Horst G. Klein, Franz-Joseph Meißner, Lew Zybatow
EuroCom –
European Intercomprehension
EuroCom stands for EuroComprehension, an acronym for European intercomprehension in the three main European language groups: Romance, Slavic and Germanic. Almost all Europeans speak a language from one of these groups as either their first or at least second language. For example, some 800 million people around the world communicate in a Romance language.
The benefits of the EuroCom concept take effect on three, mutually supporting levels: language policy, language teaching, and linguistics. The aspect concerned with language policy (achieving European multilingualism in a modular fashion) influences the teaching concepts (teaching receptive competence via interlingual transfer bases), while its implementation requires intercomprehension research (i.e. linguistic research into how the relations between languages in the same group can be exploited).
According to declarations of intent published by the European Commission (1995,[1] 1997[2]), European multilingualism has three main aims:
1. The differentiated consideration of competences and hence support for the development of receptive multilingualism.
2. Enabling the focused acquisition of partial competences with possibilities for modular expansion (e.g. modular approach in technical language for receptive reading competence).
3. The cognitive usage of group relations between languages (such as Romance intercomprehension research).
With these aims in mind, the EuroCom research group has developed a teaching approach designed to achieve receptive competence in all the Romance languages. Work began at the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Frankfurt (Klein and Stegmann) and has since been evaluated by a few thousand student guinea pigs. Yet before the first German-language reference work on Romance intercomprehension was published,[3] it was deemed necessary to translate the concept into teaching, to extend it to the other two major language groups in Europe (Slavic and Germanic), and to implement it on interactive media. At the workshop organised by FernUniversität Hagen “Towards Multilingualism in Distance Study”,[4] the EuroCom research group was joined by representatives of Romance language teaching (Franz-Joseph Meißner), Slavonic studies (Lew Zybatow), and applied computer science.[5]
The aim of the EuroCom method is to realistically enable Europeans to achieve multilingualism. What may be regarded as realistic is the acquisition of receptive competence in one language group, i.e. interlingual reading competence in all the languages of a group (or parts thereof). EuroCom intends to show learners that knowledge of their mother tongue and just one other foreign language they have learned arm them with an unexpectedly high level of advance knowledge, allowing them for instance to be able to rapidly understand the news or technical texts in all other related (but not yet learned) languages. Other competences going beyond reading comprehension can then be subsequently developed faster and more efficiently as required, although the necessary linguistic and language-teaching research have yet to be carried out. EuroCom has therefore initially concentrated on the receptive competence of reading comprehension, even though it also implies some aspects of aural understanding.
EuroComRom teaches transfer-based deduction strategies to enable multilingual receptive competence among Europeans by making optimum usage of the limited time available for learning languages. EuroComRom uses the ‘seven sevens’ to extract so much familiar material from languages which are related yet seemingly unknown to the learner that the traditional limitation to one language in European language training appears uneconomic. The EuroCom method progressively supports the acquisition of language-learning competence.
An added benefit is that learners pick up an element of Europeanness, enabling them to better appreciate Europe’s cultural diversity. Another very desirable side-effect is that the method also promotes the understanding and learning of frequently neglected smaller and minority languages (without the need to learn additional languages as such). These are often majority languages in their own area of usage, but have been belittled or at least disadvantaged by the historically developed centralism and artificial values of a marché linguistique. Alongside the major languages French, Spanish and Italian, EuroComRom has therefore consistently integrated Portuguese, Catalan and Romanian, and also enables Occitan, Sardinian and Galician texts to be understood.
Adaptations for the Slavic language group and adaptations of EuroComRom for ten different source languages are currently being developed in co-operation with the universities of Barcelona, Bucharest, Innsbruck, Lisbon and Szeged, and various research teams.
An interactive CD-ROM is currently being produced with funding from the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia in conjunction with FernUniversität Hagen and the University of Wuppertal, and will be published in 2001 to tie in with the European Year of Languages. The team for the Germanic language group is currently being assembled.
The EuroCom research group has established a series of publications (Editiones EuroCom, Shaker Verlag) devoted to publicising its research findings.[6] The recently published Volume 2 analyses the Romance contribution to European multilingualism, and explains the theoretical background and the state of the art of intercomprehension research. Volume 3 by Dorothea Rutke (“European Multilingualism: Analyses – Concepts – Documents”) was published in spring 2001. Other volumes are currently being prepared, and work is currently underway for Volume 4, which will deal with Slavic intercomprehension.
With the support of the EU and in co-operation with FernUniversität Hagen, the EuroCom research group will be hosting an international congress on European intercomprehension at the Arcadium in Hagen in the European Year of Languages 2001 (9–10 November 2001).
To sum up, the goals of the EuroCom research group can be described as advancing European multilingualism by using reading competence in language groups as a modular point of access to other languages, creating an integrated network for intercomprehension by means of adaptations, and communicating the findings interactively to a broad audience via CD-ROM and on the internet.
How does EuroCom work?
EuroCom is based on the multicultural role of written text in intercomprehension. The orthography used documents earlier forms of development of each language, as well as attempts at reform and Gongorisms. It hence often preserves and conceals group relations simultaneously – something which is not always immediately apparent in the more rapidly evolving spoken language. It is these links – bolstered by structural knowledge – which serve cognitive decoding. Moreover, time appears to be at a standstill when reading, making comparative cognition much easier.
The value of the written word for intercomprehension is familiar from many cultures, such as when texts are used to traverse barriers of dialects or even foreign languages when the phonetic bridge fails. For example, oral-auditory intercomprehension is no longer possible between Cantonese (used in places such as Guangzhou and Singapore) and the language spoken in Beijing (reformed Mandarin). Consequently, during performances of Peking operas (in spoken Mandarin), the surtitles are projected since the two idioms share the same written form. Even somebody from another language community, say a Japanese, can easily decode important lexical elements of written Chinese thanks to the partially borrowed system of writing, despite the lack of a phonetic bridge. This can be seen from the following example:
Sun
Root,
origin
The Chinese grapheme for ‘Japanese’ consists of the symbols for sun (日) and origin (本 - indicating the land of the rising sun) joined by the symbol for a person (人): sun-rise-person =日本人 = Japanese.
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日本人 |
||
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Dialectical variety |
Mandarin (Beijing) |
Cantonese (Singapore) |
|
rì-bĕn-rén |
yat-pun-yan |
|
|
Foreign language (Japanese) |
Ni-hon-yin日本人 |
|
Readers of any idiom which uses Chinese symbols can interpret the sequence of graphemes日本人(sun-rise-person) as referring to an inhabitant of Japan, even though its phonetic translation is not intercomprehensible.
EuroComRom – Romance intercomprehension
Within the major European language groups, this link between different languages and dialects takes the form not of pictograms, but rather the archaism of written conventions and – as a result of change – the related rules of correspondence. Therefore, the job is to make our script conventions transparent and hence intercomprehensible to the reader. This entails interplay among as many of the other factors as possible which serve intercomprehension within a language group.
Examples from the Romance languages highlight how links can be used between the pronunciation of the bridging language(s) or a source language and their graphic realization in related languages.
The spelling of the French campagne (aside from the various meanings requiring contextual clarification) corresponds to an intercomprehensive Eurolexeme, and not just in the Romance countries. The main factor in this example is to help learners grasp the graphic correspondence of the palatalised n-sound in the Romance languages.
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gn |
fr. seigneur, vigne, campagne |
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gn |
|
ny |
cat. senyor, vinya, campanya |
|
signore, vigna, |
≈ |
nh |
port. senhor, vinha, campanha |
|
campagna |
|
ne [nM], ni [nM], ./. |
rom. senior, vi*e, campanie |
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|
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ñ |
sp. señor, viña, campaña |
The rules of correspondence listed here seem at first sight to represent intergraphemic relationships with the various writing conventions, enabling pan-Romanistic characteristics to be deduced even in words which are less internationally well-known than campagne, and also to relate groups of words to each other such as:
it. vigna,
Sp. viña, and Port. vinha.
The fact that divergence among languages in the same group shows certain regularities makes it easier to appreciate the intergraphemic level and hence strengthens the ability of individual interlingual association congruence on a strictly synchronous basis.
Since diachrony must be left aside for reasons of learning economy, the intergraphemic level often needs a number of rules of correspondence in order to produce the adequate association congruence. This is for example the case when a written form has evolved from a number of sounds with different historical development. Although this case is not especially frequent in statistical terms, it may still be relevant in languages such as Portuguese (and also Spanish).
If for instance somebody applying intercomprehension to read a Portuguese text encounters a word starting with ch- [sh], they need to be able to spot a link with three Romance groups of consonants, namely [kl], [pl] and [fl]: In the Portuguese examples chave [Latin: clavem], cheio [Latin: plenum] and chama [Latin: flamma], the initial grapheme ch- has three different historical initial forms and therefore different correspondences:
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cl |
fr. clef (clé), [ac]clamer |
|
ch-[s] |
|
chi [kM] |
it. chiave, chiamare |
|
|
≈ |
cl |
cat. clau, clamara |
|
chave, chamar |
|
che [kM] |
rom.
cheie, a chema |
|
|
|
ll
[lM] |
sp. llave, llamar |
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|
|
pl |
fr. plein, plan |
|
ch-[s] |
|
pi
[pM] |
it. pieno, piano |
|
|
≈ |
pl |
cat. ple, pla |
|
cheio, chão |
|
pl |
rom. plin, plan |
|
|
|
ll
[lM] |
sp. lleno, llano |
|
|
|
fl |
fr. flamme |
|
ch-[s] |
|
fi |
it. fiamma |
|
|
≈ |
fl |
cat. flama |
|
chama |
|
fl |
rom. fl- [flaut, fluviu] |
|
|
|
ll [lM] |
sp. llama |
As the reference languages constantly vary in the basic Romance course for intercomprehension (the ‘seven sieves’), cognitive readers learn the forms of correspondence from the viewpoint of different target languages. The process of recognition is hence repeated several times over, and readers are rapidly able to interrelate the graphemic peculiarities of the related idioms. This is where the new media need to come in by identifying the correspondence formulae and making them usable.
Often all that needs to be done is to bring pronunciation and written conventions into congruence with each other, such as in the case of the following Romanian lexemes:
meci
chec
şniţel
gheizerul
Only by knowing that -ci is a writing convention for [-tsh], ch- for [k], gh- for [g], ţ for [ts] and ş for [sh] do we arrive at the congruences with:
match
cake
schnitzel
the geyser
EuroCom starts by using a network of transfer correspondences to make the written language transparent. Whereas a continuous decrease in intercomprehension has taken place in the major Indo-European language groups over the past 1,500 years, it has been accompanied by convergence currents of considerable importance for intercomprehension. The key role was played by the cultural superstratum of Latin until well into the 20th century, while the terminologies of Greek and Latin based technical languages have become increasingly important since the 19th century. The decisive parameters of the present are the satellite-based media universality, the internationalisation of politics and its institutions, the informational and monetary networking of trade and industry, global migration, and the role of (highly Greco-Roman) English as a global word coiner and trend-setter.
Convergences caused by internationalisms and above all by globally unifying expectations in (non-literary) text sort production increasingly promote intercomprehension, yet also highlight the need for it.
In order to aid text comprehension, EuroCom tries in a glottochronological sense to briefly halt the linguistic clock (comparable with the molecular clock), which continuously accompanies linguistic and social transformation and which brings about continuous change, by identifying convergent factors in common within a language group, making it easier to understand the divergences and particularities. This is EuroCom’s main thrust in teaching – a process which is carried out using text-based transfer processes and interlingual association congruences. In doing so, EuroCom attempts to make do without historical ballast and to use all the levels relevant for text recognition.
The method can be summarized as follows. Working on the basis of a morphosyntax which is largely the same in all the Romance languages, learners amalgamate information units in a mental lexicon into new units guided by cognitive findings from phonetic and written conventions, internationalisms, pan-Romanisms and ‘Eurofixes’. The process is then completed by the (astonishingly little) information regarding the language profile, and then the systematisation of the information gleaned.
One essential feature of the EuroCom method is the rejection of the maximalist principle of language learning and refraining from the simultaneous acquisition of all competences. The multilingualism model presented here is so far based exclusively on the teaching of receptive competences. It concentrates on training the skill to efficiently develop an understanding of new languages on the basis of existing language-learning experience. It is served by the technique of optimised deduction. French seems to be the best source language (langue dépôt) for the Romance languages. However, if the receptive competence to be achieved is restricted to reading comprehension, any other Romance language can function as the langue dépôt.
The following flow diagram explains how EuroComRom uses the ‘seven sieves’ to generate transfer-based strategies for the optimised deduction of text.
The seven sieves represent the transfer spheres of deduction. They can be applied in any order or sequence, since both spontaneous and cognitive deduction vary depending on the learner’s own language background.
The technique of optimised deduction takes into account all the available
knowledge of the non-textual information complex (including world knowledge
basis), processes the reading expectation (expectation concerning the overall
content) and text-relevant previous knowledge (genre, subject classification),
and after scanning the text (receptive reading) already produces overall
superficial information on the text.
Learners are made aware of previous knowledge by the two vocabulary sieves (international and pan-Romance vocabulary, Sieves 1 and 2), which are then spontaneously applied during the first reading.
Acting on this basis, the elements of the text to be deduced are filtered and divided into those which appear unimportant for understanding the meaning, and those which seem important. This generally results in spontaneous deduction of the international vocabulary (Sieve 1), the pan-Romance vocabulary (Sieve 2), and the interrelation of graphemes and pronunciations (Sieve 4).
If deduction is not yet successful, the processes of reflected deduction using phonetic correspondence formulae (Sieve 3) may help to reactivate the above-mentioned sieves, and may help to augment the process of deduction contextually via a syntactic transfer (Sieve 5), a morphosyntactic transfer (Sieve 6), or a prefix and suffix transfer (Sieve 7).
Although ‘playing’ with associations between the target language and one’s mother tongue needs practice, it has proved to continuously function as a source of motivation. Learners make use of an interlanguage based on invented and foreign words as they build up a mental lexicon for the target language. Our studies indicated that the elements which were initially problematic for the probands depending on their langue dépôt can now be foreseen. Therefore we made two important additions: a lexical addition using profile words and a structural addition using mini-portraits. Profile words are those few elements which once the seven sieves have been used are left over. These are words which are variously distributed throughout the group.
This is also explained by the fact that in an earlier language period sometimes various (virtually) synonymous expressions existed side by side, only one of which survived later on. Such divergences are sometimes even found within the same individual language: just think of the various verbal stems which are used in the conjugation of aller, the French for ‘to go’, such as the present tense je vais and the future j’irai, which all highlight that in the Romance languages divergences can even occur in a single ‘word’. Even the Romanian variant for ‘to go’, a merge, exists in French and in the other Romance languages, albeit in the compound words for ‘immerse’, namely submerger and immerger.
Hence profile words are words which can be deduced from neither the respective Romance source language nor the international vocabulary, or whose meaning has changed so much so that reference to the etymologically related word is no longer helpful. However, in terms of text-based frequency, there are usually not many more than two or three dozen such profile words per language – which is a major factor for learning economics!
Structural augmentation by the mini-portraits in a second phase of the EuroCom strategy allows learners to abandon themselves to their own personal motivation and to set priorities in the language group deduced using the seven sieves. The mini-portraits are used to systematize the linguistic knowledge deduced with the help of the seven sieves, and to strategically complement it. This approach is used to sharply differentiate the individual language from the other related languages, so that the learner can begin to identify the particular features of each individual language against the background of the similarities and interrelations emphasised by using the seven sieves. Thus it is that the individual languages begin to take on their own profile within the group. Text reception is accelerated in each language once its individual language portrait (particularities, structural overviews and profile words) has been absorbed.
Test results of EuroComRom
Empirical studies were carried out during the EuroCom courses in Frankfurt on 12 groups of participants each containing 100–140 students (including 5% aged over 60). The success of teaching and learning was examined using written tests completed by the students at the end of each semester. The tests usually comprised four texts,[7] two of which were in Ibero-Romance languages (Galician, Portuguese, Catalan or Spanish), one was in Romanian, and one was in a Francophone or Italophone language (Franco-Creole, Sardinian or Italian). In contrast to language courses with one target language, the aim of these tests was not to deliver an accurate translation of the text. Instead, ‘gaps’ were acceptable if they could be filled with an invented word, as long as the sense and the meaning of the entire text were rendered. Accordingly, during marking, attention and grading concentrated on the keenness to experiment when translating the text.
Although the bridging languages of the individual participants were ascertained, they were not taken into account during evaluation. The results shown in the chart are based on the grades awarded.[8]
Especially when comparing Spanish, it is
evident why French (in addition to German and English) serves as the langue
dépôt. The results can only be bettered in connection with other languages,
i.e. with a broader intercomprehension basis. The ideal case appears to be the
combination of two Romance idioms: French and Italian, and French and an
Ibero-Romance language. This was ascertained during a EuroComRom course at the University of
Tarragona in March 1999 involving bilingual Catalan students[9]
whose langues dépôt were
Catalan and Spanish. This broad Romance-language basis granted the participants
greater spontaneous deduction skills in the exercises during the course.
Similar observations were also made in spring 2000 at the University of Girona.
Ultimately, intercomprehension and receptive reading knowledge in the various target languages can be optimised by three components:
1. By a broader reference base. A distinction can be drawn between two groups. Group 1 includes in addition to French also Italian, while Group 2 comprises a knowledge of French and also an Ibero-Romance language.
2. Similar
to the first component, the graduated suitability of target languages for
intercomprehension can be observed depending on the bridging language. Hence,
access to Romanian is more intercomprehensive for Group 1 (French and Italian)
than for Group 2 (French and Ibero-Romance language). The same goes for
Ibero-Romance target languages for Group 2. Better results can thus be achieved
by better co-ordinating the langue dépôt and the target language.
3. Significant optimisation can be achieved by including intercomprehensive filters, i.e. learning progress using the EuroComRom method. Here a tendency to increasing receptive reading competence can be seen depending on familiarity with the individual sieves.
No young
European can predict the language area where he or she may one day live and
work. Broadly scattered receptive competences are therefore an outstanding
basis in order to quickly develop productive competencies in a new language
environment should this become necessary.
EuroCom would like language-learners to become Europeans who appreciate the common features of Europeanness. It looks forward to a future in which they can make use of their right to the freedom of mobility and enjoy the access to cultural diversity this freedom brings. European multilingualism achieved by reading competence in language groups is an essential element of this future.