English Language Teaching in its Social Context

sometimes338 JOAN SWANNDr Kcval:[Good company produces had qualities](SK)You might have come across this very saying in Sanskrit.[Good company produces had qualities](sic)There I mean, we cultivate qualities by virtue of‘ what (?) company. If weare in good company, we’ll cultivate good things, good habits. If we are inbad company we’ll he cultivating had habits. So this will be our attempt tohe in good company. Always have control over yourself. Try your bestalways for keeping good company.(Lesson I, 6 July 1987)Figure 20.9 Transcript illustrating alternation bctween Sanskrit and EnglishSource: Jayalakshmi (1 996): 145Note: In this ease there is an error in Dr Keval’s Sanskrit. Jayalakshmi comments that he may have learntquotations such as this by rote.Mark Sebba used a mixed system in his transcription of the speech of young Blackspeakers in London, who alternate between Creole (derived from Jamaican Creole) andLondon English. Creole utterances were underlined, London English utterances were not.Underlined utterances were, then, to be ‘pronounced as if Creole’ (1993, p. 163). Sebbaalso used some ‘eye dialect’ features to indicate the pronunciation of specific words orsounds; and certain ‘one-off’ conventions, such as the use of ‘Yo’ to represent a glottal stop(the sound used as a variant of /t/ in certain linguistic contexts, and in certain varieties ofEnglish ~ represented as an apostrophe as in bu’er for butter). Figure 20.10illustrates this. One point of interest is that the glottal stop, a feature of London English butnot (usually) of Jamaican Creole, is here used within a Creole uttcrancc (mvi%e, line 4).Sets of symbols such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are used byphoneticians to give a systematic representation of the sounds of English and other languages.Such alphabets are hard for the non-expert to read and arc not usually suitable fortranscribing long conversational sequences. However if you are interested in learners’pronunciations of English, and you are familiar with the IPA or a similar alphabet, you coulduse phonetic symbols selectively for certain words, or to rcprcscnt certain sounds.Figure 20.1 1 below illustrates the use of phonetic symbols to represent a young Russianstudent’s pronunciation of the word bushy (this is taken from the same lesson as thattranscribed in Figure 20.2 above).