Towards a Language-Based Theory of Learning

2008/11/05Seminar in Language UseProfessor Steve L. Thorne

Sungwoo Kim (Applied Linguistics)

By M.A.K. HALLIDAY

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Why Language-based Theory of Learning?

“Language development is learning how to mean; and because human beings are quintessentially creatures who mean (i.e., who engage in semiotic processes, with natural language as prototypical), all human learning is essentially semiotic in nature.” (p. 93)

“Language is not a domain of human knowledge (except in the special context of linguistics, where it becomes an object of scientific study); language is the essential condition of knowing, the process by which experience becomes knowledge.” (p. 94)

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Sources of the argument

1. Children’s spontaneous language in the home and neighborhood

2. Their use of language in construing commonsense knowledge and enacting interpersonal relationships

3. Their move into primary school, and the transition into literacy and educational knowledge

4. Their subsequent move into secondary school and into the technical knowledge of the disciplines

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FEATURE 1 – BORN TO COMM. & INTERPRET

Children are predisposed, from birth, (a) to address others, and be addressed by them (i.e., to interact communicatively); and (b) to construe their experience (i.e., to interpret experience by organizing it into meanings).

Signs are created at the intersection of these two modes of activity.

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QUESTION 1

Do you have any experience in which you encountered an emergence of a sign or sets of signs while interacting with other people or even yourself?

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FEATURE 3 – LANGUAGE SYSTEM(S)

These sets of symbolic acts develop into systems. An act of meaning implies a certain choice.

If there is a meaning ‘I want’, then there can be a meaning ‘I don’t want’, perhaps also ‘I want very much’, as alternatives.

If there is a meaning ‘I’m content’, this can contrast with other states of being: ‘I’m cross’, ‘I’m excited’, and so on. (p. 96)

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FEATURE 4 – EMERGENCE OF GRAMMAR

The system as a whole is now deconstructed, and reconstructed as a stratified semiotic, that is, with a grammar (or, better, because this concept includes vocabulary, a lexicogrammar) as intermediary between meaning and expression.

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FEATURE 4 (CONT’D)

the grammar brings into being a semiotic that has unlimited potential for learning with.

The next features relate to this “explosion into grammar”

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GRAMMAR-RELATED FEATURES

1. The symbols now become conventional, or “arbitrary.”

2. One of the strategies that children seem to adopt in learning language is that of the trailer: a kind of preview of what is going to come.

3. The “magic gateway” into grammar p. 98

4. Generalization (“proper name” to “common name”)

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STAGES of DEVELOPMENT

1. Protolanguage: mamamama . . . may mean ‘I want (that)‘ then ‘I want mummy to (do/give me that)‘, then ‘I want mummy!’ – Random form-meaning matches

2. Transition from protolanguage into language: 'Mummy’ as an referring expression - Annotation

3. Mummy as “common names” - Classification

4. “That’s not a bus, it’s a van, ” “That’s not green, it’s blue,” or “Walk, don’t run!” - Outclassification

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QUESTION 2

“There may indeed be objects of intermediate or mixed class, half van and half lorry, for example; but the name has to be one or the other; since the sign is conventional, we cannot create an intermediate expression between van and lorry.”

Q: What does this quote tell you? What does this linguistic articulation of the world gives us? What does it take away from us? In other aspects, how do linguistic signs liberate or constrain us?

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An example - CREATIVITY

Tigger: “All I did was I coughed.”

Eeyore: “He bounced."

Tigger: “Well, I sort of boffed.”

(p. 99, [from A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner]).

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FEATURE 9 - METAFUNCTION

Language (as distinct from protolanguage) is the combination of the experiential and the interpersonal that constitutes an act of meaning. (See TABLE 2 at page 100.)

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FEATURE 12 - INTERPERSONAL GATEWAY

Imparting unknown information

Extending into new experiential domains (e. g. “Sharing”)

Developing logical-semantic relations (e.g. condition | cause and effect)

Learning abstract terms (e.g. That’s not fair.)

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FEATURE 18 - ABSTRACTNESS

• Fruit is more general than raspberry, but it is no more abstract.

• What children cannot cope with, in the early stages of learning language, is abstractness: that is, words of which the referents are abstract entities.

• When children learn to read and write, they have to enter a new phase in their language development, moving on from the general to the abstract.

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FEATURE 19 – SEMIOTIC REGRESSION

I am a dinosaur. I was hatched out of an egg. Today I was hungry. I ate some leaves. (by a 7-year old child) – Looks like 3-year old speech!

This kind of semiotic regression may make it easier for children to reconstrue their experience in the form of systematic knowledge (Hammond, 1990).

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FEATURE 20 – GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR

whenever an engine fails -> in times of engine failure

“It tells us to view experience like a text, so to speak. In this way writing changed the analogy between language and other domains of experience; it foregrounded the synoptic aspect, reality as object, rather than the dynamic aspect, reality as process, as the spoken language does.”

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QUESTION

What kind of impact does children’s literacy practice (i.e. working with written language) have on their conceptualization about the world?

How does this issue relate to additional language pedagogy?