CC BY
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Коммуникативные исследования. 2015. № 1 (3). С. 57-66.
УДК 81’25
E.M. Baeva Saint Petersburg, Russia
A DAY’S COMMUNICATION SCENARIOS (NATIVE VS NON-NATIVE LANGUAGE)
The pilot project is based on the data in two languages, Russian and English, and is conducted within the framework of field linguistics. The data collection and methodology of research was devised by the author’s colleagues at Saint Petersburg State University while assembling the ORD corpus of spontaneous speech One Speaker’s Day. The current research features a foreign student studying and working in Saint Petersburg fluent in Russian, whose native language is English, so the communication he has during a day is expected to be in both languages. The analyzed data is transcribed audio recordings of everyday speech interactions of the informant with several communicants. The recordings have been obtained via continuous voice recording during a single day. The participant also provides additional sociolinguistic information about himself and his communicants and briefly describes the nature and the place of all conversations in a form of a speech diary. The linguistic material is further categorized into several speech episodes, with the description of communication scenarios (place, participants, topics discussed) and the outcome of communication. The article comments on communication language patterns and provides examples of conversations both in Russian and in English, proving the informant’s great communicative competence. The article may be of interest for those who teach or study the Russian language, as it features authentic colloquial data.
Key words: communicative approach, communication scenarios, intercultural communication, communication in non-native language, communication skills, Russian as a foreign language, Russian colloquial speech.
1. The data collection and the methodology of recordings
The ORD Corpus of Russian Everyday Communication (One Speaker’s Day] has been created in Saint Petersburg for over 7 years. It has been a unique source of natural spontaneous Russian speech.
The data for the ORD corpus is collected via continuous voice recordings of volunteers. The volunteers (or informants] are asked to spend a day in their life carrying a turned on voice recorder and a microphone with them and thus recording all sorts of everyday communication, from morning breakfast family conversations to professional disputes with colleagues and even casual dialogues on a bus. The sound data and the transcripts of all recorded speech interactions form a multi-level annotated database.
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So far the informants of the project have been citizens of Saint Petersburg of various professions. Among them you can find students, teachers, office managers and other white collars, engineers, military officers, people working in service industry, scientists and scholars, artists etc. There are also volunteers who are retired or currently unemployed. The age of the informants ranges from 18 to 77, and there are 5 relevant age groups of participants. It is therefore clear that the ORD data is not only a rich source of sociolinguistic studies and general research and analysis of contemporary Russian speech but also a potential data for teaching and studying Russian as a foreign language. It provides authentic speech data of the language as it is spoken in the real life, which is rather different from its written, “textbook” form, which is used mainly in formal register and in non-personal circumstances [Zemskaya 1979: 7].
The core body of ORD corpus contains only recordings of native Russian speakers but there have been some marginal recordings of foreigners who might come to Saint Petersburg as students, tourists, business travelers. One of the prospective studies for the ORD researchers is the speech of labor migrants who come to the city to work and to provide for their families left in the other countries. The project described in this article is a pilot recording of an English student currently doing a master degree in Russian literature in a Saint Petersburg university. In this article he will be referred to as SForl because all ORD recordings are by default made anonymously.
As required to all volunteers of ORD recordings, SFor1 was asked to fill in some sociolinguistic and psychological questionnaires, namely The Query for the Informant, The Speech Day Diary and three online temper-defining psychological tests (Eisenk, Cattell, FPI).
The Query for the Informant asks the participant to state their age, profession and current occupation, their place of birth and that of their parents, spoken languages. It also might contain the same data about the participant's communicants, should they possess that kind of information.
The Speech Day Diary monitors the day’s communication. The participant notes down the time, place, and occasion of every conversation, and briefly describes the nature of the conversation, for example, “shopping for groceries”, “socializing at a party”, “attending a tutorial”. 2
2. Native and non-native speakers and communication skills
All native speakers are functionally proficient in their language, although their communicative skills may vary. They are at least well proficient in oral face-to-face communication, as for non-native speakers, there are circumstances when they need to be functionally proficient only in reading and writing [Ammon 1989: 63]. Based on proficiency in various communicative skills, Ulrich Ammon suggests 8 types of non-native speakers:
1] Listening;
2] Listening and speaking;
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3] Reading;
4] Reading and writing;
5] Listening and reading;
6] Listening and reading and writing;
7] Listening and speaking and reading;
8] Listening and speaking and reading and writing.
It is also claimed that to describe the speech of non-native speakers it is essential to bear in mind where the speaker has learned the language, whether it was done at school, in everyday life or from his/her relatives. Therefore there are three stages of language proficiency [Mustaioki 2011: 12]:
1. Language proficiency in everyday communication: the user is capable to deal with any regular communicative situation;
2. Language proficiency in content-oriented discussions: the user is capable to partake in political, philosophical, professional conversations;
3. Language proficiency in social communication: the user is capable to communicate with native speakers without any difficulty.
In The Query for the Informant SForl states that he has got at least 10 years of experience studying the Russian language and culture, first at school, then at Oxford university, then in Russia where his work and studies imply everyday use of Russian. Therefore it may be concluded that SFor1 is fully proficient in both oral and written communication in Russian and is not faced with a communicative challenge when talking in Russian. 3
3. Communication scenarios
From the 1970s the traditional approach to language teaching has been left behind by many of those who suggested that “language is interaction; it is interpersonal activity and has a clear relationship with society. In this light, language study has to look at the use (function] of language in context, both its linguistic context (what is uttered before and after a given piece of discourse] and its social, or situational, context (who is speaking, what their social roles are, why they have come together to speak]” [Berns 1984: 5]. Thus the attention of language teachers shifted from pure grammar to the knowledge and skills needed to use grammar and other aspects of language appropriately for different communicative purposes such as making requests, giving advice, making suggestions, describing wishes and needs, and so on. Communicative competence of language learners now includes “knowing what to say and how to say it appropriately based on the situation, the participants, and their roles and intentions” [Richards 2006: 13]. Nevertheless, most students still usually encounter quite a few difficulties when they come to the natural environment of the studied language because they might not be aware of possible communication scenarios.
In everyday communication in various social and professional situations every person has a communicative role and the function of every speech act is
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to establish a contact. It must be said, though, that “communicative intentions of a person are always multiple and contradictory and never quite clear even to the speaker themselves” [Gasparov 1996: 10]. Every participant of a conversation has their own thesaurus, communicative text, communicative purpose and even their own mental idea of the world, which frequently makes communication rather difficult even for those speaking their mother tongue. So it is increasingly interesting to observe one day of speech of a person living in a foreign country who is equally fluent in the two languages and investigate the communicative acts of everyday communication and their success or failure.
All acts of everyday communication can be divided into various communicative macro episodes. The selection is based on the place of communication, its circumstances and participants. Within the framework of the ORD corpus annotation we have decided to stick to the following types of communication scenarios [Sherstinova 2013: 451]:
M - meta-communication, i.e. talking to one’s self at loud;
P - public speaking, including lectures, presentations, reports, speeches etc;
B - business or professional conversations, when at least one of the communicants is a professional in the subject in question;
S - service conversations, frequently for the information purposes, including all conversations with informants as clients, e.g. in shops, hospitals, libraries and so on;
T - teaching, instructing, practical lessons, including those doing homework with a child at home;
E - everyday communication on various subjects, which basically includes all types of conversations excluded from the previous categories. 4
4. Communicative situations and the choice of language
The English language has properly established itself as the global lingua franca and the number of people speaking it as a foreign language has long exceeded the number of its native speakers [Crystal 2012]. The term lingua franca is often used for any language of wider communication, both oral and written; in some countries in this sense it has even extended from “language of wider communication” to “world language” [Brann 1989: 38]. Russian is often used as a lingua franca by citizens of the former Soviet Union and immigrants who descend from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan [Pavlenko 2006]. Yet it may also be suggested that foreign students who come to Saint Petersburg from different countries to study the Russian language or other disciplines in Russian will as well be likely to use Russian as a lingua franca, for the opportunity to practice it while they can.
Regarding this particular experiment, one can predict that there will be two languages involved in everyday communication, since SFor1 feels fluent both in Russian and in English. We can observe 6 patterns of communication
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based of the linguistic status of communicants and the chosen communication language:
A) In Russian:
A1: Native speaker of Russian - Native speaker of English (Sforl];
A2: Native speaker of another language - Native speaker of English (Sforl];
B) In English:
B1: Native speaker of English - Native speaker of English (Sforl];
B2: Native speaker of Russian - Native speaker of English (Sforl);
B3: Native speaker of another language - Native speaker of English (Sforl); B4: Native speaker of English (Sforl] - talking to himself.
5. Communicative macro episodes
The recorded data can be divided into 8 principal communicative macro episodes.
Episode No Type of communication Place of communication No of speakers The topic Commu- nication pattern
l М Students’ dormitory l working on the final paper for the university; commenting on the recording of ORD B4
2 S in the car while commuting to work 2 traffic jams; films; weather Al
3 T at the students’ home 3 discussing comic books characters; explaining English grammar and vocabulary; holidays Al, B2
4 E at the students’ home; in the car on the way back 2 dogs; plans for the next week Al
5 T at the student s home 2 teaching English Al, B2
6 S on the bus 2 asking for directions Al
7 E in a supermarket 6 choosing and buying groceries; meeting new people; introductions and good byes Al, Bl, B2, B4
8 E at a party more than l0 small-talk; meeting new people; various everyday topics (studying, Russia, England, entertainment, free time, food etc.] Al, A2, Bl, B2, B3
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It can be observed that the most common communicative patterns are A1 and B2, and when the number of communicants increases there are both Russian and English involved in a conversation.
6. Some examples of communication scenarios
There are several examples of meta-communication in the recorded speech data. The speaker mainly uses his native language but there are some Russian words included:
well I'm doing this one day of speech // you can hear some voices from the vakhta //
The Russian noun is easily included in the discourse and takes an article as an English word would have. This technique is used more than once:
I must say I'm doing this project for a friend...
is your friend CIA?
no /she's a teacher at filfak//
When communication is made in Russian it may be called successful in most of the cases. The informant talks to his pupils (of 8 and 12 years of age] and the driver who takes him to the lesson. The topics vary from discussing traffic congestion to superheroes. Despite minor discrepancies, the speakers seem to understand each other well: privet! zdorovo //
prosti chto opozdal// v metro zabludilsja chto li? ne/ ja na avtobuse priehal/ byli probki// a-a-a //
a segodnja probki voobshhe plohie?
da ne znaju / normal vrode //
skol'ko ballov?
shhas// avarija tam //
chto / vperedi?
aga //
SForl has a very good command of Russian colloquial ways to continue a conversation and typical fluency markers (a, nu, v smysle, ne, na samom dele, etc):
a vy kogda rodilis'? v smysle/ v kakom godu? da //
v devjanosto pervom // net/ ja imeju v vidu...
a/ kakogo chisla // a... ja... eh eh eh dd... dvenadcatoe fevralja // fevralja // O / vam povezlo! gde-to mesjac nazad//
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vam povezlo! znaete/ vy kto? o/John Seymour? net/eto ja Dzhon Sejmur! vy po-moemu...
vot smotrite kogda ja rodilsja v ijule ja tam poslednjaja stranica//
da/po-moemu/ne znaju kto vy / etot vot/da/ vy etot/ fevral' da / ja s ochkami//
There are communication situations when SForl acts as an interpreter for his friend who does not speak Russian quite as well, and they both are talking to other clients of a supermarket, buying groceries for an upcoming party, making introductions and possibly mutual plans for the evening (the SFor1’s lines are underlined]: vy muzykanty? are you a musician? net
ja poju dzhaz She is a jazz singer da? da
u menja est' sejchas vecherinkayou can come and sing perevedi
on priglashaet na vecherinku tam opiat' o!pojdem/ne hochesh'?gde? a-a-a nu v eao kvartire gde?
eto v eh eh eh tri minuty otsjuda
The last macro episode of the day is a party. There are students from Russia, Australia, Finland, Canada, Mexico, Iran. They converse in Russian and in English, sometimes using a mixture of the two languages without any harm to the success of the communication:
do you know where otkrvvashka... ?
I don't know but Richard knows//
Sometimes a conversation starts in English and continues in Russian, and vice versa:
I didn't get your name there //
Joe //
Joe // where are you from?
I'm from England^// ja anglichanin / na samom dele //
anglichanin? o!
da //' ja... po-russkigovorju //
a / horosho! horosho govorish' //
spasibo //
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a vy vy obe russkie ili...?
da //
okay //
There are episodes when English is used by a communicant for clarification:
...skuchat' po Piteru?
chto?
budesh'skuchat'po Piteru?
ha.
net? I just asked if you are gonna miss...
a / budu li ja skuchat'! naverno / da // ne znaju //zdes' horosho //ja se-jchas skuchaju po Anglii/pojetomu budu vozvrashhat'sja//
7. Conclusion
During this pilot project we managed to record more than 8 hours of speech. The volunteer participating in the project engaged in a variety of communication scenarios both in Russian and in English, such as, talking to colleagues, friends and casual acquaintances on everyday colloquial subjects, meeting new people, asking for information, teaching a lesson and keeping a conversation with a lot of people simultaneously Apart from the informant, there are recorded communicants whose age ranges from 8 to 40, males and females. There are several communicative patterns between the native and non-native speakers, and all of them are represented by the data. The data itself, being in the form of voice recordings and spelling transcriptions, could be used by teachers and students in the framework of communicative approach. It may be of interest for those who study Russian as a foreign language and would like to practice while listening and studying authentic dialogues. Also, it provides excellent material for prospective studies of Russian fluency markers.
References
1. Ammon U. Towards a descriptive framework for the status/function (Social position) of a language within a country. Ammon U. (Ed.) Status and function of Languages and Language Varieties. Berlin, New York, 1989, pp. 21-107.
2. Berns M.S. Functional approaches to language and language teaching: Another look. Savignon S., Berns M.S. (Eds.) Initiatives in Communicative Language Teaching. A Book of Readings. Reading, 1984, pp. 3-21.
3. Brann C.M.B. Lingua Minor, Franca and Nationalis. Ammon U. (Ed.) Status andfunction of Languages and Language Varieties. Berlin, New York, 1989, pp. 372-386.
4. Crystal D. A global language. Seargeant Ph., Swann J. (Eds.) English in the world: history, diversity, change. Routledge, 2012, pp. 151-177.
5. Gasparov B.M. Jazyk, pamjat’, obraz: lingvistika jazykovogo sushhestvovanija [Language, memory, image: the linguistics of linguistic existence]. Moscow, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1996. 352 p.
6. Mustaioki A. Why is it so easy to communicate in lingua franca? [Pochemu obshhenie na lingva franka udaetsja tak horosho?]. Vakhtin N. (Ed.) Jazyki sosedej: mosty
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ili bar’ery? Problemy dvujazychnoj kommunikacii [The Languages of Our Neighbours: Bridges or Boundaries? The Problems of bilingual communication]. St. Petersburg, Publishing house of the European University in St. Petersburg, 2011, pp. 10-31.
7. Pavlenko A. Russian as a lingua franca. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 2006, vol. 26, pp. 78-99.
8. Richards J.C. Communicative Language Teaching Today. Cambridge University Press, 2006. 52 p.
9. Sherstinova T.Yu. Communicative macro episodes in the ORD corpus of Russian everyday communication: annotation principles and statistics [Kommunikativnye makrojepizody v korpuse povsednevnoj russkoj rechi «Odin rechevoj den'»: principy annotirovanija i rezul'taty statisticheskoj obrabotki]. Trudy Mezhdunarodnoj konferencii “Korpusnaja lingvistika - 2013” [Proceedings of the International Conference “Corpus Linguistics - 2013”]. St. Petersburg, 2013, pp. 449-456.
10. Zemskaja E.A. Russkaja razgovornaja rech': lingvisticheskij analiz i problemy obuchenija [Russian colloquial speech: linguistic analysis and the problems of teaching it]. Moscow, 1979. 240 p.
Список литературы
1. Ammon U. Towards a descriptive framework for the status/function (Social position) of a language within a country // Status and function of Languages and Language Varieties / Ed. by U. Ammon. Berlin; New York, 1989. P. 21-107.
2. Berns M.S. Functional approaches to language and language teaching: Another look // Initiatives in Communicative Language Teaching. A Book of Readings / Ed. by S. Savignon & M.S. Berns. Reading, 1984. P. 3-21.
3. Brann C.M.B. Lingua Minor, Franca and Nationalis // Status and function of Languages and Language Varieties / Ed. by U. Ammon. Berlin; New York, 1989. P. 372-386.
4. Crystal D. A global language // English in the world: history, diversity, change / Ed. by P. Seargeant & J. Swann. Routledge, 2012. P. 151-177.
5. Гаспаров Б.М. Язык, память, образ: лингвистика языкового существования. М.: Новое литературное обозрение, 1996. 352 с.
6. Мустайоки А. Почему общение на лингва франка удается так хорошо? // Языки соседей: мосты или барьеры? Проблемы двуязычной коммуникации: сб. ст. / отв. ред. Н.Б. Вахтин. СПб.: Изд-во Европ. ун-та, 2011. С. 10-31.
7. Pavlenko A. Russian as a lingua franca // Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. 2006. Vol. 26. P. 78-99.
8. Richards J.C. Communicative Language Teaching Today. Cambridge: University Press, 2006. 52 p.
9. Шерстинова Т.Ю. Коммуникативные макроэпизоды в корпусе повседневной русской речи «Один речевой день»: принципы аннотирования и результаты статистической обработки // Корпусная лингвистика - 2013: Тр. Междунар. конф. СПб., 2013. С. 449-456.
10. Земская Е.А. Русская разговорная речь: лингвистический анализ и проблемы обучения. М., 1979. 240 с.
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Е.М. Баева Санкт-Петербург, Россия
КОММУНИКАТИВНЫЕ СЦЕНАРИИ ОДНОГО РЕЧЕВОГО ДНЯ (НА РОДНОМ И НЕРОДНОМ ЯЗЫКАХ)
Представлен пилотный проект, выполненный на двуязычном материале -русском и английском - в духе исследований полевой лингвистики. Сбор материала и его анализ продолжает традицию исследований «Одного речевого дня» (ОРД), корпус которых уже несколько лет собирается коллегами автора из Санкт-Петербургского государственного университета. Для участия в проекте был приглашен иностранный студент, чьим родным языком является английский, но который свободно говорит по-русски, учась и работая в России. Материалом послужила расшифрованная в орфографическом виде речь информанта и его коммуникантов, которая записывалась информантом на диктофон по методике непрерывной записи в течение одного дня. Социолингвистические данные об информанте и его собеседниках были предоставлены самим участником проекта в виде специально разработанной анкеты и речевого дневника. В ходе анализа материала были выявлены основные коммуникативные эпизоды и сценарии, в которых информант участвовал в течение записанного речевого дня. Коммуникативные эпизоды выделялись по принципу разметки ОРД, описание коммуникативных сценариев включает в себя описание места и темы коммуникации, ее участников, а также выбор языка. В статье приводятся примеры удачной коммуникации на русском и английском языках, говорящие о высокой речевой и коммуникативной компетенции информанта. Статья может быть интересна всем, кто преподает или изучает русскую разговорную речь, так как содержит множество естественных примеров.
Ключевые слова: коммуникативный подход, коммуникативные сценарии, межкультурная коммуникация, коммуникация на неродном языке, коммуникативные навыки, русский язык как иностранный, русская разговорная речь.
Сведения об авторе:
Баева Екатерина Михайловна,
кандидат филологических наук, доцент
Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет 199034, Россия, Санкт-Петербург, Университетская наб., д. 7-9 E-mail: [email protected]
About the author:
Baeva Ekaterina Mikhailovna,
Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor
Saint Petersburg State University, 7-9 Universitetskaya nab.,
St. Petersburg, 199034, Russia E-mail: [email protected]
Дата поступления статьи 13.05.2015
