Tales from the Desh

This week in my two intercultural communication classes at my university, I taught students about prosody, or intonation and timing, in spoken discourse. I have found that many of the skills of intonation and timing are similar between Russians and Americans, with only a few exceptions. This would make adjustment for non-native speakers not as difficult as it might be, for example, for someone from India or Bangladesh who is learning Russian or English. So this is good.

Still, this is something all teachers of English need to be aware of, since it is a very important, but not-so-salient, part of the way we communicate. We use pauses in different ways to show that we are think (cognitive), to show that we want someone else to speak (interactive) and to show that we want brief feedback from our listener(s) (backchannel). In our native languages, we can identify these without even thinking. Indeed, we often are completely unaware that we even have this skill.

In addition, there are several ways for listeners to show that they are interested in the what the speaker has to say, and they are all culture-specific. For example, many westerners would say that maintaining eye contact is very important for showing interest. But this is not true for everyone. In fact, eye contact can be seen by some as a sign of rudeness.

I taught two classes on this same topic this past Monday. For the first, there were fewer students. I had prepared several situations in which students were asked to act out a hypothetical conversation and act in a certain way. For example, one student was given a sheet of paper that asked him to describe something that happened to him that day. They other student was given instructions on how to respond and show interest. The students did not know what was written on each other’s papers. I thought that the activity went OK, but it did not elicit much natural speech, and students tended not to talk very much at all.

So, for the next group, I changed the lesson a bit. Instead of asking students to speak in created dialogs, I asked them to create a new culture with totally new ways to show pauses and also new ways to show your listener that you are interested. This went much better, since the students, in their groups, used more English as they prepared their ideas, and also enjoyed demonstrating their new forms.

In addition to getting students to practice their English, this lesson also exposed students to the concept of pauses and timing with the hope that they will pay closer attention to the ways in which they themselves use such skills of discourse to communicate with others. Since these are all future teachers, such awareness will be invaluable to them.

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