11.2031, Disc: New/Re: Review of Green

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-11-2031. Mon Sep 25 2000. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 11.2031, Disc: New/Re: Review of Green

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1)
Date:  Wed, 20 Sep 2000 18:00:53 +0200
From:  "jose luis guijarro" <guijarro at wanadoo.es>
Subject:  RE:11.1984, Review: Green: New Perspectives on Teaching Mod Lang

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Wed, 20 Sep 2000 18:00:53 +0200
From:  "jose luis guijarro" <guijarro at wanadoo.es>
Subject:  RE:11.1984, Review: Green: New Perspectives on Teaching Mod Lang

Hola, buenas!
In her review of Green's _New Perspectives on Teaching and Learning Modern
Languages_ Dalila Ayoun says, among other things:

> The chapters dealing with the actual classroom methodologies all
> express their deep dissatisfaction with the way the communicative
> approach has taken over foreign language classrooms or rather with
> the way it has been implemented, which barely distinguishes it from
> the direct method for instance.

JLG: Well, it sounds promising. Maybe the destruction of a long-lived myth
is approaching. But, alack, alack!:

>DA: Thus chapter IX stresses the need for a more meaningful and
>challenging communication, in other words a revision of the content of
>communication rather than the methodology itself.

JLG: Here we go again: it's like a curse! Any idea with strong contagious
potential (I would like to know WHY it has this potential, for, as I try to
describe below, it is almost senseless in the light of current Linguistic
theory) becomes an endemic malady hard to eradicate. But... hear, hear!

>DA: these points have been already made elsewhere in the literature along
> with the point underlying the need for negotiation of meaning in real-life
>interactions as is well supported by some of the empirical research cited
>in chapter VII.

JLG: As the editor of the book seems to be aware, his NEW PERSPECTIVES on
teaching and learning modern languages, are after all NOT-SO-NEW. In fact,
they seem to repeat boring ideas that, if anything, misrepresent the real
issues one would like to get solved by serious research.

I haven't read the book, although the last part of the passage above informs
us that the need for negotiation of meaning in real-life interactions is
well supported by empirical research. What can this NEED be? I take it that
people learn languages, or anything for that matter, in real-life
interactions (a language class is, as far as I know, one of these real-life
interactions). No problem with that. But how come some people learn
languages WITHOUT any interaction AT ALL, real or otherwise (?). Are they
geniuses, extraterritorial, ... what? Of course real life interaction is one
of the known ways to learn languages! So what? Why do we need empirical
research for that obvious fact? I repeat, I haven't read the book and maybe
I am missing a revolutionary set of brilliant (old!! or, at least,
not-so-new) ideas of which I am not aware of.

Unluckily, what follows makes me doubt whether this is indeed the case.

>DA: The context of communication, i.e., the
> classroom and the curriculum, must be revisited. Again,
> Thus, the question is not whether language learners would benefit
> from opportunities to use all four skills in a motivating,
> challenging communicative environment with a content-based approach
> which creates interactive activities during which learners can
> notice and correct their errors as they restructure their
> interlanguage. The question is how to implement such an approach
> and to create such an environment. P. Hood proposes in chapter VII
> that these goals may be reached with the help of CALL (computer
> assisted language learning). All schools would be online, they
> would have networked multimedia packages and use an interactive
> whiteboard for a greater availability of current material and
> personalized instruction of all four skills.
> CALL could also partially alleviate the motivation problem outlined
> by Chambers in chapter III, although the study's findings reported
> in that chapter indicate that computers and teaching methodology do
> not have much importance compared to the students' opinion or
> perception of their teachers -- especially at the primary level
> where students are less likely to be self motivated.
> The communicative approach could also benefit from a greater focus
> on learner and teacher autonomy as advocated in chapter II by
> D. Little who shows that autonomy is a natural tendency in human
> behavior. Autonomy in language learning could lead to more
> effective and meaningful communication as the learners would decide
> curriculum content in collaboration with teachers as successfully
> done in a handful of classrooms (Dam, 1995).
> Thus the current state of foreign language learning and teaching is
> very clearly described and understood.

JLG: I fear I am in complete disagreement with this last optimistic
assertion. But my disagreement is not important, really. After all, there
are people who believe the earth is flat. Nobody would care about their
beliefs nowadays. But what if they had SOME REASONS to believe it? And, more
important, what if those reasons gave us a BETTER REPRESENTATIONAL ARGUMENT
about the place we are living on? Of course, I don't think there be any
reasons for believing the earth to be flat. But I do believe that there are
mighty good reasons to forget about the important CENTRAL role of real-life
communication or, better and more elusively put, of a "challenging
communicative environment with a content-based approach" in the fixing of
linguistic structures (i.e., LEARNING) in the minds of potential learners.
MIND YOU: I am not (repeat, NOT) saying that exercising your learned stuff
is wrong. What I am saying is that this "modern" (?) way of doing is in
principle not better than trying to learn vocabulary by rote, although I
willingly concede that it might me "more fun" for hardly motivated
kids --though this remains to be proved empirically. Let me start a brief
summary of the reasons that make me so utterly a miscreant on these "modern"
ways:

1) As we all know, and Konrad Lorenz (among others) showed, little ducks are
born with a device that IMPRINTS in their minds the "concept" `[MY MOTHER]
if certain physical conditions in the environment obtain, giving them the
benefit of a protector in their early life.

2) As we all know, and Noam Chosmy (among others) showed, little babies are
born with a device that IMPRINTS in their minds the "linguistic
representations" of their milieu if certain physical conditions obtain,
giving them the benefit of a tool that helps them communicate with people
during all their life.

3) As we all know, Jerry Fodor considered that this inprintable language
acquisition device we are all born with is in fact one of many modular
devices we have in our minds that are mandatory, quick and hollow and which
help us in sending information from the environment to what he called the
central system(s).

One of the characteristics of the fodorian modules is that its acquisition
follows a universal pattern and sequencing. That is, at a certain age, all
babies follow THE SAME path at about THE SAME time of their lives and
according to THE SAME temporal span. So far, so good.

4) Now, in the middle of the chomskyan fashion of the seventies, some people
got the idea that the ACQUISITION device for learning the mother tongue was
somehow responsible for ALL learning of foreign languages' linguistic
elements. Accordingly, they made a distinction between LEARNING a language,
which is what we, poor oldies, have done in getting a foreign language (more
or less!) in our heads, and ACQUIRING a language, which is what our lucky
descendants are supposed to be doing in fixing the linguistic elements of
the foreign languages they tackle.
This distinction is a misrepresentation. There is no universal pattern in
anything while one learns a foreign language. The discoverer of the mythical
Troy, Schliemann, learnt a foreign language every three months. John Lyons
once told me that Spanish was a language one could learnt in 15 days. It
took ME four years or so of my childhood! But then, it has taken me more
than six years to give up the learning of Chinese in my adulthood. And so
on!

5) Moreover, the acquisition of a mother language is indeed natural. But
that is because, according to Fodor, our modules are prewired and every
single hint we get form the environment is immediately and EFFICIENTLY
processed and becomes an asset for the final imprinting. This, of course, IS
NOT THE CASE while one learns a foreign language. Or, if it should be the
case, it should also be empirically well fundamented --which to my knowledge
is anything but.

6) I am a fan of Relevance Theory. According to it, and if interpret it
rightly, whenever we process information, we keep in our minds ONLY the one
that seems relevant to us. That is the only one that PRODUCTIVELY INTERACTS
with our old information in order to give us either (a) totally new
information, (b) reinforcement of old information, or (c) weakening and
eventually erasing of old information.

It is my contention that, during certain stages of foreign language
learning, a real communicative content (or whatever!) will be loaded with
lots and lots of information that is totally irrelevant to the student. It,
therefore, will be processed as NOISE and be subsequently erased, with all
the processing effort this certainly requires. As it does not have the
benefits of relevant information, it tends to form a concrete wall of
irrelevant stuff that slowly by slowly might do away with the (little)
motivation the student might have had when he began learning.

7) The defenders of the Communicative Faith tell us that, precisely, by
doing natural meaningful activities, this problem should disappear, for the
"meaningful" should help new linguistic information to become relevant. I
wish somebody in the field would explain to me how this process comes about.
Why not teach them directly a few vocabulary and grammatical forms and have
them used in "traditional good old exercises"? Why indeed is the "meaningful
approach" more relevant than the traditional one? I'm not saying it is not.
What I am asking is WHY. I am a miscreant, and I don't believe by faith
alone. I need solid reasoning and empirical proof.

8) Lastly and (almost) incidentally, I am pretty sure that our communication
ability (or, in Relevance Theory terms, our faculty to "optimize relevance"
of information in our communicative interactions) is also a module like
device. Which means that it becomes settled and imprinted at a very early
age and does not have to be taught again --or better, CANNOT be taught again
and again... and again. The foreign language learner will use whatever means
he has at her disposal to engage in a communicative interaction with
foreigners, as I am doing now with you people. (S)he may not use the right
(i.e., native) elements in the appropriate place and time (as I am sure I am
not), but (s)he will communicate, never fear! No problem in that angle.

9) An intriguing problem, for which I haven't got an clear answer, is the
developping of a module-like functioning of some consciously learned
activities (i.e., driving a bike, or playing a piano) and representations
(i.e., learning to read, or learning to look at birds professionally). This
development of foreign language representations in hollow, quick, (almost)
unconscious, and mandatory mental reactions is what I think confused the
early advocates of the distinction between LEARNING and ACQUIRING. But, I
insist, from a linguistic point of view (in the chomskyan tradition, that
is) the similarity ends there. I wish somebody would point out to me whether
this has been treated seriously somewhere.

10) One of the authors of Relevance Theory, Dan Sperber, has argued that the
human mind might be a lot more modular than what Fodor thought. In fact, it
might be totally modular, in which case, to say that some functioning is
modular is not to say very much. What he argues, I think rightly, is that
there is not a uniform kind of mind modules. There might be a good number of
types, ranging from the micromodules which we call "concepts" to
macromodules like what I mentioned before could be called the relevance
device we use in acquiring information. All this is a very speculative field
just now, I agree, but at least it might be a much more "new perspective on
teaching and learning modern languages"


Hasta otra!

Jose Luis Guijarro Morales
Facultad de Filosofia y Letras
Avda. Gomez Ulla, 1
11003 Cadiz (España)
Tel. +34 956 015526
Fax. +34 956 015501
joseluis.guijarro at uca.es

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