View Content #22435

By Lindsay Marean, InterCom Editor

When I was a child, my mother, who is now a retired National Board Certified Spanish teacher, used to drill me on Spanish verb inflections for fun. Inflectional morphemes are word pieces that provide such information as who is doing the action of the verb, and at what time. I would gleefully chant, “Yo -o, tú -as, él/ella/usted -a” (I -1^st person present, you informal singular -2^nd person present, he/she/you formal singular -3^rd person present). Later, in high school Spanish, I excelled at conjugation tasks, noticing that I didn’t even have to know the meaning of the words I was conjugating (or the paragraph they were extracted from) to get an “A” on the task. Clearly, a knowledge of morphemes, the basic building blocks of meaning, isn’t enough to truly negotiate meaning in Spanish.

As a young adult, I decided to learn my heritage language, Potawatomi. I still find stacks of vocabulary flashcards here and there in my office during cleaning sprees. Now, as an intermediate speaker, I wonder what I could have possibly hoped to learn from a card saying that mkezen means ‘shoe’ (the English word moccasin is a borrowing from Algonquian languages like Potawatomi). In Potawatomi, all nouns have one of two genders, either animate or inanimate; to build a sentence one must choose either animate or inanimate verbs to match the nouns they’re describing. Even to make a noun plural, one must know its animacy. Also, certain vowels seem to disappear and appear depending on what inflectional morphemes are attached. My flashcard never prepared me to know that I’d have to say nmekzenen to mean ‘my shoes’ in a sentence like “I can’t find my shoes!” Memorizing stacks of vocabulary didn’t enable me to communicate basic needs in Potawatomi.

I had a lot of Japanese friends in college, and my college boyfriend ended up majoring in Japanese and doing a study abroad in Japan. I had learned all sorts of fun phrases from my friends and in two semesters of Japanese classes, and I love intercultural encounters in general, so I thought nothing of calling him up in his shared housing in Japan to chat. However, the person who picked up the phone at the other end didn’t speak English, and I had never learned any fun phrases for asking if someone was available to talk on the phone. I discovered at that panicked moment that my improvisational communication skills in Japanese were limited to saying, “Nihongo, iie” (Japanese language, no) and my boyfriend’s name. Learning common collocations and fun sentences didn’t prepare me to negotiate real-life situations in Japanese.

The common thread that is missing in my three experiences is a focus on negotiating meaning to truly communicate in a second language. This is not to say that accurate grammatical inflection, a large vocabulary base, and focus on and use of collocations and phrases that native speakers use aren’t important. They are all essential building materials, but the structure that incorporates them is communication with other humans.

• If I am given an information gap task that requires an understanding of the words I’m conjugating, I get a more accurate understanding of my actual proficiency in Spanish, and I actively improve it.
• If my exposure to new vocabulary is embedded in authentic resources meant to communicate meaning to native speakers, I build up a repertoire of usage along with a knowledge of words.
• If my in-class tasks include unanticipated complications to negotiate, I learn communication strategies along with common words and phrases, and I also get a clear idea of the phrases and skills that I need to work on to improve my proficiency.

Authentic resources, communication-based tasks, and genuine negotiation of meaning in a wide range of contexts build true proficiency as we acquire morphemes, words, collocations, and phrases.