Interveiw
Elise Megale
Group 5
I am a Spanish major. In my interview with Loren Chavarría of the Spanish department, I asked her how important grammar was in Spanish. Although my question was very broad, Chavarría had a lot of interesting things to say. Our conversation was so long, and we covered so many things, I have tried to condense it here for you. It was more a discussion about the world, culture, prejudice and language then how grammar could affect my future career.
We began by talking about grammar in a university setting. With her students studying Spanish as a second language, Chavarría doesn’t consider “perfect” grammar as important when they are first learning. She talked about two types of language students that she usually has. The first group retains grammar very well, but usually don’t try to speak much for fear of making a mistake, although the little they do speak may be grammatically more advanced then the second type of student. These other students will jump into speaking, and try to communicate their ideas above all. She believes, the best way for the second type of student to learn the correct grammar is to speak read and listen to native speakers.
We then began to talk about who determines what “good” grammar is for a culture. Those in power determine correct grammar, those with money. In the United States, this has been the white European-Americans. Chavarría told me of the first time she saw Condoleezza Rice on the television. “I was so surprised! Here was this African American woman! I had assumed by how she spoke that she was white. Why didn’t she speak like an African American? Why was that dialect not acceptable?” Those people that speak “Spanglish”, or with an African American dialect, usually come from a lower socioeconomic level. She thought it was a pity that all over the Americas, north and south, indigenous people have been forced (with violence many times) to abandon their languages, their dialect, and culture, to adopt that of the colonizer. Our languages reflect our culture. We ended by discussing how the mixing and changing of languages and grammar is inevitable, a force that has not been stopped before historically.
Overall, my conversation with professor Chavarría was very enlightening and thought provoking.
posted by Anonymous @ 9:08 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I definitely was the first kind of student when taking french, afraid to speak because I didn't want it to be wrong. That's so true that language is a reflection of our culture and what we value. I think that it shouldn't matter how we speak, so long as we can understand each other. In our society, a certain way of speaking is "better" than others, and I think this is because it makes it easier to communicate when we find common ground and become alike with our language use.
Yes, I was the first type of student when learning Spanish as well. I was that way for three years, in fact, until I was forced to speak by living in Spain. It was interesting, especially now in light of the Delpit article, to notice that there were something like nine accepted languages in that country. It seems people are a bit more tolerant when it's acknowledged that there will be differences each with a valuable past.
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