doing community service

I sit down at my computer after a couple of days of genuine bona fide community activity. Yesterday – well I can barely recall what I did yesterday. Hopefully it’ll come back to me as I write. The evening was spent devoted to housing co-op treasury work, costing our situation under the new funding agreement. Tedious stuff to describe, but there really is something engrossing in figures – there must be, considering the hours I spend poring over them. Of course there must also be some self-satisfaction in knowing I’m doing useful work for the co-op, cementing myself in as an indispensable office-bearer, a credit to the team. At the same time, I’m perhaps not the team player I should be, I like doing my work in isolation, I like knowing I’m about the only one in the co-op with the willingness to perform accounting tasks I myself would once have baulked at, perhaps for fear of turning into a blinking bespectacled drone.

And now I recall what else I did yesterday. In the morning I drove off to the Adelaide South West Community Centre for my first stint at assisting in English conversation classes. The inaugural class was held the week before, unbeknownst to me. Lita, the organiser of the classes, had expected me to turn up, though she hadn’t directly informed me. The others at the centre assured me this wasn’t a concern, for Lita tended to get into a flap about most things. Besides, there was only the one student, and, according to the others, Lita had become so possessive of her that I mightn’t even have been welcome once the class had gotten underway.

I was getting the impression that Lita might be a difficult woman to work with. I’d met her, and found her affable enough, and almost embarrassingly deferential to my supposed expertise as an ESL teacher, but there was a kind of doggedness and preciosity about everything that made her company a little draining after a while.
I arrived at the community centre about half an hour before the class was due to begin, and I was soon treated to a diverting altercation between Yvonne, one of the centre’s more impressive operators - and an acquaintance of Sarah’s and mine through the co-op sector - and Lita. It seems that Lita had, the previous week, become so absorbed with the language difficulties of her only student, a fairly newly-arrived Korean woman called Clara (surely not her real name), that she’d brusquely turned away another woman, a Filipina who’d approached them following Yvonne’s suggestion, for she was in attendance for the purpose of minding any children of students who might need it, and was at a loose end.

Not surprisingly, Lita had no adequate response to Yvonne’s criticism of her behaviour. She emphasised Clara’s need for intensive assistance, and tried to explain the nature of her problems. ‘You’re missing the point, Lita,’ Yvonne interrupted impatiently. ‘Is it a conversation class or isn’t it? That’s what it’s advertised as. The poor woman was so embarrassed, and I was embarrassed at having put her in that position. What’s more, I then had to entertain the blessed woman myself, when I had a load of work of my own to do.’

Lita seemed contrite enough at this, but I sensed, like Yvonne, that this would be an ongoing problem. We started the class, with only the one woman, Clara, and I think my presence helped to make the interactions more conversational and less intensive. At times Clara seemed to forget the language technicalities, being too engrossed in the content of the communications. Is this a good thing? Well, it’s meant to be a conversation class after all. I think the best thing is to mix it up, because these people do want to improve their English language kills, so you need to bring their attention back to language structures from time to time. The problem with immersion methods often is that it’s more about effective enough communication than absolutely correct language. The main difficulty is fossilisation in the interlanguage. Always loved that term, but it’s not just pretentious claptrap, it’s a reasonably accurate description of what happens.

To illustrate, it’s perhaps best to go on with my recounting of the class. At 11.30am, only half an hour before the 90 minute class was due to wind up, another student arrived, a Japanese woman named Kyoai, together with two kids. Unfortunately the crèche volunteer, this time a man and a native English speaker, had by this time gone away, so she had to struggle between minding a six-month baby and a three-year-old and participating in our class. She was late because it had been raining and she was travelling by foot, only living a couple of blocks away. She explained that she needed English practice because her husband, an Australian, never corrected her, because he always understood what she was trying to say. Their conversation was in any case minimal, he came home, turned on the TV, that was it. No sense of tragedy in her voice about this, she just laughed it off, but with embarrassment.

So it was with some mortification that I heard Lita say to her, after focusing most of her attention on Clara, that really, her English was quite good, that in fact she had no real need of these classes and should instead go to the lunchtime learning sessions or something like that. Lunchtime learning was not targeted at NESB people at all. No doubt Kyoai would benefit from such sessions, but it was just not true that she had no need of this type of class. She knew that she needed correcting, that she was in danger of fossilisation, and to be given such a non-welcome from Lita must have been demoralising. I protested mildly, and made more of an effort to include her, but considering Lita’s comments, I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t come back. And so I’m going to have to bite the bullet and take Lita aside about this. If we’re to have informal conversation classes, she has to accept that abilities will be mixed, from the newly arrived elderly to youngish adults who’ve been here for a dozen years but know they are still making mistakes. And she must be welcoming to any NESB person who wants to join the group.

Kyoia’s concern, I’m sure, is that, with her minimal opportunities for English communication, she feels increasingly trapped by her lack of confidence with the language, increasingly reduced to minimal conversations involving an inflexible English language use, cut off from the possibility of richness and diversity of communication that a greater command of English might give her.

Fossilisation in the interlanguage occurs when the rewards for improving your target language structuring and pronunciation are insufficient to make the effort required worthwhile. Listen to any NESB person who hasn’t been exposed to English before adulthood and you’re likely to find some fossilisation, that’s to say, some stubborn remnants of native language usage transferred to the target language. With people of Chinese background it’s often found in the inappropriate application of plurals, for example. The term ‘interlanguage’ refers to this mixing of native language structures with target language vocabulary.

Actually this matter of rewards and effort is a major factor in all learning, not just language learning. How many of us really understand the deceptively simple equation e=mc2 ? I could devote the next several years to understanding the maths and physics behind it, its implications, etc, but the effort required, at my age, to master whole areas of mathematics hitherto unknown to me, to put myself as far as possible into the mind of an Einstein and so forth, would bear little fruit whether in terms of kudos from my friends or contributions to the field of scientific theory. There might, on the other hand, be some reward in going into the matter just a little bit more than the average lay person, since most people are easily dazzled by science and you might get to impress some Sarah Blasko fantasy figure at parties.

In Kyoia’s case, she might feel that making the extra effort to avoid fossilisation isn’t being appreciated by her husband, or by the shopkeepers and other professionals she might have dealings with from time to time, and she’s still young and wants extra stimulation. The last thing she wants to hear is that her English is ‘excellent’ and has no need of improvement, or even that it’s adequate for her purposes.