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Harro! I shrub because, really, I have no otherwise, do I?

Wednesday April 17 2019
tongue

A signboard pinned on a tree at Sangach Primary School in Marakwet East Consistency discouraging mother tongue speaking at the school on October 27, 2011. FILE PHOTO | NMG

By ALICE WAIRIMU NDERITU

In the days when university breaks were occupied through teaching as untrained teachers, I taught history in a posh private school.

One day, the headmistress, an Irish nun, found me looking crestfallen and asked, “You do realise you can tell me if anything is wrong, don’t you? Tell me.” I told her. My students had laughed at me.

I was teaching the Industrial Revolution and instead of pronouncing the word machine as | \ mə-ˈshēn| I had pronounced it as something corresponding to \marching\ because of influence from my mother tongue.

My students’ giggles spread like ripples until the whole class erupted into guffaws. “Teacher, you ‘shrubbed’,” they chortled. ‘Shrubbing” is Kenyan slang for mother tongue interference on English.

One student then pronounced the word “machine” correctly. I was mortified. I was keen to set a good example as a teacher in everything, including pronunciation.

There was a television show on teaching English as foreign language, “Mind your Language,” that made fun of students’ pronunciations. Had I, like the show, become a source of amusement to my students?

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Today my pronunciation of words, so long as I am understood, does not bother me. Back then, as a 20-year-old, to be laughed at hurt.

I had explained the predicament to my linguistics-studying friends. I was to stop thinking in mother tongue and speaking English, as language was the connection between my thoughts and the words I pronounced, they said. I was to practise sound patterns of the offending word.

So I trudged up the hill to the school while practicing pronouncing the word “ma-chi-ne” over and over. I still had two weeks to teach the Industrial Revolution and the word machine was all over my lesson plans.

Putting her arm around me, the headmistress had said. “Next time anyone laughs, make it a teaching moment. Remind them you mispronounced the word because you can speak another language fluently enough for it to interfere with English. Many of your students speak only one language fluently, English, and your teaching opportunity is to tell them the value of speaking more than one language”.

This was an interesting perspective. The next time I “shrubbed,” I waited for the laughter to subside.

Then I matter-of-factly asked whether they realised that I mispronounced the word because I spoke another language fluently.

The headmistress was right. They were instantly enthralled. None had seen it that way and few spoke another language fluently.

The class already knew that certain pronunciations are identified with various ethnic groups.

With the benefit of notes from my linguistics friends, I taught my students that first language learning, also known as mother tongue, is easier because of the conducive home learning environment a second language may lack; as was my case, first languages usually affect languages acquired later; errors may occur due to some English sounds not being found in the mother tongue.

Those speaking English with mother tongue interference often felt embarrassed, which contributed to more mispronunciations; “shrubbing” is not voluntary and is predominant in a multilingual situation; speakers of a second language often use the first language to organise the second language; people often rely on their mother tongue structures while attempting to speak a second language.

My students so enjoyed the discussions on my mother tongue influence that in time my “shrubbing” became a great change connection.

They learnt to laugh at themselves instead of at me for considering it an achievement for a native English speaker to speak and “shrub” in an African language yet they did not think of Africans as achievers for speaking English.

It is still considered embarrassing if people in authority like teachers or newscasters “shrub.” Since good pronunciation is crucial to clear communication, we need to teach pronunciation with as much emphasis as grammar and vocabulary.

Wairimu Nderitu is the author of Beyond Ethnicism, and Kenya: Bridging Ethnic Divides [email protected]

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