Mrs Doyle, in Father Ted, always knew when to offer a nice cup of tea.
Frequently in ‘real’ communicative situations, even between mother tongue speakers, there is the need to reformulate what we say to make our meaning clear. It is common to ask for clarification of what has been said.
In his book ‘How Conversation Works’, Ronald Wardhaugh wrote that “much that is said in conversation is so ambiguous as to be virtually incomprehensible outside the framework in which it occurs“.
Therefore, we should not be surprised when students of English as a second language find most of the so called ‘realistic’ dialogues hard to follow or even unintelligible.
A lot of listening material places students in the role of eavesdroppers where they are expected to comprehend conversations which they are : (a) certainly not part of and (b) probably not remotely interested in.
This difficulty in comprehending video/audio texts is widely cited as the justification for ‘simplifying’ language and for presenting it in bite-sized chunks. These language units then have to pretend to be realistic and ‘natural’ . In this way, learners are spoon-fed with authentic seeming conversations when, in reality, authenticity has already been sacrificed on the altar of didactics. But this simulated reality runs counter to the view “that students should listen to ordinary speech, spoken by ordinary people in their ordinary ways” which Mary Underwood advocates in her book on Teaching Listening .
Attempts to make dialogues seem ‘realistic’ can easily produce nonsense. Take for example this conversation taken from the 1990 ‘Unita Didattiche per la prova scritta’ pitched at Italian Students and published in 1990 :
GEORGE: Hallo, David. I haven’t seen you for years. Do you always live in the country?
DAVID : Yes, I live in a village near a large forest.
G : When I’m in the country, I generally find the days long.
D : Why?
G : Because I’m going to the theatre or a concert in the evening.
D : We have no theatres in our village but there’s sometimes a circus.
G : Do you often go to London?
D : I seldom go there because London is a very noisy city.
G : No doubt, but I find my city interesting. I could never live elsewhere.
D : I’d like a nice cup of tea. Will you come with me?
G : With pleasure. Let’s go.
Here the dialogue has been crudely manipulated to ensure the maximum occurrence of frequency adverbs – always, generally, sometimes, often, seldom. Quite apart from the fact that two of these are misused ( ‘always’ should be ‘still’ ; ‘seldom’ is far too formal in this context) , this exchange is so false and wooden that any native speaker would recognise its unnatural, even surreal, aspects.
The less than subtle attempt to add cultural authenticity (“I’d like a nice cup of tea“) only adds to the absurdity of the dialogue. However well intentioned, it has to be recognised that such exercises create a false impression of authentic structures. Students learn a form of English that in no way prepares them for genuine communication.
Rather than use such fake texts it would be far better to take a listening passage directly from a podcast, TV/ radio programme of a DVD and include a glossary of ‘difficult’ language. These would be harder to follow but at least they would be more authentic and give examples of ‘real’ language in use.
