One of the faculty members I work with is responsible for doing phone interviews with students who will be going abroad with our program in China, in order to establish language proficiency. She does parts of these interviews in both English and Chinese. The last time she did it, she complained that one of the students insisted that the phone volume wasn’t loud enough during the Chinese part of the interview, but it hadn’t been a problem during the English part. She clearly thought the student was trying to pull a fast one to cover up a lack of proficiency.
The thing is, I’m sure the student was telling the truth. The instructor is a native Chinese speaker who has been living in the US for many, many years, so maybe she’s forgotten what it’s like to try to listen to a foreign language when you can’t see the speaker. It is much harder than listening in one’s native language. If the volume is a little low when you’re listening to the news or the radio or the phone in your native language, your brain is quite adept at filling in the blanks, srot of lkie how we can raed wrods taht are out of oderr, as lnog as the frist and lsat lteter is in the rghit palce.
But when you’re listening to a language that you are less familiar with, particularly one with a very different sound system like Chinese (and with tones, too!), it takes a lot more effort for you to process what’s going on. You need to be able to hear everything very clearly, hence the second language learner early lessons on how to say, “Could you repeat that?” and “Could you say it slower?”
I was thinking about this last night while driving to karate, because I switched the radio station in the car over to the Spanish station and had an almost immediate urge to turn the volume up. I hadn’t been having any trouble hearing the English station I’d been listening to just before that, but who needs to actually hear all the words to the latest pop-alt rock song anyway? I compromised and turned the radio up just a little bit, rather than as much as my brain kept telling me I needed to, because my mom works with a bunch of audiologists and has raised me to have a healthy fear of damaging my hearing unthinkingly.* And anyway, by that point I was distracted enough by my need to overanalyze the whole phenomenon that I wasn’t really listening to the words after all.
*I am also afraid to yell excessively or clear my throat. Do you know what that can do to your vocal folds?! I’ve seen pictures. You learn these things if you live with a speech language pathologist for long enough. So remember, don’t clear your throat, cough or swallow instead.
