Elisa Fiorenza - English 2nd – LM

TASK 3

Encounter with the East Coast American students from Trinity College, 2 April 2009

The encounter with the students from Trinity College was a very interesting chance to experience a different way of communicating: I felt I got in contact with other people involving the “whole” me, [THIS IS THE IDEA OF EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING PROJECTS: THEY INVOLVE THE “WHOLE” YOU. COMMUNICATION DOES, TOO; IT IS NOT ONLY CEREBRAL, EVEN WHEN YOU ARE DISCUSSING A MATH PROBLEM WITH SOMEONE.] trying to internalize another worldview and “accomodate” that of my interlocutors, even if only for some moments.

According to Boylan¹, the process of accomModation implies a convergence of expression as well as of intentionality, and to do so, I prepared myself repeating like a mantra [THAT'S THE IDEA: THE MAXIMS ARE NEITHER “RIGHT” NOR “WRONG”, SO THERE IS LITTLE TO DECIDE INTELLECTUALLY; YOU MUST MAKE THEM YOURS BY AN ACT OF THE WILL.] the main maxims about some West Coast American values to guide my speech and behaviour during the interaction, in order to feel like a “real Seattle girl”. That repetition actually helped me a lot to internalize a new mind-set [HMMMM... ARE YOU SURE YOU ARE NOT EXAGGERATING? STANISLAWSKI SPENT MONTHS TO GET HIS ACTORS TO ENTER INTO A CHARACTER. IT TOOK YOU JUST MINUTES??!!!??!!], to feel more spontaneous.

For the first part of the evening I was supposed to speak and behave as a British girl, but I was not able to do it, since I had few time to internalize that worldview, [AH! THAT'S WHAT i WAS SAYING] so I continued speaking my variety for the whole evening. Honestly, not only I was not well prepared to switch variety, but also I was such at ease with mine that changing was a too big effort!

To break the ice, my friends and I decided to write on a board the typical stereotypes about Americans and Italians: many unexpected comments came out (like “Italian are overdressed”, “In the US everything is big!”, different conceptions of personal space and so on), and while we were laughing upon ABOUT the way we see each other, the distance among us seemed to be shorter.

During the whole evening I let my supposed “Seattle way of being”come out: I introduced myself to some students, but I admit that at the beginning the accomModation was mainly “mimicry”², that is, just an attempt of convergence of expression. To facilitate my task, I often said I had been living in Seattle for some months, and tried to be convincing since I realized I needed a feedback from my interlocutors, to feel like I really was one of them.[CORRECT!] My behaviour can be seen as evidence for considering accomodation as “the search for a common code, through attempts at co-constructing shared meanings”³ and -I would add- it needs trust and courage, too.

The first thing I noticed was that the more I was able to formally accomodate TO them, the more it was simple for me to convey a particular worldview, and also they looked more at ease with me and free to speak more directly. This was particularly evident when I spoke with a girl from Boston: we alternated between Italian and English, and even if maybe she made attempts to converge towards her Italian interlocutor, her extremely limited knowledge of the language resulted in an obstacle to the creation of a certain degree of understanding between us. On the contrary, when I tried to speak American English the conversation was clearly more spontaneous and realistic: the conversation could go on since we had a common shared “formal” field upon which we could build a conversation, and also convey certain values at the same time. We talked more freely, and also me, I felt more at ease while speaking the variety of English I prepared, than speaking Italian with her.

The next step was a confirmation of what is claimed in Boylan “formal accomodation follows substantial accomodation automatically, at least to some extent”⁴: according to my experience it was like a circle, where the starting point was a formal basic knowledge of the target language [ACTUALLY THE STARTING POINT IS AN APPRECIATION FOR THE OTHER CULTURE'S WAY OF BEING.] which enabled us to develop a conversation, then as there was an intentional convergence among the actors, the formal accomodation followed naturally.

Obviously it is possible that her attempts were not on the level of intentionality, and that may be one of the reasons why there was no degree of “entente”⁵ while we were speaking Italian, but I believe it is more likely that the previous knowledge of the interlocutor’s formal way of communicating makes substantial accomModation easier, as if speakers need some shared formal “tools” to start some kind of approach. [OBVIOUSLY A SHARED CONVENTIONAL CODE, LIKE SCHOLASTIC ITALIAN (OR ENGLISH), HELPS COMMUNICATING. BUT DOES IT REALLY HELP AS MUCH AS SHARING FEELINGS? IF YOU MEET A TURKISH (WHO KNOWS NO ENGLISH OR ITALIAN) BOY ON A TRAIN, IT IS POSSIBLE THAT JUST BY GESTURES AND DRAWINGS ON A PIECE OF PAPER YOU MANAGE TO ESTABLISH AN ENTENTE.]

One of the main sensation I had in speaking with Clifton, an American boy from Seattle, was the clear feeling of an increased directness and equality, against the deeply rooted tendence to submissiveness typical of the Italian female society. While I was behaving like a “Seattleite”, I remind me MYSELF THAT I came from a city where, for example, the governor is a woman [A GREAT STRATEGY!], and automatically I felt I stood in a more frontal position, and my words expressed naturally my worldview. Maybe it was also due to a sort of “mirror effect”, since my interlocutor had this kind of behaviour, keeping eye-contact and a head-on position during the whole conversation. The experiment with him was really amazing: while we were talking I continued believing we were from the same city, so I began speaking about some interesting things to visit in his “emerald city”, like the Space Needle and green parks, and I felt I could go on the whole evening pretending to be from the West Coast. In the moments when there was a kind of convergence of entente between us, I realized the turn taking was more spontaneous, the speech was less awkward and I also felt there was an increased sense of proximity and tuning. This means, again, that internalizing the interlocutor’s worldview lead to a spontaneous formal convergence. [GOOD DESCRIPTION... BUT IS IT EMBELLISHED BY YOUR MEMORY? AFTER ALL, THE EVENT TOOK PLACE TWO MONTHS AGO!!]

In general, as regards to the accomodation to the East Coast students, I was not able to catch any substancial peculiarity in their way of being from the East Coast, except for some differences in pronunciation (which I tried unsuccessfully to imitate). Most of them were young students who shared more or less my same experiences of travelling and studying abroad,; moreover we talked for little time about the same general topics (our countries, our experiences of learning a language, the way we see each other), for these reasons it was not possible to observe any particular “East Coast” characteristic typical of their cultural value system. [CLEARLY IT WOULD BE EASIER IF THEY WERE IN THEIR HOME ENVIRONMENT AND NOT IN AN ARTIFICIAL SITUATION LIKE OUR PARTY]

As this last task failed, I could only notice a reaction in the alternation between of American English and Italian: when we used Italian there was more distance among us, on the contrary, when we spoke American English, there was a clear “common communicative terrain”⁶, as if we were on the same wavelength. The process I experienced can be seen as a circular movement:

    FORMAL ACCOMODATION

SUBSTANTIAL ACCOMODATION

The ability of TO formally accomodate SHOWN BY my interlocutors facilitated the substantial accomModation: it seemed to me to have the right words to get in touch with their way of being; then, once it seemed we were also sharing a certain worldview, I also felt I was using language in a more spontaneous way. According to me, if there is no substantial convergence, a simple exchange of information is taking place: this is what happened when I was talking with an Irish boy, since we both had no will to converge towards each other, so the communication soon ended.

In my opinion, this experiment was an exercise of IN relativization, which sharpened my ability of observing people and myself as well: internalizing even partially another worldview meant first of all thinking about my own cultural value system,; for this reason, in the search for those that WHAT could be the values of a typical Seattle girl, I also had to ask myself “American people from the West Coast are different from Italians. So, how do I define myself first of all? What are my cultural values then?”. Moreover I also realized how clearly the language we use is a mirror of our worldview: while speaking with those American students, I noticed, for instance, the increased quantity of “hedges” which stuff the speech of the Italians, reflecting the preference for an indirect approach to communication. [AN INTERESTING OBSERVATION. I AGREE: HEDGING CHARACTERIZES “TYPICAL” ITALIAN SPEECH. BUT IT IS A DIFFERENT KIND OF HEDGING THAN THAT WHICH CHARACTERIZES “TYPICAL” BRITISH SPEAKERS. DO YOU SEE THE DIFFERENCE?]

On the whole, I do not know to what extent I was A “victim” of my enthusiasm [GOOD PRECAUTIONARY STATEMENT: THAT IS WHAT I WAS REFERRING TO BEFORE WHEN I ASKED YOU IF YOU WERE SURE YOU WERE NOT EXAGGERATING], but there is one statement I really believe in and I am sure I experienced that evening, that is the concept of “cultures and individuals as not monolithic”⁷: as I tried to put myself in the shoes of a West Coast American girl, it seemed to me that we all have many different seeds that can be cultivated, it only depends on how much “light” we want to give them, that is to what degree we want to widen our perspectives and embrace different “willS to mean”.

[ALTHOUGH YOU ATTENDED ONLY HALF THE LESSONS, THIS PAPER DEMONSTRATES A SURE GRASP OF THE PRINCIPLES I TRIED TO EXPLAIN, AND AN “IN DEPTH” VIEW OF THE KIND OF INTROSPECTION I TRIED TO INDUCE IN THE STUDENTS PRESENT. MY GOD, WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE WRITTEN IF YOU HAD ATTENDED ALL THE LESSONS???!!!]

OBVIOUSLY, EXCELLENT!