The Effect of Reading on L 2 Listening and Speaking

Course books are full of very interesting reading texts that are supposed to be helping our students to learn how to speak English. Unfortunately they are probably doing just the opposite because they are deepening the filter through which French people listen to English. Adult learners depend on the written word and this is their downfall when they want to learn to speak and listen to a foreign language. This paper describes the three independent systems involved in producing language: semantic, lexical and phonological processes, linking them to the effects of second language acquisition through reading. C an our ability to understand and speak a foreign language be considered part of our culture? By emphasizing an acquired skill that is permanently integrated into a person's deepest inner self, the definition of "culture" found in Le Petit Robert makes it seem so: "Developpement de certaines facultes de I' esprit par des exercices intellectuels appropries. Par ext. Ensemble des connaissances acquises qui permettent de developper Ie sens critique, Ie gout, Ie jugement. V. 1. "La culture, c'est ce qui reste quand on a tout oublie" (Herriot). " Le Petit Robert (The development of certain mental faculties through appropriate intellectual exercises. By extension, all of the acquired knowledge that allows the development of critical thought, taste, judgement. . .1. . "Culture is what is left over when everything else has been forgotten" [Herriot]). Our ability to read, to speak and to listen to our native language is truly "what is left over when everything else has been forgotten. " This, unfortunately is what makes learning a second language as an adult so difficult. It seems that although methods of teaching English are constantly improving, we do not yet take into consideration all of the advances in language acquisition THE J 0 URN A L o F T E SOL F RAN C E research. The latest publications do include what are called "word partnerships" "useful phrases", or "words in context", and they are emphasizing more pronunciation work, insisting on accentuation. However, they seem to totally ignore the fact that most adults learn through the written word. Course books are full of printed words that students can read and record in their memories. Unfortunately they do this with a wildly inaccurate phonological code, "fossilizing" their perception of this second language. Since most adults are constantly reading in their own language, they are unaware of how this activity reinforces all of the phonetic principles of a native language and even modifies perception. Reading influences how people pronounce words, what sounds people think are in words, how well words are remembered, and how rapidly pronunciations of words change over time. (Ehri, et at, 1988) "Fossilizing" the first language: early development By learning our native language we have established a mental filter that eliminates non-relevant sounds and assimilates any even slightly relevant sounds to a preestablished prototype. When native speakers hear English pronounced with a strong Texan accent that deforms the sounds they are used to, they can still understand by automatically assimilating these sounds to ones they know. This ability is precisely what prevents a native speaker from being able to comprehend the sounds of a foreign language. We all have firmly established mental filters that automatically go to work even when we would be better off if they didn't. This mental filter started developing before we were born as shown by experiments with one-day old infants. In these studies, one-day old infants were already more interested in the language they had heard in their mother's womb than a foreign language (Locke, 1993). During their first year, infants go from an interest in native language sounds to defining categories for these sounds that give them a strong foundation for understanding language. Once formed, these categories or prototypes act as a perceptual magnet shrinking the distances for sounds near a category and stretching the distance between categories (Kuhl, 1994). For example, I am using the categories I developed as a child when I cannot distinguish between the French words "dessous" and "dessus" because I assimilate both of these "u" sounds to the English "you". The French mental filter works in the same way when a French person cannot hear the difference between the English words "sit" and "seat". THE JOURNAL o F T E SOL F RAN C E As our mental filters become more and more efficient we can even totally ignore non-significant sounds. In a study with Japanese speakers and English speakers, no brain activity was recorded for the Japanese speakers with the sound stimulus of Irl and III whereas all of the English speakers did react.