learn, of how it operates -- which I argue is discourse pragmatics, as Brazil argued -- then the pieces start to fit together. If you look at tiny pieces, like, for example, typically in textbooks we’ll have things like “yes-no questions go up and Wh- questions go down” and then, sure enough, there you are teaching in the classroom and there’s a completely opposite example: there’s a yes-no question that went down. And all your students say, “Wait! I thought this was a rule!” The rule doesn’t rest inside the syntax, it rests inside the pragmatics, which means that many yes-no questions go up and Wh- questions go down, simply on the basis of the pragmatic information or discourse information they’re communicating, but it’s not a rule inside the syntax, which means that any potentially yes-no question can go down and any Wh- question can go up, depending upon the discourse context. But what happens if you look at the pieces -- a bit of syntax, a bit of attitudinal work, a bit of this, a bit of that -- then you’re left with this impression that the system is a sort of somewhat random collection of contours and individual pieces that you feel like you couldn’t learn it, let alone present it to your learners. So my overarching goal, for sure, apart from other things that I do in the book, the thing that I start with and end with is the system. It can be learned in the same way that any other linguistic system can be learned.

MH: As you just said, intonation and pragmatics are connected. Do you think that maybe people think that intonation is random because they don’t focus so much on pragmatics?

LP: I think a big part of the issue is we don’t do a great job of even teaching our teachers intonation, but when we do, and when we’re teachers, and present it, it’s often presented in these little pieces that are often not connected to a context. It is impossible to see how the whole thing fits together within an interaction. If, for example, historically you think of semantic models of intonation teaching where you have like, you know, 200 contours and like, “Contour A is like this and it’s happy but slightly puzzled; Contour B is unhappy but potentially bored,” and you’re like this is ridiculous, this is insane, no one can learn this. And the truth it it’s because that is not how the underlying system operates. It operates in conjunction with all the other pragmatic phenomena we know: facial movements, gesture, and all kinds of haptic issues. All these things contribute to the pragmatic phenomena, including intonation, and that can contribute in a very systematic way.

MH: I’m guessing that’s the reason why the first word in the title of the book is Discourse.

LP: Yes.

MH: Do you want to say anything more about that?

LP: Well, only that I really -- and I think I’ve probably said this now for the third time so I’m sorry – I really believe that a huge part of the problem has been presenting pieces and not a whole. And, of course, you can’t see the whole unless you can see the discourse context. Now this, again, doesn’t just apply to intonation. It applies to everything. Like we talked about the use of articles. Articles rely on a discourse context: what I think you know, and what you think I know. If I’m reminding you how to get to my house and you’ve been here before, I say, “Remember you go around the corner and there’s the bridge that you go under.” Now if you haven’t been here before, I’m going to say, “You go around the corner and then you see a bridge and you go under,” right? These are automatic linguistic choices that we make based on our understanding of the discourse context. As I said, that applies to all linguistic systems and equally to intonation. If you take out tiny pieces, these tiny historical ways of presenting it and so on, it doesn’t do any good. It makes it either look non-systematic or absolutely impossible to learn. So discourse context is absolutely critical.

MH: So what would you recommend for teachers? How can they bring discourse context more into the classroom?

LP: I think we are happily in a world now where, for most of us -- surely not everyone, I understand that -- but most of us have access to so much authentic, naturally based material that you can use even at a very low level to pull in natural language as it is inside a discourse context. It doesn’t have to be particularly long. One of the examples I use in the book was collected by one of my students and is two sorority girls in a university and it talks about how you accommodate the pitch. The first girl says “Oh Amy, it’s so great to see you!” [editor: spoken with high pitch] and the second one says, “Yeah, it’s great to see you!” [editor: spoken with high pitch] because she’s accommodating to the pitch. It would be weird if the second one says, “Hi, yeah, good to see you.” [editor: spoken with low pitch] With low, it would make it sound like, “Really? Is it good to see me? It sounds like you really don’t care one way or the other.” So pitch accommodation is one way that we use intonation in interaction. That’s the shortest example on the planet. There are tons of examples like that that you can access through the internet that you can access with YouTube and that you can create yourself on the phones, apps, you know. When we say discourse, I think a lot of people think, “Oh God, a chunk of spoken language, a lecture.” It totally doesn’t need to be that complicated. It depends what it is you’re trying to teach them. But most of the examples in my book are discourse examples in the sense that they are pulled from a natural discourse environment but they’re not this long; it doesn’t need to be. For the features that you’re showing, they can be quite short examples.

Of course, it’s difficult if you don’t know what it is you’re looking for, if no one’s talked to you about the system. If no one’s said to you, “Here are the systematic pieces you might want to look for,” you don’t know what you’re looking for. And that’s our job as teaching our young and our new novice teachers, to say, “Here’s what you’re looking for.” It’s not helpful if you’re using old-fashioned examples or old-fashioned saws like “Wh- always goes down, yes-no always goes up,” because that’s not how it works. So as soon as your teachers get out there and they get faced with an example that doesn’t match it, they don’t have anything to hold onto, to change that. I think the job is sort of the other way around. I think as, we as trainers and as teacher practioner-researchers, it’s our job to do a better job of explaining this to our novice colleagues so that they can do better than we did, they have better tools in their tool box than we had.