My French is OK – as long as you don’t talk to me.

The other day I wrote a post in which I suggested that learners who become proficient in a language may choose, consciously or not, to retain features of pronunciation that make it clear to listeners that they are not native speakers. The reason I gave for this was that the way they speak impacts heavily on the way they are perceived and, while they may be proficient enough in the language to sound like native speakers, doing this would mean an important part of their identity would be lost. I suggested that these learners might prefer to be perceived as members of a different community, or culture, or language group, because this is a large part of who they are.

Of course, I know there are a large number of language learners who don’t want to speak with a “foreign” accent, and there seems to be an increasing demand for “accent neutralization” in language teaching. This addresses the needs of learners who want, for one reason or another, to hide their non-nativeness.

I think this is a shame though. How you speak has a big impact on how you are perceived, and surely it’s important (or should be important) for many language learners to be perceived as non-native users of the language. With this in mind, I’ve discovered through my own experience another reason why language learners might want to do this, though it’s nothing like as worthy as the desire to retain national or cultural identity.

I used to speak French pretty well. I had a wide enough vocabulary to talk freely on more or less any subject and, while I still struggled a bit with some sounds and occasionally stressed syllables when I shouldn’t, my pronunciation was decent. I was also reasonably accurate grammatically, and I had a lot of little fillers that made my speech sound very natural. I was never really able to pass myself off as a native speaker, but I could hold my own in a conversation with a group of French people and they didn’t have to grade their language down for me in any way.

However, that was 20 years ago. These days I only ever use French when I’m on holiday in France, which is for a couple of weeks a year at the most. Over the years my French has understandably deteriorated, and in a way that makes me really insecure when I use it. I’m a lot less fluent than I used to be, and I make really basic grammatical errors like getting the genders of nouns wrong. Not using the language very often also means that the vocabulary I once had easy access to just isn’t there any more. But the biggest problem is my listening – I have real problems understanding what anyone is saying to me.

Of all the features required to use a language, my pronunciation is probably the thing that has deteriorated the least. I still know how to pronounce words and I can still more or less get my tongue round them. In addition, I seem to have retained a lot of those little phrases that French speakers stick in between or at the end of phrases (“si tu veux”, “he ben”, “quoi” etc.) that make whatever I say sound that little bit more natural.

The result of all of this is that provided I get some time to plan what I want to say in advance, I can use my decent pronunciation and throw in some fillers to make my French sound a lot better than it actually is. But although I can fake my speaking skills to some extent, I can’t fake my listening skills. So what tends to happen when I use French is that whoever I’m speaking to assumes that I’m a decent speaker and therefore a decent listener. They then give what seems like an appropriate response which I, given my rubbish listening skills, can’t understand.

I’ve developed a strategy to address this. Whenever I speak to someone new in French (a waiter, a shop assistant, or whoever), I make sure that my opening phrase is badly pronounced. It’s just a little marker to indicate to the listener that they’re dealing with someone whose French is not that great, and that they’ll need to bear this in mind when communicating with me.

Does anybody else do this?

This is not a strategy I’m particularly proud of, and deliberately speaking badly is not something I would consider recommending to my students. But having said that, it seems to be working out OK for me in that I’m having a lot fewer embarrassing moments of misunderstanding on this holiday than I have in the past.

I realise of course that what I should be doing is trying to develop my listening skills more so I can understand at least as much as I can speak. Funny how language teachers are not necessarily very good language learners.

Or is it just me?