Chiara Pennacchini- English LS II - TASK 3 - 4-4-09

Encounter with American students from Trinity College

[Note: Corrections are in yellow. If they raise a grammatical issue that Prof. Pietandrea may want to discuss with you, that issue is indicated in light blue; otherwise the corrections in yellow are simply lexical.][Comments on content are in green.]

Meeting American students was a very useful task by which we had the chance to test our “accommodation” ability.

According to Boylan¹, with the term “accommodation” one has to include not just “the move to make one’s way of communicating converge with that of one’s interlocutors”², but above all reconstruct the cultural worldview in order to say and, even more, to see things with the eyes of the one's [cohesion with previous “one”] interlocutor.

Personally, I agree with this conception because that night evening first of all I had to take the part of a British upper class female and, even if interpreting that role has been was [tense/aspect] quite hard, I realized that, being the English and American worlds being [word order] so distant, the first impression they had about me was of a shady person. This definition could seem strong, but I believe it is the most right correct: I tried to be detached and a bit cold in introductions and they felt, I think, that I was trying to build a distance among between us. As I started to be embarrassed of with that situation, I decided to change immediately my mind immediately [word order] and try to be a half a British girl and a half just myself.

Maybe I made the best decision at least for the first part of the night evening, because it was the only way to create “entente”. During the test, I understood that to establish a certain kind of “intimacy”, entente is fundamental. In fact, I always thought that to feel in connection connected with people in general, and in this case with American people, speaking the same language was enough and, to be honest, I started to talk with them with this idea in my mind. I thought that behaving like an English person would not create any problem in conversation, but it was not like this. I had to change quickly my attitude quickly [word order], or since I was risking to be remain isolated at least for the first part of the night evening. Entente is the step relational state that allows communication; if you don’t try to create a certain kind of “affinity” and “warmth” with your partner, the discussion will be superficial and without particular your desired results.

I don’t know if it was just my impression or if I felt what has really happened [tense/aspect], but I had the impression that my English attitude was just at the formal level, through verbal and gestural behaviors: I tried to use more English words and structures, (like films instead of movies or the construction have got, very British, and not just have and so on),; I tried to use a regular tone of voice (very tough for me) and avoid gestures, but my behavior to build in building a relationship was not English at all. [Perhaps. But your formal accommodation probably signaled a British attitude to your American interlocutors, so they reacted to you less spontaneously than they would have done if you had accommodated to their American style of interacting. You see, “formal accommodation” alone does not work very well with native speakers, since they sense a diverge with your intentional state. But you were not interacting with British students. You were interacting with American students who probably took your formal signals as indicators of your intentional state, instead of comparing them with your intentional state reconstructed on the basis of other indicators, such as timing, focal interests, avoidance routines, etc.] So, I have to admit that I failed in the task of being a real English person; maybe the situation didn’t help me because American people are open and it is impossible to avoid their will to communicate with you. Moreover we were all young people and I believe that also British young people behave differently from the “standard” English people; surely they would be closer than other young people like Italians or Americans, but their age allow them to be a bit more “ruleless” carefree.

What about my formal accommodation? As I’ve already said it was not natural, to the extent that I had to think about it and, above all, it didn’t last a lot. My way of speaking English had the prominence upper hand. Thinking about the way in which you have to speak and behave detaches you from following the conversation, so, as I didn’t want that people would to* think that I was not interested in conversation, I preferred to pay attention to the speech and not to the form of it.

*[An infinitive construction replaces the subjunctive, see: http://tinyurl.com/boylan-2009-k, page 4 in the pdf file, corresponding to printed page 72. Alternatively you could have used a non-overt modal auxiliary: I don't want that people [should] think. See: http://tinyurl.com/boylan-2009-m.]

The second part of the night evening was, surely, easier and it made the meeting very special. I have to admit that the two attitudes I had to play were not divided equally: in fact, I left my English attitude very soon to “accommodate” to the Americans people and also to the rest of my classmates.

This type of accommodation started differently just right from the beginning. I realized that what I wanted was creating to create [telic infinitive] above all an “intentional accommodation”, not merely an “expressive accommodation”.

There was a moment of transition in which the tools to build an create intentional accommodation have been showed appeared [tense/aspect]. Almost casually accidentally some of us and some Americans have started [tense/aspect] to ask each other the way in which we look at Americans and Italians; maybe, unconsciously, we were trying to understand and in a certain sense to our stereotypes ourselves and this it was useful to have the perception of American behavior and cultural values.

Surely what happened was a “substantial accommodation”³, to the extent that the Americans were just having fun in describing Italians, while first of all we were trying to verify if our conception of them might be right and then, but not secondarily, we were trying to “converge with an interlocutor’s constant intentionality”⁴. From my point of view, I realized that for to create a better feeling, what we all needed was that for at least one of us should to** leave his/her own dresses mindset and became (mentally speaking) like the person in front of him/her. I tried to do so looking at their behavior and remembering what my “American” classmates discovered about them, but I don’t know if I was right in that role.

** See the note above on the two substitute forms for the subjunctive.

This attitude was positive for them, too, because they felt at ease with another person who was similar to them. I think in this case there was not the less risk to be of being misunderstood or to be being seen as an actor; behaviors and words were natural also because of the influence of people who were native speakers. We had a good time, though just we the Italians have tried to accommodate. [Are you sure about that? I had the impression that the Americans were trying to accommodate, at least at the beginning, by being more formal – well, at least for THEM more formal – to be more “European”.] For example, when the Americans were asked to try to speak or at least to act a bit like Italians they started to feel embarrassed,; they were not able to do that, or maybe they weren’t ready because they were not prepared. [They had had just 3 months of Italian lessons! And traditional lessons, too; so they knew nothing about accommodation. Obviously they didn't know what to do!]

This time the degree of my entente was higher, just if only for the fact that I felt a real connection with them. Surely it was not easy to accommodate with to them, it was the my first attempt and I don’t know if the environment that I tried to create was right for accommodationng; what is sure is that I was no longer embarrassed no more to talk with them and, even if it could sounds strange, I was more self confident in my American dresses mindset than in my Italian ones. In my daily life, it is hard for me to be open and express my feelings and emotions to other people; in that occasion it wasn’t so. I felt different, open and friendly much more than when I’m Italian and it was a positive sensation for me. [This, of course, is one of the objectives of teaching students of English to focus their attention on accommodating, not on grammar. It liberates their creativity.]

I don’t think that my formal accommodation had changed from the beginning. It has been easier to change the my behavior, but not to change the way I spoke English. So, this could be the only trait of divergence between Boylan’s idea of accommodation and mine. I think that, by under the influence of the your interlocutor, it should be natural that, after knowing something about his/her view of life, if you really want to accommodate, your own behavior has to be modified until being it becomes closer to the other party's, but language maybe doesn’t work in the same way, or at least with the same speed. [I agree that it doesn't work with the same speed.] Talking with your interlocutor and, as consequence, having the will to accommodate to him/her could be easier than starting to talk like him/her. So, I believe that formal accommodation is the second step that, as Boylan maintains, comes after the intentional accommodation, but it can’t be achieved as a direct consequence of it and, above all, just from immediately upon the first meeting. It needs time to be learned and interiorized; the first time it one could be just can only make an attempt.

In conclusion, I can affirm that I didn’t expect an experience like this. I was quite skeptical about the validity of the “accommodation theory” because I thought that theoretically it was right but, at the same time, it should be impossible to apply. I thought that just ethnographers or anthropologists would be able to do that so because their job is observing and, as consequence, trying to be in connection with the people they study. [Yes, but ethnographers and anthropologists are, when they begin their field work, young graduate students just like you: with the same inhibitions, lack of experience, etc. EVERYONE has to begin from zero. So you, as a graduate student in languages, are just as well prepared, or ill prepared, as any young ethnographer or anthropologist. And the same for your future students. This method is used by some of my former students, now teachers, with their Scuola Media students!] But it isn’t so. If you really want to create a chemistry with the person in front of you, you just need the will to mean as s/he means, as that is to say the will to communicate with her/him as if you two had the same cultural values and the same vision of the world.

What a mess pity it is to the study of foreign languages focusing just on the grammatical theory of a determined those languages, you are and not being able to discover the most beautiful thing of the other: his/her culture.

OK.

I appreciated the reserves you expressed with respect to the hypothesis that formal accommodation spontaneously follows substantial accommodation. You were writing under the obvious influence of the elation created by the evening; in a more academic style you might have indicated the hypothesis you disagree with (as I just did in italics) and provided more explicit arguments against it. In any case, your report was enjoyable reading.