Last night after Professor Yi's wide-ranging and stirring talk, we were discussing another wide-ranging and stirring speaker--Barack Obama. I'm not an admirer of Obama's politics (too anti-Chinese!), but I am a big fan of his intonation and his stress, and even his vocabulary and grammar.
Let's look at the intonation and stress first. Here is one of the best known of many videos which came out drawing attention to the links between his mastery of the rhythms of black American English and the rhythms of popular music.
http://kr.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY
If that doesn't work, look at this one:
http://kr.youtube.com/watch?v=BHEO_fG3mm4
If Obama wins the election, which looks possible, there will be some important changes in the English language which every English teacher, or at least every English teacher's students, will have to recognize.
a) First of all, black American English will be HAVE to be recognized as one of the most vital, musical, and LEARNABLE forms of the language. The struggle which we waged in elementary English education (by, inter alia, introducing characters like Peter and then Thomas in the elementary school book, by having chants with black rhythms) will be vindicated, and other "peripheral" forms of English, including Korean English, will be further legitimized. At long last white English will be recognized for what it is; not "correct" English at all, but merely one other variety, in some ways a not very pedagogically useful or consistent variety.
b) Secondly, COMPLEX conceptual vocabulary, such as:
"It was the creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of the nation" and "it was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed the trails towards freedom"
and LONG sentences, such as this:
"It was the call of workers who organized and women who organized, women who reached for ballots, and a president who chose the moon as a new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to justice and equality."
will be revalorized as well. Obama is not simply a master of the rhythms of black English; he is also a law professor at the University of Chicago, and he's very good at complex vocabulary, sustained syntax, and even the rhetorical organization of HOURS of discourse without notes and without a Powerpoint program.
This is NOT a skill that has been very much respected in America; the USA is controlled by businessmen who are mostly interested in the bottom line, the lowest price, and the shortest possible effective advertising slogans. As our OTHER Professor Yi pointed out last night over dinner, Americans tend to choose the stupidest candidate in a debate (Bush over Gore, and then Bush over Kerry). (That is, actually, why Americans developed Powerpoint!)
But now that may change, because Obama is very good at speaking to BOTH the black and the white, BOTH the educated and the less so.
Notice how, after delivering a VERY complex sentence rich in complex vocabulary, difficult imagery, intricate historical references, and coherent rhetorical links, he provides a "translation" into three simple words" "Yes we can".
These three words, of course, do not really "reconstrue" what Obama has just said. But they ARE the kind of thing that good English teachers area always doing. They are the kind of translation that Korean teachers do in the classroom when foreign teachers use difficult sentences like this:
NT: Let's see who we are going to be studying with in our text book, in our English book. Let's look. Open your books to the page right here. There is no page number, so I can't tell you the page number. For here. It's right before the table of contents.
S: (어딘지 몰라서 책을 뒤적거림)
K: (책을 보여주면서) 차례 앞쪽입니다.
They are the kind of thing that Korean teachers do when they "translate" their children from Korean to English like this:
T: Why?
Tim: 선생님 제 영어 이름을 까먹었어요.
T: Oh, you don't know your English name?
Tim: Yeah.
They are the kind of thing that Korean teachers do when they translate THEMSELVES,from English to Korean or from Korean to English or from sixth grade English to fifth grade English or from third grade English to fourth grade English, like this:
T: What does Nami say next? 지금 이야기를 계속 만들어가는 거야. What does Nami say next?
What "Yes we can" does is to provide an abstract link between very DIFFERENT ways of stating the idea of opportunity and possibility (the founding documents, the slaves and abolitionists, the union organizers, the suffragettes, JFK's "race to the moon" speech, and King's "mountaintop" speech). But that abstract link is made simple, just as our third grade book does. In fact, it's straight out of Lesson Seven ("I Can Swim"). It's this:
T: Can you swim?
S: Yes we can.
This skill, the ability to reconstrue complex grammar as relatively simple grammar but as complex inter-ersonal DISCOURSE, is essential to good teaching. But it's particularly important for Obama, because, since he is a professor, he tends to use VERY complex grammar.
a) What the most important thing is now is to just wait and see.
b) What the most important thing is is patience.
These sentences LOOK ungrammatical--but they are not. What they are is SUSPENSEFUL. They create suspense in TWO ways:
a) The identity of the "important thing" is DELAYED in the sentence by the complex grammar. "What the important thing is...."
b) The sentence LOOKS like a grammatical trap out of which Obama cannot escape--how can he begin a sentence like that and still have it come out grammatically?
But escape it he does. Can we fly?
Yes, we can.
dk