Linguistics is endlessly fascinating, and there are many hundreds of books you can read about subjects as diverse as the influence of media headlines on peopleâs attitudes and behaviour, or the way that the Guugu Yimithirr language uses cardinal points (north, south, east, west) for explaining directions. However, our particular corner of linguistics concerns teaching and learning English language, and so it seems appropriate to start with an idea for a lesson.
There are classroom activities throughout this book, and if you are currently teaching, you may find them helpful both to develop your learnersâ English and to try out the concepts you encounter in this book. I havenât specified a proficiency level for any of the activities, but where I use phrases like low proficiency, I have in mind levels A1-A2 of the CEFR levels (Council of Europe 2019), advanced proficiency refers to C1-C2, and so on. Most activities are adaptable for different levels, and you are of course the best judge of suitability for those you teach. If you donât currently have a class, perhaps you are studying and can try them out with your peers. Where there are questions about the activities, you can think them through by yourself or, even better, talk them through with colleagues or classroom peers. This will enable you to reflect on your teaching and on how your learners learn.
To follow this activity up, you could do some work on the parable about the blind men and the elephant. Simplified versions of the parable are easily found online, or for advanced classes you could use the John Godfrey Saxe poem of the same name. The parable lends itself really well to drama, role-play, art, and so on. In summary, the story is about six blind men who encounter elephants during the course of their lives. Each one gets to know about the elephant by touching it â but each one feels a different part of it. Thus, the one who feels the tail describes the elephant as a rope, the one who feels the tusks describes it as a spear, the one who feels its side describes a wall, and so on. They argue about what it is that they have encountered, with each giving a totally different version.
So, what is language? âIn a sense the only satisfactory response is âwhy do you want to know?â since unless we know what lies beneath the question we cannot hope to answer it in a way which will suit the questionerâ (Halliday 1969:26). In our case, linguistics for TESOL is a type of applied linguistics , an academic discipline whose purpose is âto engage with problems in the real world involving the use of languageâ (Widdowson 2018:136). Here, our real-world problems are those of TESOL practitioners: what to teach, how to teach it, and why. The linguistics elephant has been examined from different academic perspectives, such as psychology, sociology, and neuroscience, and each of these âblind menâ gives us an account of what language is â a system, a tool, a set of practices, a flurry of brain activity â which helps us solve those problems.
Reflection
What is language? Can you summarise your thoughts in exactly eight words?
Classroom Activity: The Elephant
- 1.Find and print six different photos of parts of an elephant. Try to find ones which donât reveal too easily the subject; there are close-ups of elephant tusks which look more like tree bark, for example.
- 2.Ask learners to work in groups of six. Give each member of the group one of the photos. Tell them not to show their photos to anybody, but to spend a minute thinking how they can describe the photo.
- 3.Learners then describe their photos to each other. The aim is to work out what the photos as a whole depict (an elephant) by listening to each other. Depending on the photos you have chosen, this may be quite tricky!
What language does this activity draw out? What skills does it develop? In other words, what is its aim? What language might you need to feed in so that the activity works well, and when might you do that? How can you follow this activity up?
1.1 Language as a Rule-Bound System
Reflection
Watch the TED talk by John McWhorter about fantasy languages such as Elvish, Klingon, and Dothraki. What characteristics does he say indicate that they are actual languages? The talk is available here: âș https://âwww.âted.âcom/âtalks/âjohn_âmcwhorter_âare_âelvish_âklingon_âdothraki_âand_âna_âvi_âreal_âlanguages?âlanguage=âen
McWhorter (2013) says that languages need more than words; they need to have grammar, or a system of putting words together into meaningful sentences. He also says that real languages evolve over time and display irregularities due to this evolution.
Interestingly, McWhorterâs focus is Conlangs, or constructed languages, the ones created for use in fantasy fiction or films and then developed by fans. In other words, they pre-exist any communication or social interaction which uses them because they have been artificially created.
McWhorterâs argument is, therefore, that language is a structure. This point of view has been around in linguistics for a very long time. Linguistics, like other social sciences, did not exist as a discipline in its own right until relatively recently, historically speaking. Sociology, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics: they were all subsumed into philosophy for many years, subjects which thinkers of the day wrote about and debated. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these separated into discipline areas.
Ferdinand de Saussure began his work at this time, and said that language consists of signs , each of which signifies something. Most simply, this means that a word (such as shoe) is a signifier , and the thing it represents (a shoe) is the signified . Signs are themselves arbitrary â a collection of sounds creates a word, which has a random association with the person, place, or thing that it signifies â but together they form a system, which is language, where each sign is defined by its relationship to other parts of the system.
Saussure famously used the analogy of a game of chess to explain this. There may be external factors to consider in chess: its history, who is playing it and where, what the stakes are, and so forth. However, the most important thing, he said, is the game itself. It has defined pieces, each with a relationship to the others, and they move in predefined ways according to fixed rules. In a similar way, Saussure did not deny that there are other ways to look at language, but insisted that the structure (the pieces and the rules) of the âgameâ itself is the most significant perspective. Whatâs more, the rules, the structure, are not influenced by what the chess pieces are made out of or what shape they are (Ballard 2016).
Saussure was not the first to focus on rules; there is a long tradition of scholarship going back thousands of years to the first scholars of Sanskrit, Sumerian, Greek, and Latin (Ballard 2016; Crystal 2019). However, Saussureâs timing was significant in that it coincided with a more general move in the social sciences to see things in a more âscientificâ way, with thinkers such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer suggesting that society consisted of a system where every part had a function and a relationship to every other part, a concept called structuralism . This helped his work to gain traction and become incredibly influential.
In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky took this argument much further. He argued that not only is language a system, but it is a human instinct. He pointed to the fact that all humans, unless they have a specific impairment which prevents them from doing so, are capable of acquiring language. He proposed the existence of a language acquisition device (LAD) which all humans share, and he pointed out the commonality that all languages share. This commonality he termed Universal Grammar (UG) . UG consists of principles and parameters, where principles represent the common constraints which all languages have and parameters are the ways in which they vary.
Itâs similar to growing vegetables in a garden. Every vegetable variety has common needs: water, soil, light, weed control, nutrients, regular picking, space to grow, and so on. These apply regardless of environment and are true before we plant a single seed. However, individual vegetable varieties work in slightly different ways â they have different parameters â within those universal constraints. Some need more space, some need to be picked more regularly than others, and some need more water or light than others. In a similar way, as children grow up surrounded by a particular language, their brains adjust to certain parameters related to that language. For example, in English we say itâs raining, but in Spanish we say estĂĄ lloviendo (literally, is raining). In English we have to have a pronoun (it), in Spanish the pronoun is implied. Languages are loosely divided into pronoun-drop (pro-drop) and non-pro-drop depending on whether the pronoun is explicit or implied from other features of the sentence.
Chomsky linked this line of thought right back to the philosopher René Descartes, who had proposed that the mind works as a completely separate entity to the body: a concept known as dualism . Descartes also said that we cannot trust the evidenc...