Subject: Monitoring, pronunciation and anxiety

Date: Fri, 12 Nov 1999 13:37:07 +0100

From: Timothy Mason To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum FLTEACH@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU

First things first : it is hardly surprising that Mel Gibson can do an American accent - he is American.

Now to less momentous matters ; I believe that it will not be far from the truth to say that we all monitor some of the time, and that we monitor both in any FL we might speak and in our Mother Tongue. We monitor, as Stephen Krashen suggests, when we are interested in accuracy. We are interested in accuracy when, for one reason or another, we want to make a good impression : monitoring is more likely to occur in formal than in informal situations. I myself monitor when I'm lecturing, whether in French or in English (in the latter case, I sometimes catch myself doing an American accent. Damned embarrassing). I also monitor in meetings far more than I do in face-to-face conversation ; some time ago, my French had plateaud - fossilization had set in. Then I became HOD, and now have to write a lot of letters and to attend planninng sessions and so on. As a result, I have found that my French is getting worse.

That is to say, I have grown dissatisfied with it, and now make some attempt to ameliorate it. Now, this does not seem to me to be a purely linguistic phenomenon. Gesture, posture, clothing and tone all demand greater attention than they did when I knew who I was and knew what I was doing. I am in the process of acquiring a new persona - that means, incidentally, new language, among other things.

I suspect that for some people it is easier to acquire a new persona in a foreign language than it is to do so in their own. Hence, picking up a foreign language, accent and all, will be less fraught with pitfalls than adopting a new accent and way of speech from among those on offer in the mother tongue. For others - and this may be particularly true of adolescents - fragility of self is such that they need to protect it against the least intrusion, including that of taking on the role of the francophone or the hispanophone.

Regards

Timothy Mason

iufm de versailles

tmason@timothyjpmason.com