Language Blog Week 3

Language Blog

Part One:

1. My conversation partner’s first language is French.  He was born in Montreal, Canada.  He has actively been speaking English for about three years. He studied English in school, so he was proficient in writing and reading English. However, he learned to speak English by immersing himself in American culture.  The first part of the experiment went fairly easy.  He seemed to understand what I was communicating.  The communication was slow and laborious with many stops and starts. Words that asked, how or what were difficult to convey with gestures.  

2. As the conversation was proceeding with my partner, I noticed that he was talking a little louder and his side of the conversation was being conveyed in a simple manner. I felt he was talking to me as if I was a child. My side of the conversation was necessarily simple. We have spoken together in conversation many times and he never simplified his conversation before.

3.  The culture that used spoken language definitely has the advantage.  Voice inflection can convey a great deal in communicating. Gestures are limited in conveying emotion and questions.  Communicating complex ideas are very difficult using only gestures. I found it almost impossible in our experiment.   The culture that could use spoken language might have an attitude that the person, who cannot speak, is ignorant. The culture using the spoken language might convey frustration and impatience towards the non speaking person.   My friend is learning signing or ASL. She has attended many gatherings with deaf people.  She has learned that deaf people often are treated as if they are ignorant. Or they can be ignored because communicating with them is often difficult. Many people who are able to speak feel frustrated and impatient in communicating with the deaf.  My husband is partially deaf and he sometimes cannot follow a conversation in a crowd of people.  He will excuse himself instead of participating, because he is aware of the frustration people have when he cannot hear them properly.  Some people will refuse to take the time involved for communication with a non-speaking person, or treat the nonspeaking person as if they are stupid.

Part2

I had a very difficult time lasting the full fifteen minutes using speech with no gestures or inflections in my voice. I had to start the clock over many times because I messed up and used a gesture or inflection in my voice.  I naturally use inflection when I speak, it was unnatural and required a great deal of concentration to prevent myself from using facial expressions or gestures.

My partner had a difficult time following my conversation.  He stated that he did not know at times, when I was asking a question or making a statement. He could not understand if I was conveying humor or not.

This experiment proved to me that the non-spoken area of communication is more important than the spoken portion of communication.  I learned that most effective communication between people happen with our body language and facial expressions.  I believe that people with autism have a difficult time in reading body language correctly and also blind people would have a difficult time reading body language.  It would be beneficial not to be able to read body language in a culture that was a dictatorship and displaying facial gestures could cause harm to yourself or your family. In this culture honest communication would have to be hidden.