Postby Cainntear » Sun Mar 12, 2023 8:43 pm
As I recall it, the video was pretty thorough. However, I think it glossed over the difference between a native audience and a non-native audience.
For a learner, language comprehension degrades gradually -- i.e. the more noise you have, the less you understand. However, for the native language comprehension is basically all or nothing -- your brain can reconstruct the original sentence even despite noisy interference, but a little bit more noise and you understand nothing.
I remember sitting in a room that had air conditioning at the back. I was vaguely aware that my brain was putting more effort into listening when the fans were on that when they weren't, but even that was only because I'd heard about this idea before. The speakers would get to the end of the sentence and say the last few words quieter -- to me it was like a light had been switched off. The thing is, I had a Spanish guy beside me in there sometimes and his English wasn't great, so his received signal must have been pretty ropey.
I'm pretty certain that wherever I read about it was saying that foreign students shouldn't be seated away from the teacher, as the further they are, the less they understand, whereas native students can get further and further with no loss of understanding until it suddenly cuts out.
I have a feeling this may have been during my English teaching masters, because although we wouldn't have been preparing to teach natives anyway, that's what the research said. The advice to language teachers was to fill the class from the front, because students at the back of the classroom simply wouldn't understand.
Anyhow... back onto the topic.
I personally find that I have the same all or nothing comprehension in modern TV dialog, and I imagine that means non-natives will have the same degradation of comprehension as in a classroom. English-language media is a global market... I wonder if highlighting the problems might create a market force that makes studios just sort the bloody dialogue out...?
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