Painting of a White Cat

For native English speakers, it can be difficult to really experience the language as a learner would.  Something about our close proximity and familiarity, coupled with our tendency to generalize and simplify, can mute the distinct nuances of the language to the point that the native speaker doesn’t even recognize them.  English is full of complex patterns and ideas, contradictions and rules far beyond what most native speakers can experience “up close.”  You may have experienced this when an English learner asks about a contradiction or a rule that you’ve never thought about.  It can throw us or take us a moment to unravel what we thought we knew about the language, but had blanketed over in our extreme familiarity with it. To illustrate this tendency, I will draw on a metaphor that works for me.  

What color should Lucy paint her white cat?

Let’s imagine that Lucy wants to paint a picture of her white cat, Henry.  She is a person with no artistic background.  She is very familiar with her cat and knows exactly what he looks like--every inch of him.  After all, they have lived together for eight years. Lucy figures that her white cat is an uncomplicated subject and knowing Henry as she does, she should be able to paint him relatively easily.  She goes to the hobby store and buys a canvas, brushes, and white paint, for the fur of course, as well as some green and gold for the background.  

She draws the shape of the cat onto the canvas and begins to fill in the fur with precise brush strokes that imitate the fur of her faithful cat.   She is careful to paint the fur longer around the neck, and to recreate those little folds of skin and fur with careful touches of the brush.  Around the cat’s haunches she contours, following the lines of the body perfectly.  She steps back to take a look.  The painting doesn’t look anything like Henry.  It looks more like a blob of white. She examines her work carefully, checking to make sure she has every angle, every detail formed correctly.  It was all right.  And yet so wrong.  

Lucy steps back

Lucy doesn’t want to give up.  She takes art lessons.  In one class, the students paint an egg.  She reaches for the white paint, but the Instructor encourages her to step back and really see the egg.   “What colors do you see?” the teacher asks. “White,” responds Lucy.  Obviously the egg is white.  “Yes, the egg is white,” replies the kind instructor, “but what color do you see?” Lucy looked long and hard at the egg, tracing with her eyes the contour of the egg from its pristine white peak along the sloping edge where white turned to ecru, amber, and gray.  Lucy caught her breath.  Her eyes darted to the other side of the egg, while still in reality white, she saw pink, blue, and lavender.  There was very little white visible on the egg she knew to be white. The instructor nodded.  “You have to be able to see the egg before you can paint it.” Lucy understood.  It was not enough to know the color of the egg. She had to know how the egg was perceived.  Lucy went home and took a long look at her cat.  While her mind still knew he was white, her eyes were open to see what she would need to in order to paint him.  Green and gold reflected off the pillows, grays in the shadows of his fur. She noticed that to paint the white cat, she would even use black paint! The closer she looked, the more variation she found.  She laughed at herself for thinking one could paint a white cat with white paint.

Native speakers may struggle to see white cats as other than white

Just as it wasn't enough to simply know that Henry is a white cat, to teach English, it is not enough to know the elements that we speak of.  It is not enough to understand parts and place a label on them.  We must be able to know the language as it is perceived.  Our familiarity with the language can blind us to the differences and contradictions in our mother tongue.  If we cannot see these details, we cannot teach them, any more than Lucy could paint her cat when she only perceived him as the white she knew he was.

Our labeling and categories can impede our progress.  If someone asks what sound the letter “t” makes, native speakers might have just one answer.  However, if a teacher takes time to step back, forget what she knows about the letter t, and experience it, she will hear that there can be differences in the sounds.  This can be difficult to do.  As a teacher attempts to test the theory, he or she may articulate more than usual, throwing off the result.  Putting much effort into hearing the differences can make the teacher very conscious, which can also make it difficult to hear new things.

Want to step back and see the colors?

I’ll give you some words to experiment with.  It would be a good idea to listen to them outside of the context of this reading.  Play around with them now, but also listen to others.  Listen to recordings of yourself made prior, if you have them.  Notice your own speech time to time.  Then, reflect and see if you don’t hear some variations among speakers in the pronunciations of “t” in the following sentence:  

“The teacher certainly wanted the students to try to banter better than they did at first, so she kicked off the night with a test. ”  

Some things to look for are differences in aspiration between an initial “t’ in teacher and the final “t” in night.  Is the “t” in certainly almost skipped over by some speakers?  By yourself?  Do any of the “t”s sound like “d”s?  Do any of the “d”s sound like “t”s?

We may not hear the differences, but our students do

Many language learners are experts at noticing these differences.  Partly due to their own linguistic backgrounds, there are some letter sounds that will pop out as entirely distinct to their ears--sounds that we lump into one category (as in the “t” example above).  Other experiences in their own language make them deaf to sound differences in their language, just as we are in ours.   Since language learners are likely to pick up on contradictions and variations, it is good for us to be aware of them, or at least able to stand back when we need to and take a good hard look or listen to see if we can experience their conundrum, just as Lucy had to step back, throw off her preconception that eggs are white, and see what the instructor was seeing.  

We must practice perceiving the language

This ability is what makes the difference between a good English teacher, and a good English teacher for English learners.  Learners need a teacher who can experience the language as they do, so that they can help them solve the frustrating problems and contradictions that they can’t get past themselves.  In this blog, I will give more insight into the mind of the language learner.  With time and practice, any teacher can improve his or her ability to step back and see all the colors of English.