Language Exploration and Awareness

A Resource Book for Teachers

Larry Andrews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135631550
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

"Language Exploration and Awareness: A Resource Book for Teachers, Third Edition" shows English teachers how they can expand their curriculum beyond the traditional emphases on grammar and syntax, to help their students learn about many aspects of the English language, including general semantics, regional and social dialects, syntax, spelling, history of the English language, social language conventions, lexicography, and word origins. Clear, practical, and reader-friendly, the text reviews basic aspects of English language study in classrooms, then illustrates how teachers can create student-centered, inquiry-oriented activities for the learners in their classrooms. Written from a sociocultural perspective, this text stresses the uses of authentic language as it is used by real people for real purposes in diverse social contexts. Changes in the Third Edition are: all chapters have been thoroughly updated to address new developments in the world and in the field of English and language arts education; the chapters in Section II include new Student Explorations - activities designed by pre- and in-service teachers that readers can use with students in their classrooms; and new in this edition are references throughout several chapters to Web sites that instructors and students will find useful. This text is intended as text for undergraduate and master's level English language arts courses on the pedagogies of language teaching, and as an introduction to language or introduction to linguistics courses - particularly those emphasizing language study from a sociocultural perspective; and for courses preparing teachers of English as a new language. The text is also intended as a resource for current classroom teachers.

SECTION II

Language Exploration and Awareness: The Elements

Each chapter in is divided into two parts. Part 1 is for you, the classroom teacher, and it describes a basic aspect of language study. Part 2, on the other hand, is for your students. Part 2 contains illustrative language explorations for your students’ classroom inquiries.

CHAPTER 4

Properties of Communication and Language

Language study is not a subject, but a process.

—Peter Trudgill, Accent, Dialect, and the School

Before you read this chapter, please answer these questions: Where do you think language came from? How is human language different from animal signaling systems? Why do we teach the English language in schools?

We don’t think about essential activities all of the time. We think the most about breathing, for example, when we have a cold and our lungs or nasal passages are congested. We think about swallowing only when we have a sore throat. We don’t think twice about walking across the room to turn off a lamp until we have a sprained ankle. So it is with language. We use it every day, but scarcely give it a moment’s notice until something goes awry.

We might become more attentive to language when we hear someone violate one of our pet linguistic peeves, like pronouncing NUKE-lear as NUKE-YA-lure, or REAL-tor as REAL-A-tor. We might pay closer attention to language if we hear some someone offer as a truthful statement something we know to be false. If someone fails to return a greeting we offer to them, we wonder what’s wrong with them. Pet peeves aside, I tend to agree with Geoffrey Nunberg when he says that the worst offense people can commit against language is to fail to listen to it closely.¹

Whatever the characteristics are that separate us humans from all of the other creatures on earth, complex language is certainly one of the most obvious and most important. The advantages bestowed by the ability to string together meaningful words in an infinite number of combinations and permutations are obvious to anyone who has ever struggled to communicate across a language barrier. Words are bridges to other minds, allowing us to cooperate in complex ways and knitting our communities together.²

This chapter is about communication, about language, what it is, where it might have come from, and how it is uniquely human. This chapter, and those that follow, will also help you and your students to listen to language more closely.

Having read, either in part or in whole, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, some plays and poems by Shakespeare, and perhaps the King James translation of the Holy Bible, you know that the English we use today is far different from the English found in those older selections. You already have an intuitive sense of linguistic change from an historical perspective. But, before these older examples, what did English look like? Moreover, where did language come from?

Answers to these questions have been offered over the years by parents, archeologists, theologians, and linguists, and the answers have been a curious mixture of opinion, fact, theory, speculation, and ideology. Whenever our available information falters, speculation becomes a ready reference, as numerous conversations at a family reunion or in the teachers’ lounge will attest.

With regard to the question about the origin of language, where it came from, the simplest answer is easy: We don’t know. There are no audio-or videotapes in the archives at the Smithsonian Institute recording the first utterances. The National Enquirer has not yet published an article, “Here! For the First Time! Language Begins!” Not even the ever-resourceful Oprah Winfrey has managed to schedule an interview with “Urg and Yhlms,” we can almost hear her say, “those wonderfully creative folks who created language.”

The popular arts have made some speculative contributions to the question about the origin of language. In the Bantam novels of Jean Auel, for example, (see Clan of the Cave Bear, The Valley of Horses, The Plains of Passage), Ayla and the other characters speak—in remarkably Modern English—with what can only be described as truly prodigious linguistic repertoires, given the fact that the novels are set in the Pleistocene Epoch when humans first appeared.

In The Valley of Horses there is this exchange, initiated when Ayla asks, “What are counting words?” Jondalar replies, “They are … names for the marks on your sticks, for one thing, for other things, too. They are used to say the number of…anything.” Seeing that Ayla is close to grasping the notion of numeracy, Jondalar elaborates, “ ‘Let me show you,’ he said. He lined [some stones] up in a row, and, pointing to each in turn, began to count. ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.’“³

Please. Give us a break.

Some popular movies, on the other hand, have reflected quite an opposite view in terms of the linguistic development of its characters. Raquel Welch (1,000,000 B.C.), Shelly Long, Ringo Starr and John Matuszak (Prehistoric Women) stumble and bumble around bushes and piles of rocks, wearing scanty clothes fashioned from the hides of their most recent kills, muttering either gritty and guttural “Argghhs” or suggestive and sensuous “Ummms.”

Granted, neither the novels nor the movies cited here intended to be serious attempts at linguistic scholarship, but they do help to illustrate some of the diverse myths and notions about the beginnings of language. With both the novels and the movies set in approximately the same time periods, we see on the one hand linguistic development generally equivalent to what you and I are accustomed to in the 21st century, whereas on the other hand we hear only animal-like grunts and groans.

One of my favorite films, Quest for Fire, stands out as a remarkable exception. This film is a celebration of human persistence, courage, inquisitiveness, creativity, and communication. Aired with some regularity on the cable channels, Quest for Fire depicts three men (led by Ron Perlman) who embark upon a dangerous journey, seeking fire for their tribe. While their dialogue is prelinguistic, they demonstrate language-in-the-making. Their prelinguistic behavior is highlighted when they are befriended by a female member (Rae Dawn Chong) of another tribe, whose language is much more fully developed. The attempts at communication among the characters are both instructive and poignant.

THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE: SOME SPECULATIONS

There have been other attempts to account for the beginning of language and we examine just a few of them here. I’m not offering these theories because they represent scientific thought; they’re here because some of them are amusing.

The divine origin theory is one attempt to explain how language began. According to the Judeo-Christian view, God created Adam (in Hebrew, one translation of Adam is “man”) and language at the same time. In Genesis 2:19 (RSV), we read:

God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.

The actual language spoken by Adam and Eve has received its share of attention, too. Andreas Kemke, a Swedish philologist who can only be described as a staunchly loyal Swedish patriot, claimed that in the Garden of Eden God spoke Swedish (of course!), Adam and Eve spoke Danish, and the evil serpent spoke French.⁴ Clearly, Kemke the Swede had much higher regard for his neighbors from Denmark than he had for those from France!

In the Hindu tradition, language comes from Sarasvasti, wife of Brahma, the creator of the universe.⁵ The Holy Qur’an gives the Islamic account:

And among His Signs is the creation of the heavens

And the earth, and the variations in your languages.⁶

Similar accounts of the divine origin theory of language appear in American Indian beliefs. It is probably safe to say that every religious denomination in the world asserts that language came from a divine source, inasmuch as the Divine Creator created everything else.⁷

Another view of the origin of language is the natural sounds theory, sometimes called the bow-wow theory or the echoic theory. This belief holds that the first words were actually human imitations or pantomimes of the sounds cave dwellers heard in the natural world. For example, when Pleistocene Peter observed a creature flying overhead making a caw-caw sound, he would imitate that naturally occurring sound in naming the bird. Similarly, when Pleistocene Paula walked by a stream and heard what she interpreted as a ripple or a babble,then she used those words to describe to Peter what she had seen. Little by little, as a bow-wow, a hiss, a boom, and other sounds were encountered, these natural sounds became words, and thus, the vocabulary list grew.⁸

Of course, every...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Section I Language Exploration and Awareness The Rationale
• Section II Language Exploration and Awareness The Elements
• Bibliography
• Index