Language, Communication and Education

Barbara Mayor, A. K. Pugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135785550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Examines communication in the classroom within the larger context of the development of standard English and its social implications.

Section 1
Language and other Communication Systems

Introduction

Each of the articles in this introductory section explores a different aspect of human communication, only the first of which might conventionally be called ‘language’. Yet each system is equally rule-governed and, like spoken language, interpretable by those who are initiated into the culture.

In ‘Primate Communication’ Altmann works towards a definition of human language by examining those features which distinguish it from the communications systems of other primates. He comes to the conclusion that human language is indeed outstanding in several key respects, although it is not unique in every one of them; nor is it clear why human beings should have developed language in the way they have. This is a field in which our knowledge is still in its infancy, despite what now amounts to a substantial body of research.

By contrast, research into the nature of human sign languages is relatively recent and expanding fast. In their article, Woll and Lawson examine the features which qualify British sign language as a fully developed communication system that can replace spoken language for all the normal communication needs of its users. In so doing, they draw many parallels with spoken languages. They are also at pains to point out the particular strengths of sign languages, such as their ability to express complex ideas economically via a number of simultaneous movements.

The article by Sacks, a neurologist, describes in a very vivid way the interlocking nature of verbal and non-verbal communication between human beings. It is only in cases of brain damage that it is possible to observe either of these aspects operating in isolation, and their inadequacy as separate systems becomes immediately apparent to the observer. Normally, of course, verbal and non-verbal components of communication are working together towards the same communicative end. Sacks describes what can happen when one channel is blocked out.

Bourdieu’s article ‘The Berber House’ describes a very different kind of non-verbal communication but one which is no less systematic. It can be hard for us to recognise the symbolic value of the various features in our own immediate environment because we and the objects co-exist in the same culture. By entering into a culture which will to most readers be unfamiliar, it becomes possible to look in a more detached manner at the way in which human beings express meaning through the design and location of the objects around them.

Barbara Mayor

1.1
Primate Communication

STUART A.ALTMANN

Let us suppose for the moment that we are in a grove of acacia trees on the savannahs of East Africa. In the trees above our heads there is a group of the common African green monkey, sometimes called the vervet. Suddenly, a martial eagle swoops down on the vervets. The first vervet that sees the approaching eagle gives an alarm bark. At the sound of this vocalization all the vervet monkeys suddenly drop from the branches of the trees to the dense undergrowth, where they are safe from the attack of the eagle.

Here is a vocalization given by one member of a social group that is heard and responded to by other members of his group. Such vocalizations are obviously used for communication. But can we call this kind of communication a “language”?

On these same savannahs of East Africa, baboons, which are large, ground-living monkeys, are fairly abundant. At night, these animals sleep either in trees or on cliff faces. The small infant baboon sleeps huddled against its mother.

As the infant becomes older, however, the mother becomes progressively more reluctant to allow the infant to sleep next to her. This rejection by the mother seems to be a traumatic situation for the infant, and in the evening, as a group of baboons approaches their sleeping trees, the repeated cooing and screeching of a rejected infant can be heard. Sometimes the infant’s calling is successful and the mother allows the infant to sleep next to her.

As a final example, in the rain forest of Central and South America there is a monkey, called the howler monkey, that produces one of the loudest sounds in the animal kingdom. When two groups of howler monkeys come together, the calling of the adult males between the two groups can be heard for a great distance. The males do not wait for the appearance of another group before giving their call, however. They howl each morning at about sun rise and at other times of the day as well, even though no other group of howler monkeys is visible through the dense foliage. This howling vocalization seems to serve as a proclamation of an occupied territory and each group tends to avoid those areas from which the howls of other males come.

Each species of monkey or ape has a small repertoire of such socially significant vocalizations. For example, the green monkey and the howler monkey each have about twenty distinct calls in their repertoire. And each of these vocalizations generally elicits a distinct response in the other members of the social group.

Should we refer to such systems of vocalizations as languages? One’s immediate response to this question is no—that only people have the ability to use language, to speak. But if we ask ourselves what it is that distinguishes the speech of humans from the kinds of vocalizations that we have heard in these monkeys, the answer is not a simple one. Thus, one reason for looking closely at the communication systems of other animals is that we may sharpen our ideas of what is unique about human language.

Man is a primate; that is, he belongs to the group of animals that includes the monkeys, the apes, and the prosimians. And so, for evolutionary reasons this group of animals is of particular importance for comparisons with man: we share a common heritage with the nonhuman primates and for that reason they bear many similarities to us in the chemical composition of their bodies, their anatomy, their behavior, and so forth. Perhaps they have inherited systems of social signaling that are similar to our language. Thus another reason for studying the communication of nonhuman primates is that we may learn something about the evolution of man’s ability to speak.

In addition, these primate signaling systems are interesting in their own right. These animals live in complex social groups. The coordination of group activities depends upon the ability of the animals in the group to communicate with each other. We therefore have an unusual opportunity to study the relationship between the social behavior of individuals and the kind of social system that they live in.

Unfortunately for the sake of such comparisons, the study of behavior and social communication in nonhuman primates is in its infancy. More time and effort have been devoted to the study of any of a number of human languages, such as Navaho, than have been spent on all the rest of the primate species put together. Only within the last few years have there been any concerted attempts to understand the social signals of these animals. Nevertheless, from what is now known about communication in the monkeys and apes, we can make some interesting comparisons with our own language.

We have already said that many nonhuman primates are able to communicate by means of vocalizations and that these vocalizations may trigger responses in other members of their group. In addition, these animals, like man, communicate by various non-vocal signals, including visual signals such as gestures, postures, and facial expressions, by various odors emitted by scent glands, and so forth. As with human speech, most of the social communication of nonhuman primates is specialized, in that this signaling behavior serves no function other than social communication.

A classical way of distinguishing human speech from the communication of other animals is to say that man uses symbols. But exactly what does it mean to say that we use symbols? Or to put it the other way around, if there were an animal that could use symbols, how would we know it?

Unfortunately the term “symbol” is too ambiguous to be very useful here: it has come to mean too many different things to different people. But certainly, a central property of what most people mean when they talk about symbols is to say that there is some kind of fixed association between the symbol and some object or event in the real world. Such messages are called “semantic messages” and in some sense a semantic message stands for the object or event.

There are examples of semantic messages in the social signals of nonhuman primates. For example, the alarm calls of vervet monkeys are semantic, in that a vervet monkey gives essentially the same response to the sound of the alarm call as it gives to the sight of an approaching eagle: in both cases, the animal drops from the branches of the tree into the undergrowth.

For the most part, however, the social signals of monkeys and apes are not semantic: the messages do not stand for something else. They are simply social signals to which a response is given. In this they are much more like the cry of a newborn infant than they are like the speech of human adults.

A striking characteristic of human speech is that we often talk about things that are not immediately present. We may talk about events that occurred in a different place or at some remote period in time. This characteristic of human speech—that these semantic messages are often markedly displaced in time or space from whatever objects or events they stand for—is an extremely important property. It gives us the flexibility of discussing things that are not present at the moment. We can therefore readily discuss past events and use our experience with such past events to plan for the future. For example, if you want to talk about whether or not to buy a cow, you do not need to have a cow in front of you in order to use the word “cow.” Similarly, the person to whom you are talking does not need to have a cow there in order to understand what you mean by that word. Nonhuman primates seem to have a much more limited capacity to displace their semantic messages in time or space from whatever the messages stand for. These animals are much more tied to their immediate sensory environment.

Perhaps the most important characteristic of human speech is that it enables us to communicate about everything, even if we must create new words or sentences to do so. We have names for all the things that are familiar to us and if we encounter something new we can make up a new name for it. In fact, hundreds of new words are introduced into our language every year. Similarly, we can make up whatever sentences we need in order to say what we mean. We are not limited to those sentences with which we are already familiar.

This ability to generate new sentences grows out of the process by which each human child learns to speak during the first few years of its life. The child does not simply memorize a number of sentences that are then used at the appropriate time or place. Rather, the child somehow acquires the ability to combine the various words in its vocabulary into meaningful sentences. Some of these sentences may never before have been used by anyone, yet they can be understood.

This remarkable ability to produce countless new words and new sentences, and to use this ability to talk about anything, is not present in the social signaling of any nonhuman primate. Of course, new vocalizations must evolve within primate societies from time to time. There is no other way to account for the present diversity in vocalizations that we find in species of monkeys and apes. But each such change probably involves a considerable change in the genetics of the population. The evolution of such primate vocalizations is therefore limited by the rate at which such genetic changes can take place.

Human language is not subject to any such restriction. Our ability to make up or learn new words and to transmit these new words to other members of our society means that human language can evolve independently of any further genetic changes. The same is true of our ability to produce countless new sentences.

Each of us was born with the ability to learn a language—not just the particular language of our parents but any language spoken by any human beings. If, for example, an Indian child were raised in a Spanish-speaking family he would grow up speaking Spanish. Thus, each human child is born with the potential for becoming a speaker and understander of any human language despite great differences in the vocabularies and the grammars of languages. But the monkey infant has no such flexibility. An infant monkey that is raised with monkeys of another and very different species still gives for the most part just those social signals that are characteristic of its own species, though it may come to understand those of the species with which it lives. This would seem to indicate that monkeys, at least, have much more flexibility at understanding foreign social signals than they do at using them. As is often the case with human behavior, recognition is easier than recall and reproduction.

We have indicated that human languages are universal, in that we can speak about anything, and that this universality depends upon our ability to coin endless new words and to generate new sentences apparently without limit, so that no matter what new situation arises we are able to talk about it. If the universality of our language depends upon lan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Section 1: Language and other Communication Systems
• Section 2: Standardisation and Diversity in Language
• Section 3: Language, Power and Control
• Section 4: Learning Communication Skills
• Section 5: Language in Classroom Learning
• Section 6: Literacy
• Index