Reading Test 04

|Part 1|

In or out?

British further education colleges did not traditionally have any concerns about student drop-out, because the origins of the sector were in vocational apprenticeship training for employers where the apprentices could not drop out without endangering their job.

In the 70s, this sector began to expand into more general education courses, which were seen both as an alternative to school for 16–18 year-olds and a second chance for adults. The philosophy was mainly liberal with students regarded as adults who should not be heavily monitored, but rather free to make their own decisions; it was not uncommon to hear academic staff argue that attendance at classes was purely voluntary.

In the 80s, with an increased consciousness of equal opportunities, the focus of the further education colleges moved to widening participation, encouraging into colleges students from previously under-represented groups, particularly from ethnic minorities. This, in turn, led to a curriculum which was more representative of the new student body. For example, there were initiatives to ensure the incorporation of literature by black writers into A-level literature courses; history syllabuses were altered to move beyond a purely Eurocentric view of the world; and geography syllabuses began to look at the politics of maps.

A turning point came in 1991 with the publication of a report on completion rates by the government inspection body for education, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate for England and Wales, (HMI 1991). However, this report was based on academic staff’s explanations of why students had left. It suggested that the vast majority left either for personal reasons or because they had found employment and that only 10% left for reasons that could in any way be attributed to the college.

Meanwhile, Britain had been going through the Thatcherite revolution and, in parallel to the Reagan politics of the US, a key principle was the need to reduce taxation drastically. At this point (and to a large extent still), further and higher education colleges were almost entirely funded from the public purse. There had been many cuts in this funding through the 80s, but no one had really looked at value for money. However, in the early 90s, the Audit Commission with Office of Standards in Education (OFSTED) (the new version of HMI) turned the spotlight onto further education and published a seminal report, Unfinished Business (Audit Commission and OFSTED 1993), which showed that drop-out was happening on a significant scale and, crucially given the politics of the time, attributed a cost to the state of £500 million, arguing that this was a waste of public (i.e. taxpayers’) money. To quote Yorke (1999), non-completion became political.

The Audit Commission report coincided with government moves to privatise the functions of the state as much as possible; and with the decision to remove further education from the control of local government and give it a quasi-independent status, where colleges were governed by independent boards of governors bidding to the state for funding to run educational provision. As part of this, a new series of principles for funding and bidding were developed (FEFC 1994) which incorporated severe financial penalties for student drop-out. In essence, the system is that almost all the state funding is attached to the individual student. There is funding for initial advice and guidance, on-course delivery and student achievement, but if the student drops out, the college loses that funding immediately, so that loss of students in the first term leads to an immediate loss of college funding for the other two terms. Not surprisingly, this focused the concern of colleges immediately and sharply on the need to improve student retention rates.

Recently, therefore, there has been considerable effort to improve retention but, as Martinez (1995) pointed out, there was no body of research on which to base strategies. An additional complexity was that colleges had been slow to computerise their student data and most colleges were in the position of not knowing what their retention rates were or any patterns involved. Where data did exist it was held separately by either administrative or academic staff with poor communication between these groups. Colleges, however, jumped into a number of strategies based largely on experience, instinct and common sense and publication of these began.

The main strategies tried are outlined in the literature as summarised by Martinez (1996). These include sorting activities around entry to ensure ‘best fit’, supporting activities including child care, financial support and enrichment/learner support, connecting activities to strengthen the relationship between the college and the student, including mentoring and tutorials and activities to transform the student, including raising of expectations and study/career development support and tutoring.

|Part 2|

Another intelligence?

Emotional intelligence as a theory was first brought to public attention by the book Emotional Intelligence, Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman, but the theory itself is, in fact, attributed to two Americans, John D Mayer and Peter Salovey.

What is emotional intelligence exactly? According to Goleman, Emotional Intelligence consists of five key elements. The first is knowing one’s own emotions: being able to recognise that one is in an emotional state and having the ability to identify which emotion is being experienced, even if it is not a particularly comfortable feeling to admit to, e.g. jealousy or envy.

Emotional awareness can then lead to managing one’s emotions. This involves dealing with emotions, like jealousy, resentment, anger, etc, that one may have difficulty accepting by, perhaps, giving oneself comfort food, or doing nice things when one is feeling low. Many people do this instinctively by buying chocolate or treating themselves; others are able to wrap themselves in positive thoughts or ‘mother themselves’. There are, of course, many people who are incapable of doing this, and so need to be taught. The third area is self-motivation. Our emotions can simultaneously empower and hinder us, so it is important to develop the ability to control them. Strategies can be learnt whereby emotions are set aside to be dealt with at a later date. For example, when dealing with the success or good fortune of others, it is better not to suppress any ‘negative’ emotion that arises. One just has to recognise it is there. And then one just needs to be extra careful when making decisions and not allow one’s emotions to cloud the issue, by letting them dictate how one functions with that person. The separation of logic and emotion is not easy when dealing with people.

As social beings, we need to be able to deal with other people which brings us to the next item in Goleman’s list, namely: recognising emotions in other people. This means, in effect, having or developing ‘social radar’, i.e. learning to read the weather systems around individuals or groups of people. Obviously, leading on from this is the ability to handle relationships. If we can recognise, understand and then deal with other people’s emotions, we can function better both socially and professionally. Not being tangible, emotions are difficult to analyse and quantify, compounded by the fact that each area in the list above, does not operate in isolation. Each of us has misread a friend’s or a colleague’s behaviour to us and other people. The classic example is the shy person, categorised by some people as arrogant and distant and by others as lively and friendly and very personable. How can two different groups make a definitive analysis of someone that is so strikingly contradictory? And yet this happens on a daily basis in all our relationships—even to the point of misreading the behaviour of those close to us! In the work scenario, this can cost money. And so it makes economic sense for business to be aware of it and develop strategies for employing people and dealing with their employees.

All common sense you might say. Goleman himself has even suggested that emotional intelligence is just a new way of describing competence; what some people might call savoir faire or savoir vivre. Part of the problem here is that society or some parts of society have forgotten that these skills ever existed and have found the need to re-invent them. But the emergence of Emotional Intelligence as a theory suggests that the family situations and other social interactions where social skills were honed in the past are fast disappearing, so that people now sadly need to be re-skilled.

|Part 3|

Pronunciation and physiognomy

Imagine the scene: you are sitting on the tube and on gets someone you instinctively feel is American. To make sure you ask them the time, and are right, but how did you know?

When we say someone ‘looks American’, we take into consideration dress, mannerism and physical appearance. However, since the Americans do not constitute one single race, what exactly is meant by ‘look’? In fact, one salient feature is a pronounced widening around the jaw, a well-documented phenomenon.

The writer Arthur Koestler once remarked that friends of his, whom he met thirty years after they emigrated to the United States, had acquired an ‘American physiognomy’, i.e. a broadened jaw, an appearance which is also prevalent in the indigenous population. An anthropologist friend of his attributed this to the increased use of the jaw musculature in American enunciation. This ‘change of countenance’ in immigrants had already been observed by the historian M. Fishberg in 1910.

To paraphrase the philosopher Emerson, certain national, social and religious groups, such as ageing actors, long-term convicts and celibate priests, to give just a few examples, develop a distinguishing ‘look’, which is not easily defined, but readily recognised. Their way of life affects their facial expression and physical features, giving the mistaken impression that these traits are of hereditary or ‘racial’ origin. All the factors mentioned above contribute, as well as heredity. But the question of appearance being affected by pronunciation, as in the case of American immigrants (including those from other English speaking countries) over the course of many years, is of great interest, and calls for further study into the science of voice production. This can only benefit those working in the field of speech therapy, elocution and the pronunciation of foreign languages, and help the student from a purely physiological point of view.

Naturally, the numerous psychological and socio-linguistic factors that inhibit most adult learners of foreign languages from acquiring a ‘good’ pronunciation constitute a completely different and no less important issue that requires separate investigation. The pronunciation of the various forms of English around the world today is affected by the voice being ‘placed’ in different parts of the mouth. We use our speech organs in certain ways to produce specific sounds, and these muscles have to practise to learn new phonemes. Non-Americans should look in the mirror while repeating ‘I really never heard of poor reward for valour’ with full use of the USA retroflex /r/ phoneme, and note what happens to their jawbones after three or four repetitions. Imagine the effect of these movements on the jaw muscles after twenty years! This phoneme is one of the most noticeable features of US English and one that non-Americans always exaggerate when mimicking the accent. Likewise, standard British RP is often parodied, and its whine of superiority mocked to the point of turning the end of one’s nose up as much as possible. Not only does this enhance the ‘performance’, but also begs the question of whether this look is the origin of the expression ‘stuck up’?

On a Birmingham bus once, a friend pointed to a fellow passenger and said, ‘That man’s Brummie accent is written all over his face.’ This was from someone who would not normally make crass generalisations. The interesting thing would be to establish whether thin lips and a tense, prominent chin are a result of the way Midlands English is spoken, or its cause, or a mixture of both. Similarly, in the case of Liverpool one could ask whether the distinctive ‘Scouse’ accent was a reason for, or an effect of the frequency of high cheekbones in the local population.

When one ‘learns’ another accent, as in the theatre for example, voice coaches often resort to images to help their students acquire the distinctive sound of the target pronunciation. With ‘Scouse’, the mental aid employed is pushing your cheekbones up in a smile as high as they will go and imagining you’ve got a very slack mouth full of cotton wool. The sound seems to spring off the sides of your face–outwards and upwards. For a Belfast accent, one has to tighten the sides of the jaws until there is maximum tension, and speak opening the lips as little as possible. This gives rise to the well-known Ulster jaw phenomenon. Learning Australian involves imagining the ordeals of the first westerners transported to the other side of the world. When exposed to the merciless glare and unremitting heat of the southern sun, we instinctively screw up our eyes and grimace for protection.

Has this contributed to an Australian ‘look’, and affected the way ‘Aussies’ speak English, or vice versa? It is a curious chicken and egg conundrum, but perhaps the answer is ultimately irrelevant. Of course other factors affect the way people look and sound, and I am not suggesting for one minute that all those who speak one form of a language or dialect have a set physiognomy because of their pronunciation patterns. But a large enough number do, and that alone is worth investigating. What is important, however, is establishing pronunciation as one of the factors that determine physiognomy, and gaining a deeper insight into the origins and nature of the sounds of speech. And of course, one wonders what ‘look’ one’s own group has!