Verbal Skills taught by folks who speak the language

By Marilyn A. Posner - Pittsburgh Tribune Review, May 18, 1997

Communication. How can people maintain this most tenuous and important connection?

Carnegie Mellon University has been working on a method to help bring down language barriers by creating an Oral Language Archive that will soon be accessible on the Internet. The CMU project is intended to help people learn specific categories of speech defined by such identifiers as language, region, gender and situation.

Teachers, students, businesspeople and anyone else with access to the Internet will be able to log on and listen to native speakers in conversation in whatever situation they choose.

Christopher M. Jones, a senior lecturer in French and director of the Language Learning Resource Center in Carnegie Mellon's Modern Language Department was interested in the concept long before he took a position at CMU four years ago.

Jones sees language and culture as a daily experience, not merely imbedded in literature but as it transpires in the streets, shops and homes every day of the year.

"This dovetails (with the direction) in the Modern Language Department at CMU where we don't make distinctions between high culture and low culture. We think of culture as everything that occurs between people. It could be the purchase of a bottle of milk or the creation of a great novel. All those things are in a continuum called culture and all worthy of study " he said.

But the mere idea of creating dialogues and making them available to a wide range of people couldn’t happen until Jones and CMU became a marriage made in heaven.

"CMU has the strong technical and computing infrastructure " said Jones. "Coming to CMU gave me the computing support to make it a reality."

Jones credits Mathew McNally, director of computing at CMU's College of Humanities and Social Sciences, for a significant part of the success. "McNally was codirector of the project for its first two years, contributing his expertise in computing and information systems design," said Jones.

In addition, up to 17 people at a time have been involved in recording, transcribing, translating and editing the dialogues, including faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students.

Faculty members involved in recording and developing the archive are Susan Polanski–Spanish, Etsuko Takahashi –Japanese, Bonnie Youngs–French, and Christian Hallstein–German.

The project is composed of dialogues between two-person teams. He first drafted people handy to the university–students and faculty members along with businesspeople using their native languages.

"We tapped all of them, looking for a variety in regional origin," he said, explaining that the Spanish spoken in Spain is not the same as that found in the speech of Mexico or Argentina.

"We ask our speakers to imagine themselves in daily situations and role-play them in pairs," said Jones. "We found in general they were able to do this and do an exceptional job in creating simulated, authentic speech."

The dialogues should be fun and interesting with some teaching value to them.

" We choose very carefully. Only about one in eight or 10 dialogues is actually chosen for the archive because the quality of sound may not be right or there may be improper words for our use such as mentioning a Pittsburgh location or using an English word. Or sometimes it's just boring."

Now Jones is spreading the project's wings to find native speakers outside the Oakland campus.

He is approaching airline companies to get promotional tickets so dialogues can be recorded in far-flung lands.

"We don't want all university students, but peasants and people in different stations in life," said Jones.

Dialogs have been recorded in Quebec and this summer the project will head to the south of France for more work.

Eventually, French dialogues may be accumulated from the Caribbean, west and north Africa, Switzerland and Belgium.

Jones has considered adding English to the languages available in the archive, but currently CMU's English as a Second Language program is in a separate department. That problem may be resolved soon and he is certain there would be great interest in adding English dialogues.

Currently, dialogues are being recorded in French, Spanish and Japanese with German under development.

The intention is to offer thousands of dialogues in each language.

By July 1 when this goes online, he will have 100 dialogues in French, 75 in Japanese and 50 in Spanish.

Other colleges are testing the OLA including Dartmouth, Harvard, University of lowa, Washington & Lee, Colby and Boston University.

The project was begun with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities augmented by CMU funding.

The University of lowa has a pending agreement with OLA to distribute a compact disc in French with Japanese and Spanish to follow.

Funding has been made possible from San Diego State University to do the Spanish part of the project.

Although the dialogues may not be so topical in 10 or 15 years, they will still be useful from a historical perspective.

"Fifty years from now, you will be able to listen to these dialogues and hear them discuss life in Mexico in 1996," he said.

In choosing the dialogues, Jones used topics created for the European Community and enlarged on them a bit. The EC topics were those chosen to give citizens of the European Union what they need to work and live as they move from one country to another, such as food, professional life, travel, lodging, current issues and politics .

He shied away from discussing literature and philosophy because this is not project targeting only academic usage. Instead, it is a level above survival language designed for intermediate to advanced speakers constrained only by the topics used.

Potential users should not worry about the Internet access part of using OLA. According to Jones, "We don't want people to have to master a whole new skill of computing to hear this language. We will make the World Wide Web the method of dissemination, because clicking a mouse is really the only skill required for navigating the Web."

A compact disc will be made when Jones has enough dialogues to fill a 72 minute audio CD.

In a year or two, the project may develop video as well, although that is a much more expensive process since it is a bit more difficult to present authentic dialogues in Spain while standing at the corner of Forbes and Morewood looking at the Cut on the CMU campus.

After July 1, log on to the Oral Language Archive website at: http://ml.hss.cmll.edu/MLRC/ola and meet the world of language.