It was early evening, and only one of my intermediate adult students had turned up for class. We were both tired. He suppressed a yawn, and then I found myself doing the same. We had just completed the first half of an exercise on pronunciation. The student, who was sitting directly in front of my desk, all of two paces from me, shifted in his seat. “This is boring,” he said.
I was surprised and looked up sharply.
The student was looking at his book, and I realized that he had not meant the words for me so much as a private commentary, almost as if he were describing the situation to himself. “We don’t have to do it,” I said.
“No, no, no!” he blurted out. He was now the startled one. “I didn’t mean it like that!”
I repeated that we were not obliged to do the exercise, and after some more apologies and protestations from him, we went on to a different one.
The student is 31 years old, a metalworker who hopes to get into a teaching course so that he can one day work as a welding instructor rather than as a welder. Demonstrating a basic level of English is a requirement for enrolling in the course.
For the next several weeks, I skipped over the pronunciation exercises in the lessons. But one day I decided it was time to work again on pronunciation. This time the student protested before we began. “Is this important?” he asked.
“I think it is.”
There ensued a conversation in which he pushed for learning the rudiments—new grammatical structures and new vocabulary—rather than wasting time on polishing pronunciation. Pronunciation matters, I insisted, and he came back with the observation that he knew more or less how to say the words he was learning.
“Okay,” I said, then turned to write island on the board. “How do you say that?” I asked him.
“IS-land,” he answered.
I turned to one of the other students—all three were present that day—and asked, “Is that right?”
She shook her head no and then proceeded to pronounce the word correctly.
“What about this one?” I asked the metalworker, writing answer on the board.
He got that one wrong too, as he did building and cousin.
“But you can understand me?”
Yes, I told him, I could, but having to slow even infinitesimally made me lose faith in his ability to speak. I listened differently. I listened cautiously, almost suspiciously.
He looked dubious, so I reminded him that he had laughed at my Spanish accent one day. He grinned sheepishly.
My faulty Spanish pronunciation and my terrible English spelling—those are the elephants in my classroom. The spelling elephant had once seemed so big that it squeezed me into a corner, but it had shrunk, I found, because I talked openly about it. I even called it by name when it popped out unexpectedly. The other, bigger elephant, my accent and other difficulties with Spanish, was the creature I wanted to keep hidden. Sometimes, however, it lumbered out, showing its ugly, wrinkled hide and small, worried eyes. What mortification then! That day with my student, I did not need to show the elephant; I needed only to speak of it. “This very morning,” I began, and proceeded to tell him about my experience going to the grocery store and asking for an item, whereupon, simply because I spoke with an accent, the attendant had stared at me blankly. I’d repeated my question, exact same words, and then the attendant decided to listen, and she understood what I said. “But people will often assume they don’t understand you and not even try,” I told the students that day. “Just because of your pronunciation.”
I took a breath and went on. “You think being understood is all that matters. But I can tell you that the ease of communication counts for a lot.”
No one said anything.
“If you are making the effort to learn the language, why wouldn’t you make the effort to learn it well?”
He frowned, raised his eyebrows, and shrugged. We continued with the lesson. IS-land? I thought. AN-swer? How often had I corrected him? It appeared to be a stroke of luck that he hadn’t always paid attention in class. But he hadn’t paid attention because he hadn’t cared. Had I finally made him care? I wondered if I’d have to call out my big elephant. Poor old elephant, wrinkly skin, worried eyes. Yes, laugh, I would tell my student. Your elephant and mine, quite a pair.
