Langague, Learning , and Teaching

Langague, Learning , and Teaching
1. What is the composite definition of language provided in this chapter? (p.5)
• Language is systematic.
• Language is a set of arbitrary symbols.
• Those symbols are primarily vocal, but may also be visual.
• The symbols have conventionalized meanings to which they refer.
• Language is used to communication.
• Language operates in a speech community or culture.
• Language is essentially human, although possibly not limited to humans.
• Language is acquired by all people in much the same way; language and language learning both have universal characteristics.

2. Give the points involving language learning.
• Learning is acquisition or getting
• Learning is retention of information or skill
• Retention implies storage systems, memory, and cognitive organization.
• Learning involves active, conscious focus on and acting upon events outside or inside the organism
• Learning is relatively permanent but subject to forgetting
• Learning involves some form of practice, perhaps reinforced practice
• Learning is a change in behavior.

3. Briefly describe the trends in linguistics in the 1940s-1950s and in the 1960s.
Structuralism/Behaviorism
In the 1940s and 1950s, the structural, or descriptive, school of linguistics, with its advocates-Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, Charles Hockett, Charles Fries, and others-prided itself in a rigorous application of the scietific principle of observation of human languages. An important axiom of structural linguistics was that languages can differ from each other without limit, and hat no preconceptions could apply to the field.
Among psychologists, a behaviorist paradigm also focused on publicly observable responses- those tht can be objectively perceived, recorded, and measured
Rationalism and Cognitive Psychology
In the decade of the 1960s, the generative-transformational school of linguistics emerged through the influence of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky was trying to show tht human language cannot be scrutinized simply in terms of observable stimuli and responses or the blooms of raw data gathered by field linguists. the generative linguist was interested not only in describing language(achieving the level of descriptive adequacy) but also in arriving at an explanatory level of adequacy in the study of language, that is, a principled basis.




4. How do theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics interact? What is Robin Lakoff’s remark on the direction of linguistic trends?

Early 1900, 1940s&1950s Structuralism/Behaviorism
Description, observable performance, scientific method, empiricism surface structure,
Conditioning, reinforcement

1960s&1970 Rationalism & Cognitive Psychology
Generative linguistics, acquisition, innateness, interlanguage systematicity, universal grammar, competence, deep structure.

1980 1990 & early 2000 Constructivism
Interactive discourse, sociocultural variables, cooperative group learning, intrlanguage variability, interactionist hypotheses.