by Sara Carter
The verbal paralysis that when I first arrived here would overcome me each time I was addressed in Spanish and attempted a response has effectively disappeared as my confidence in my speaking skills has grown with increased usage of the language. I have actually become so accustomed to communicating in Spanish that when I go to address someone or begin a conversation when I am in what I know to be a Spanish environment (while I am out in the city or in a group speaking Spanish, for example) my immediate thought process occurs in Spanish, guiding my subsequent remark. Getting to this point that I no longer constantly translate my thoughts from English to be able to articulate them as a series of Spanish words has been crucial in facilitating fluidity in speaking, I feel. What is surprising to me is that this seems to have occurred without my awareness; though I have certainly been making an effort to better my Spanish by using it as much as possible, I have not been specifically focusing on decreasing the influence of English upon my production of Spanish, as it wasn’t something that I ever considered. I do still sometimes get a bit flustered if the person with whom I am speaking is clearly having difficulty understanding me and I continue to be unable to express what I am trying to say. Another trend I have noticed is that it becomes easier and more natural to speak in Spanish when I do so for long stretches of time without using any English. So if I spend the whole day communicating in Spanish, I am increasingly able to do so with more fluidity than after I run participants for several hours, with whom I speak in English (as my experiment itself is entirely in English). When I make the switch to Spanish after a period of predominant English use I have found that I initially encounter more difficulty with both understanding and immediately finding the words to express my thoughts, occurring now mostly in English. This often happens after I’ve been spending time with the other PIRE students, with whom I have admittedly continued to speak almost exclusively in English, though we do seem to codeswitch with greater frequency with words and phrases that we commonly use in Spanish. Although having this option of speaking English with the other girls that I am here with has probably somewhat hindered my improvement in Spanish, I don’t feel that it has at all precluded development of my speaking abilities, as indicated by the aforementioned changes I’ve noted.
Looking through the results of some of the behavioral tasks such as the DELE, a multiple choice reading comprehension task in Spanish, the level of Spanish proficiency of some of my participants is lower than I had anticipated; their responses to the Language History Questionnaire that they complete before being scheduled indicated a level of exposure and usage of the language that would seem to suggest a better handle of it. It has been the English teachers that I have recruited to participate either by contacting language schools or by the recommendations of other participants I’ve run that have not performed as well as expected on the Spanish behavioral tasks. Although this is surprising to me given that they have all been living in Spain for at least two years and many of them even longer, I suppose that the environment in which many of them spend the majority of their time doesn’t necessarily lend itself to frequent use of Spanish. The English teachers who have had lower scores in the Spanish tasks spend all day either instructing their students as to the particulars of the English language or engaging with fellow English-speaking instructors. Many of them have also mentioned that they have a significant other who is a native English speaker or that they speak in English with many of their friends in Granada. This greater exposure to their native language seems to preclude veritable immersion in their L2 and their somewhat lower level of Spanish proficiency calls into question whether they are to be considered as true bilinguals. As my study really seeks to investigate the effects on verb bias tendencies upon English- Spanish bilinguals who are truly immersed in their second language environment, I believe that the data from some of my participants will ultimately have to be thrown out. Another difficulty that I have run into with collecting data has been that participants that have been scheduled will either not show up to complete the experiment or will cancel repeatedly and ask to reschedule. Aside from being rather frustrating, this is also problematic because no-shows and last minute cancellations don’t enable us to remove them from the schedule with adequate notice to free up that time slot for another participant, which is unfortunate given how many of us are trying to use a limited amount of lab space. Although I have admittedly been ready to simply give up trying to schedule participants who have been unreliable, inclined to assume that they will never actually be able to make it, Alvaro has assured me this not uncommon in recruiting people for studies as everyone has busy lives and has encouraged me to be patient and just consider this part of the process.
In a (perhaps somewhat desperate?) last-minute attempt to get more participants on the schedule for next week and make the most of the last of our time here, I began to make accounts on conversation exchange websites for Granada on which people seeking to further their language skills are able to get in contact with each other (in a totally secure, non-online-predator way; no actual personal information was required, I promise). On these sites individuals post a profile in which they indicate their native language, as well as the language they are seeking to practice and their level of proficiency in this language. My intent was to look for native English speakers in Granada who indicated in their profile that they had been living in Spain for at least two years and send them a message with some information about participating in my experiment. Ironically, their intention in joining such a conversation exchange forum is to practice their Spanish, yet my sole purpose in utilizing this type of networking tool has been quite oppositely to contact people on the basis of their native language. An amusing side effect of this little recruitment strategy of mine is that the pathetically unimaginative profiles that I have created, truly devoid of any actual information, seem to be full of promise, as my email inbox is increasingly cluttered with notifications that I have received messages of Spanish speakers looking to practice their English. I have actually already gotten in touch with a woman who meets the requirements for my study and has indicated that she would be interested in participating, but have not yet had any other successes. If everyone that is scheduled through next week shows up though we will have more than 30 participants, which we ended up conceding would be a reasonable target when it became increasingly apparent that our participant group would be inhibitively difficult to pin down.