Changing your accent with your whole body
“Only half of the activations in the brain were to do with the speech and language areas. The voice is not just coming from your lips. It’s coming from the whole body and you need to think about that when you’re trying to change aspects of it.”
From How Our Brains Control Our Accents in the Times, an interesting article on how brain scans showing how impressionists’ brains are firing in the movements parts when they change their accents, as if they were doing the body language and gestures of the person they are mimicking, even when they are not moving.
This will probably seem like a bizarre connection to anyone but me, but this instantly made me think of my problems with one of the biggest politically correct dogmatic TEFLly things around at the moment, the abandonment of the native speaker model. If someone can improve their language skills by taking on aspects of the body language, facial gestures, cultural habits etc of someone or (as has been widely proven is very important in immigrants and bilingual kids) by identifying with a group of people who speak that language, how is that possible with an ill-defined group of EIL speakers who don’t share any of those aspects?
For me, having a picture of Italian as something I speak while waving around my arms, speaking loudly and being charmingly direct makes it both easier and more motivating to learn the language. It also helps me to stop translating by taking on another persona when I speak Italian and so switch off the interference from the English, Japanese and (less successfully) Spanish speaking parts of my brain. Not only do I not think that would be possible with a vaguely defined World Italian, I tend to suggest that my students go in the opposite direction and choose one country, region or even famous person that they want to model their English on.
That was quite long! For the busy amongst you, here’s the 21 word version:
When it comes to learning a language, stereotypes are useful. Trying to be like Robert DeNiro could be even more so.
And for the very busy, the five word version
Jennifer Jenkins eat my shorts!
