Nyelvtanulás | Román » Intercomprehension and Language Teaching and Learning in the Romanian Military System, An Open Door Towards the Future

INTERCOMPREHENSION AND LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE ROMANIAN MILITARY SYSTEM: AN OPEN DOOR TOWARDS THE FUTURE Delia LUNGU, PhD, “Mircea cel Batran” Naval Academy, Romania Mariana Boeru, “Mircea cel Batran” Naval Academy, Romania 1. Background In 2004 Romania was invited to join NATO, which involved complying with a series of accession conditions. Among these, the ability of all military personnel to communicate in other languages than Romanian was a main issue to be addressed by the Romanian Ministry of National Defense. Foreign languages have always been taught in the Romanian military educational system. Before Romania’s accession to NATO, foreign languages had been taught in military high schools, colleges and academies. Nevertheless, the Romanian military felt the need for a more intensive and comprehensive form of language training for its personnel who had to refresh and improve their language knowledge and abilities in order to reach the NATO-imposed

standards. Thus, new foreign language centres have been established across the country and the services. The mission of these centers has been to offer military postgraduates intensive six-hour-per-day general and military English, French and German courses. Moreover, two teacher-training centres have been opened to offer the foreign language teachers in the system the opportunity to further develop professionally, by attending in-service residential training courses. The training courses offered so far have focused on the methodology of teaching English, this being the main foreign language taught in the system. 2. Enlarging the horizon Answering the challenges of a multilingual environment Interestingly enough, although NATO encompasses military forces from 26 countries, foreign language training, in the military system, has traditionally focused on two, maximum three languages, namely English, French and German. On one hand, this is justifiable in terms of cost and

time-effectiveness. On the other hand, we must admit that the ethnic diversity in the theatre of operations, reflected by the military personnel’s varying degrees of proficiency in the mainstream languages, poses some strain on the effective communication among forces. Romania has been an active member of NATO for three years now. Our military personnel have mostly reached the language proficiency requirements imposed by Romania’s joining the Alliance. Our militaries involved in NATO operations are now fluent in at least one language (English) or even in two (English and French/ German). After three years of operating in a multinational and implicitly multilingual professional environment, our forces have intimated some of the challenges they have faced when interacting with ethnically diverse counterparts. Although the lingua franca among NATO forces is still English, the feedback is that the ability to understand, at least partially, other languages would help to bridge

cultural communication gaps, thus strengthening the professional relations between the parties involved and leading to enhanced efficiency in accomplishing the tasks. Naturally, this information has had its impact on the foreign language teaching system, which has been, at its turn, made to look upon itself in an attempt to respond to the present needs of our active military personnel. Of course, it would be unrealistic time and cost wise to think that training in more than two or three languages can be offered. No one expects our personnel to be proficient in the languages of all the other NATO forces. However, it has been obvious that the way in which foreign language training has been done, its aims and methods need to be revisited and put into perspective so that they respond to the challenges of the current military environment. This is where intercomprehension comes into place. 3. Intercomprehension The first encounters We first came across the concept of intercomprehension in

2005 when we participated in an international ELT conference in Çanakkale, Turkey and listened to Dr. Filomena Capucho’s (Universidade Católica Portuguesa) presentation “Intercomprehension: A Way to Multilingual Education”. Although that was the first “formal” encounter with the term, we later realized that we had experienced some of its principles without even realizing it. When we first arrived in Istanbul, we had to find the central bus station to catch a bus to Çanakkale. Needless to say, neither of us is a speaker of Turkish nor has the slightest idea about the Turkish language system. We were in the possession of a city map, which was not of much help since it was in Turkish, so we decided to make use of our extensive knowledge of the world’s lingua franca, English, which, to our surprise, proved to be of little use. At a closer look at the map, we saw the bus symbol and the words otogar and otobus next to it. We immediately resorted to our knowledge of Romanian

and realized that otogar in Turkish was the same with autogara in Romanian, while the word otobus next to the symbol of the bus rang equally familiar since it is the same in English and similar to the Romanian autobuz. What we did was to employ the very same decoding strategies that we teach our students when they come across unknown vocabulary in English, this time, however, to find our way in a completely unknown language. Looking back we can say that we successfully used the following strategies: a) using words which are similar (in writing or pronunciation) in Romanian, Turkish and English; b) applying our schemata to visual clues in order to deduce the meaning of unknown words. On the bus to Çanakkale we were trying “to kill” the 6-hour trip by decoding some of the ads we could see along the road. We managed to decode two terms written on large billboards, redundantly posted on buildings. The terms were satilik for sale and kiralik for rent We reached that conclusion by using

the following deduction strategies: 1. The ads were posted on buildings so we assumed they had to do with the real estate business. Their unique format prevented us from mistaking them for ads for other types of businesses. What was even more helpful was the fact that the buildings were either new or still under construction. They had no shops or other types of commercial facilities. 2 The two graphemes repeated themselves often enough for us to be able to recognize them and notice that while satilik was posted both on finished and under construction buildings, kiralik was only posted on finished buildings. Therefore, we deduced that satilik meant for sale while kiralik for rent. The second strategy mentioned above had worked again By the time we reached Çanakkale we had already enriched our knowledge of Turkish vocabulary with quite a few other survival words, among which kek for cake and su for water. We must confess that all our deductive work was not done in a conscious and

particularly purposeful way, consequently we were reminded of the strategies we had employed when attending Dr. Capucho’s presentation in the conference. Her proposal to employ those learning strategies one uses when learning one foreign language to any other previously unknown languages was both interesting and intriguing. We immediately recognized its potential for and applicability to our system. Our curiosity and interest having been stirred, we started to read the literature available on the topic. 4. Intercomprehension in the Romanian military foreign language training We have soon realized that we can capitalize on the foreign language knowledge our personnel already possess in order to help them tap and develop their skills not only to autonomously acquire the specialized vocabulary in the language(s) they know, but also to approach informational chunks in other, unknown languages. This sets the current teaching practices into perspective and comes to expand their reach into

areas they have not really tackled before. Teaching a foreign language does not only imply the transfer of lexical and structural items or the correct pronunciation, but also the insight into another culture, the ability to communicate effectively beyond the written or spoken word. Moreover, the foreign language teacher’s responsibility is to help the students develop their learning skills and strategies, which they have to be able to apply inside and outside the classroom, with or without the teacher’s supervision. One might wonder where the novelty of such an approach lies. Student autonomy has been recognized as a key issue by ELT professionals for quite some time now. Well, this is true However, while students have been expected to operate autonomously in the target foreign language, they have not really been encouraged to apply the same strategies to a second or third language they might wish to pursue. It is not that a miraculous set of procedures, which would ensure the

rapid and efficient acquisition of different languages, has been suddenly discovered. It is merely the recognition of the potential of such learning strategies outside the boundaries of just one foreign language. Having interpreted the concept of intercomprehension in this manner, we have come to the conclusion that it would be perfectly applicable to our environment. Not only are we living in a multilingual European community, which is striving to maintain and promote its multilingual nature, but also our target student population is operating in a multiethnic and multilingual professional environment in which effective communication is essential to the accomplishment of military tasks. There is an obvious need for a link between language learning and intercultural learning. The multilingual intercomprehension opens the way for militaries of different countries to communicate on the same footing since linguistic respect through usage should not be given to a single lingua franca

but to all languages represented by their speakers in the military. Dominance is achieved via language too; therefore, it should not find its place in a professional environment functioning on the principles of equality and partnership. Let us clarify this statement Intercomprehension in its original understanding of two speakers communicating each in their native language is not realistic and applicable in the military environment. However, even limited passive knowledge of or receptive ability to decode some informational chunks in another language has the potential to strengthen professional relations by means of mutual respect for each other’s cultural and linguistic identity. Returning to the Romanian military foreign language educational system we suggest that intercomprehension could be used along the following lines: A. As a learning strategy developed while attending a foreign language course, concerning: • the acquisition of specialized vocabulary (in the foreign

language taught, i.e English, French or German) through the active and conscious use of intercomprehension strategies; These might include: o the awareness of internationalisms (especially well represented in technical language) of Latin and Greek origins. According to Peter Doyé: On average, adult Europeans have 4000 of these easily recognizable words at their disposal. They vary in amount and distribution from language to language, but even such languages as Finnish and Hungarian, which belong to the Uralian Group, contain quite a number of these international words. (Doyé, 2005) o the awareness of lexical similarities among languages within the same family (especially in French). Our students can make use of their knowledge of Romanian to deduce the meaning of specialized vocabulary in the other Romance languages. Mention must be made that Latin is taught in most Romanian high schools, functioning, therefore, as the perfect langue dépôt our students can use in their

encounters with the other Romance lexical items. B. To develop the learners’ multilingual receptive competence by means of a set of transferbased deduction skills Considering the natural capacity of human beings to learn foreign languages, it would be extremely beneficial if our students were made aware of the linguistic wealth they already possess and the ways in which they can use that to understand other languages. Thus, the foreign language teachers’ responsibility should be: • motivate students to use intercomprehension by making them aware of how much they already know. Students might not even be conscious of the fact that their general knowledge of the world, their expertise in a particular field, their competence in their mother tongue as well as in a foreign language is part of their “fund of knowledge” which can be easily tapped when approaching other foreign languages. • develop the student’s general linguistic competence. While teaching a foreign

language, teachers should also give their students information about language systems and language families, thus developing their general language knowledge fund and enabling them to make correlations between languages more easily. • help students become aware of and actively use language learning strategies. These deduction based strategies include the application of the students’ knowledge of the world, of various cultures, of verbal and non-verbal communication patterns, of language systems and groups, of phonological patterns, and, last but not least, of morphology and syntax. It is vital that students, on one hand, should be made aware of these strategies when formally learning a foreign language, and, on the other hand, be encouraged to transfer them to any other foreign languages they are faced with. C. To raise awareness of and promote respect for cultural diversity through intercultural learning. Considering the fact that language is one of the most important carriers

of culture, we feel it is essential that students receive an intercultural education while learning a foreign language. The more aware students become of cultural diversity and various cultural patterns, the more effective and affective communicators they become. In our particular case, since our students are expected to be functional in a multilingual, multiethnic professional environment, we feel that they need to be equipped with some general cultural competences in order to efficiently accomplish their tasks. 4. Teacher Training in Intercomprehension Needs Analysis Pilot Sessions We have talked, so far, about the foreign language teachers’ responsibility in promoting intercomprehension among the Romanian military students. However, we are aware of the fact that in order for our teachers to include the intecomprehension strategies in their foreign language classes they need to be first introduced to the concept and then persuaded of its benefits. In one word, we felt that the

first step should be taken in the direction of teacher training. As mentioned before, current teacher training courses focus exclusively on the methodology of teaching foreign languages with little or no mention of the cultural or multilingual aspects. Therefore, before anything else, we considered that an initial needs analysis was called for. The questionnaire consisted of two questions: 1. “Are you familiar with the word intercomprehension?” and 2. “If your answer to Q1 is No, can you guess what the meaning of intercomprehension is?” The respondent population was made up of 13 Naval Academy teachers, Foreign Language Main Centre teachers and Self Access Centre teachers. Annex 1 will show their answers to the two questions. Interestingly enough, although none of the teachers were familiar with the term, they were quick to apply one of its basic strategies. As seen in their answers they made use of the prefix inter and their knowledge of the word comprehension to deduce

the basic meaning of the word. They then related it to their previous experience and interpreted it as a learning strategy by means of previous knowledge and contextual clues. To continue with, a series of informal talks were conducted in which teachers were questioned, among other things, about their interest in the concept of intercomprehension. They all showed a vivid interest in the topic and expressed their willingness to learn more about it. The findings of the needs analysis questionnaire and informal talks helped us crystallize the aims of objectives of the pilot teacher training sessions we intended to design for our teachers. We decided to start off with two 60-minute pilot training sessions. The aims of the first training session were: • to familiarize teachers with the current European language policy; • to raise the teachers’ interest in the concept of intercomprehension; • to familiarize teachers with the concept of intercomprehension; • to present the

current reach of the concept at the international level. Method: The session was designed as a plenary activity in the form of a Power Point presentation. It included a brief overview of the European language policy with a stress on the promotion of multilinguism followed by the definition(s) of the concept of intercomprehension according to the current scholars in the field. Teachers were also given a presentation of the present international projects and their vision and employment of the concept. At the end of the session, teachers were given the chance to ask questions and were also indicated some of the main sources for further inquiry in the field of intercomprehension. The second session was a practical one. Its aims were: • to expose teachers to some methodologies and strategies of teaching towards intercomprehension; • to encourage teachers to reflect upon the benefits of including intercomprehension in their language classes; • to create the opportunity for

teachers to revisit their assumptions and beliefs about the role of the foreign language teacher. Method: The teachers were involved in a series of awareness-raising-through-discovery activities. The focus was on the receptive skills of teachers to decode texts written in a foreign language other than English, i.e Italian Mention must be made that the participant population comprised exclusively teachers of English who had not had any formal training in Italian. The task was based on the principles of co-operative learning and the participants had to work in groups to do a series of comprehension tasks based on the text. Peer observation was also used as each group was assigned a silent observer from among them, who had to watch the participants while they were doing the tasks and record the strategies they used to decode the text. At the end of the activity, each group reunited with its observer and went over the strategies employed. A plenary discussion was then held in which

participants shared their findings and considered the applicability of such strategies in their language classes. Feedback: At the end of the two pilot training sessions, the teachers were administered a feedback questionnaire. The respondent population consisted of the 10 teachers of English from the Naval Academy. The feedback questionnaire was used as a tool of testing the participants’ reaction to the concept of intercomprehension and their opinions as to its applicability to their language classes. Since the question of participants’ familiarity with the topic had been dealt with in the initial NA questionnaire (see Annex 1), the 10 teachers were now asked how interested they became in the topic after the raising awareness first session. The majority (see Annex 2) expressed a real interest in the topic. Moreover, especially in the light of the second session, again most participants acknowledged the applicability of the intercomprehension strategies to their language classes.

If we correlate their answers to question 2 with those to the open-ended question 4, we can see that most teachers had used some of the decoding strategies with their students but only within the boundaries of the taught language. According to their comments they would be interested in enlarging the scope of such strategies to other languages: “I had used those deduction strategies before with my students of English to help them cope with unknown vocabulary or more complex texts” (Respondent 3); “The strategies we used to decode the text in Italian were not new either to me as a teacher nor to my students of English. I just never thought I could or saw the need to apply them to other languages. Now I do”(Respondent7) The majority of teachers agreed that further training in the area is necessary and saw the benefits of dealing with intercomprehension within the future teacher training seminars. 5. Plans for the future The participants’ feedback to the two pilot training

sessions encouraged us to pursue the topic further. Our initial enthusiasm for the topic has been confirmed by the general positive reaction of our teacher population. The next step is to include the two training sessions on intercomprehension in the 2007-2008 teacher-training scheme in the national military educational programme. If the reaction of the teachers from all the other language institutions in the military coincides with that of the Naval Academy teachers, a possible international training project might also be considered. Bibliography 1. Capucho, F (2005) Intercomprehension: A Way to Multilingual Education The 4th International ELT Research Conference. Reflecting on insights from ELT research Canakkale: Onsekiz Mart University. 2. Doyé, P, (2005) Intercomprehension In JC Beacco and M Byram, Guide for the development for language education policies in Europe: From linguistic diversity to plurilingual education. Strasbourg: Council of Europe, Language Policy Division

3. Klein, Horst G, Franz-Joseph Meißner, Lew Zybatow (2002): EuroCom - European Intercomprehension. In: Lew Zybatow (Hg), Proceedings of the 35th Linguistic Colloque. Innsbruck Annex 1 Q 1.-13 Q 1. 2. 3. 4. 5 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 1. “Are you familiar with the word intercomprehension?” No 2. “If your answer to Q1 is No, can you guess what the meaning of intercomprehension is?” Reciprocal/ two-way understanding Honestly, never heard of the term. It’s the prefix “inter” that causes trouble I could just guess it might be knowledge achieved in different fields that helps and makes the acquisition of a language easier?! Comprehension of words, phrases similar in different languages, so people can communicate among them. It is the ability to communicate and understand each other with the help of your own language. It is comprehension among more speakers of different languages ( maybe through cognates, common roots) Understanding words, phrases or texts in a

foreign language by means of referring to knowledge from other fields of competence. Possibly the understanding of two or more different codes/languages. In the educational process it might mean the ability of the student and that of the teacher to understand each other better. As I understand it, it refers to understanding something, a concept as a result of making connections, interrelations among concepts, for example I made connections between the meaning of “comprehension” and the prefix “ inter” that, for me, relates to interrelations, connections. It could be the process of understanding through intuition, usage of images, gestures etc. It could be the relation between the levels of language comprehension of different subjects. A deeper understanding of a concept/idea/rule through another idea. The ability to understand an inner-world/structure. Annex 2 POST-SESSION FEEDBACK This is a feedback questionnaire designed to measure the extent to which the two pilot

sessions on intercomprehension have reached their aims. Your answers will help the trainers decide whether this topic should be further pursued in future teacher trainings. 1. How interested in the concept of intercomprehension are you now, after attending Session 1 “An Introduction to Intercomprehension”? Circle the appropriate letter a, b, c or d. a. b. c. d. not at all interested a little interested quite interested (3) very interested (7) 2. How applicable are in your opinion the intercomprehension strategies explored during Session 2 “Intercomprehension: Methods and Strategies” to your language classes? Circle the appropriate letter a, b, c or d. a. b. c. d. no applicability little applicability (1) some applicability (3) applicable (6) 3. How beneficial to you as language teachers would future trainings in intercomprehension methodology be? Circle the appropriate letter a, b, c or d. a. b. c. d. not beneficial of little benefit beneficial (2) very beneficial (8) 4.

What is one thing you learned in the two sessions on intercomprehension? 5. If you want to make any other comments: THANK YOU! Abstract The main purpose of this paper is to present the initiative of disseminating the concept of intercomprehension within the Romanian military educational system and to analyse its applicability and benefits in the field of teaching and learning foreign languages. The initiative is justified by the absence of intercomprehension from the Romanian linguistics scene and the specificity of our

teaching environment. Our system offers foreign language training to military personnel who participate in multinational assignments in which exposure to different languages and cultures is inevitable and difficult to deal with. The evident impossibility of teaching more than just one or two foreign languages led us to seriously consider intercomprehension as means of facilitating their interaction with other international militaries by developing their intercultural communicative competences and receptive skills. However, this task cannot be performed without first training our educators. That is why we felt it was important to include the topic of intercomprehension in the syllabus of current and future teacher training events organized in the Romanian military system, thus, raising awareness of the issue and encouraging our teachers to apply its methodology in their language classes. The starting point of this initiative was constituted by a formal and informal inquiry among

teachers concerning their familiarity with intercomprehension and its possible relevance in teaching languages. The results encouraged us to go farther, as they revealed a genuine interest in the field despite little knowledge of it. Consequently, a series of teacher training sessions were designed and piloted in view to their inclusion in future trainings. The paper will present the current situation in the Romanian military educational system with regard to intercomprehension, the results of the initial inquiry and the feedback on the piloted training sessions and further steps to be taken from that point onwards