Page 172 - Beyond Methods

160 Fostering language awareness
well-known complaint by British playwright George Bernard Shaw that fish could just as well be spelled ghoti (gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in nation).
Simple examples like the above can provide an interesting way of fostering general language awareness among learners, particularly about the regularity or the irregularity of linguistic systems. The same examples can also be used creatively to help learners analyze and understand whether there is underlying logic behind apparent irregularities. For instance, Stubbs (1980, p. 48, cited in Hawkins, 1984, p. 118–9) observes that Shaw’s fish-ghoti example is actually a clear case of a misunderstanding of the English spelling system because gh cannot represent the sound f in initial position in any word in English. Other sounds in ghoti also have restrictions about whether they can occur in the initial, middle, or final position of an English word.
Reflective task 7.3
How can you make use of just this one example (fish-ghoti) to teach some of the basics of the spelling system in English?
Subtle nuances of stress and intonation are yet another area of L2 learning and teaching where any attempt at explicit language aware- ness will be of immense help. Several studies on discourse strategies of everyday communication between native and non-native speak- ers of a language reveal the importance of proper use of prosodic features. John Gumperz (1982), for instance, has studied commu- nicative tensions between London residents and immigrants from India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean islands. He found that the mis- trust and miscommunication prevalent among these communities arise in part because of faulty use of stress and intonation features by non-native speakers of English, and he has provided several in- teresting examples to support his claim.
One such example deals with a London bus driver, an immigrant from the West Indies. When a passenger boarded the bus and pre- sented a large bill to buy a ticket, the driver said, “Exact change, please,” putting extra emphasis on please and with falling intona- tion. Walking down the aisle, the passenger wondered aloud, “Why do these people have to be so rude and threatening?” (Gumperz,