Introduction to Linguistics PDF

Preview

Summary

Area: ENGLISH Focus: Introduction to Linguistics Competencies: 1. demonstrate familiarity with the theories of language and language learning and their influence on language teaching 2. revisit the knowledge of linguistic theories and concepts and apply it to the teaching of communication skills lis...

Description

Area: ENGLISH Focus: Introduction to Linguistics Competencies: 1.

demonstrate familiarity with the theories of language and language learning and their influence on language teaching 2. revisit the knowledge of linguistic theories and concepts and apply it to the teaching of communication skills – listening, speaking, reading, writing, and grammar show understanding of how language rules are used in real conversations

A. Linguistics and English Language Teaching Teachers’ knowledge on the workings of language and language teaching are essentially intertwined with each other. The teachers’ competence on how a language behaves will certainly help teachers explain to the students how the language works, as well as anticipate and respond appropriately to possible learning difficulties. 1. Knowledge of linguistics, specifically phonology, may be useful for explaining interference problems that may be experienced by English language learners with the English sound system. To illustrate, in the absence of the following sounds such as /f/ and /v/ in Philippine languages, except in Ivatan and Ibanag, Filipino English learners are likely to use /p/ and /v/ as substitute sounds, e.g., /pæn/ for /fæn/ ‘ fan’ and /bæn/ for /væn/ ‘van’. Language teachers are advised to remember that each language has its own inventory of phonemes that may differ from that of another language. Such differences may result in using sounds that only approximate the target sounds, as shown in the aforecited examples. 2. Language teachers need to realize that grammatical units such as morphemes, words, phrases and clauses behave quite differently across languages. For example, plurality, and tense in English are expressed through inflections as is {-s/ -es} and {-ed}. However, Tagalog plurality is expressed as separate words as in mga bata ‘children’. Linguistically speaking, Tagalog verbs have no tense, only aspects – perfective “ kumain’ and imperfective ‘kumakain’, which may explain the Filipinos’ problems in dealing with English tenses. 3. Helping students to discover the meaning of words by parsing them into small parts depends heavily on the teacher’s knowledge of morphology or word formation rules. To exemplify, students may parse or segment the following words, taking note of the morpheme {ment} that recurs in embarrassment, government, disillusionment,

enhancement. As students discover the meaning of {-ment} as state or condition’, they may be able to give the meaning of the cited examples as: ‘state of being embarrassed’, ‘state of governing’, ‘state of being disillusioned’, and ‘state of enhancing’. Hence, the process of

word formation such as derivation may help learners interpret and remember meaning of words that follow certain patterns in forming short words into longer words. 4. Teachers’ knowledge about larger units of language use – discourse structure – may be relevant when teaching exchanges or conversations. The use of language for social functions such as asking permission involves familiarity with modals that express formality and a higher degree of politeness when speaking with someone who is older, who occupies a higher position, or is an authority than the speaker. In this context appropriacy has to be observed in selecting modals. For example, it is appropriate to use may, not can when asking permission from someone who is older, higher in position than the speaker. e.g. May I use the office computer?

B. Views about Language 1.

The structuralists believe that language can be described in terms of observable and verifiable data as it is being used. They also describe language in terms of its structure and according to the regularities and patterns or rules in language structure. To them, language is a system of speech sounds, arbitrarily assigned to the objects, states, and concepts to which they refer, used for human communication.  Language is primarily vocal. Language is speech, primarily made up of vocal sounds produced by the speech apparatus in the human body. The primary medium of language is speech; the written record is but a secondary representation of the language. Writing is only the graphic representation of the sounds of the language. While most languages have writing systems, a number of languages continue to exist, even today, in the spoken form only, without any written form. Linguists claim that speech is primary, writing secondary. Therefore, it is assumed that speech has a priority in language teaching.  Language is a system of systems. Language is not a disorganized or a chaotic combination of sounds. Sounds are arranged in certain fixed or established, systematic order to form meaningful units or words. For example, no word in English starts with bz-, lr- or zl- combination, but there are those that begin with spr- and str- (as in spring and string). In like manner, words are also arranged in a particular system to generate acceptable meaningful sentences. The sentence “Shen bought a new novel” is acceptable but the group of words “Shen bought new novel a” is unacceptable, since the word order of the latter violates the established convention in English grammar, the Subject-Verb-Object or

S-V-O word order.

Language is a system of structurally related elements or ‘building blocks’ for the encoding of meaning, the elements being phonemes (sounds), morphemes (words), tagmemes (phrases and sentences/clauses). Language learning, it is assumed, entails mastering the elements or building blocks of the language and learning the rules by which these elements are combined, from phoneme to morpheme to word to phrase to sentence.  Language is arbitrary. There is no inherent relation between the words of a language and their meanings or the ideas conveyed by them. Put another way, there is no one to one correspondence between the structure of a word and the thing it stands for. There is no ‘sacred’ reason why an animal that flies is called ibon in Filipino, pajaro in Spanish, bird in English. Selection of these words in the languages mentioned here is purely an accident of history that native speakers of the languages have agreed on. Through the years reference to such animal has become an established convention that cannot be easily changed. That language is arbitrary means that the relationship between the words and the ‘things’ they denote is merely conventional, i.e. native speakers of English, in some sense, agreed to use the sounds / kæt / ‘cat’ in English because native speakers of English ‘want’ it to be.  Language is a means of communication. Language is an important means of communicating between humans of their ideas, beliefs, or feelings. Language gives shape to people’s thoughts, as well as guides and controls their activity.

2.

The transformationalists/ cognitivists believe that language is a system of knowledge made manifest in linguistic forms but innate and, in its most abstract form, universal.  Language is innate. The presence of the language acquisition device (LAD) in the human brain predisposes all normal children to acquire their first language in an amazingly short time, around five years since birth.  Language is creative. It enables native speakers to produce and understand sentences they have not heard nor used before.  Language is a mental phenomenon. It is not mechanical.  Language is universal. It is universal in the sense that all

normal children the world over acquire a mother tongue but it is also universal in the sense that, at a highly abstract level, all languages must share key features of human languages,

such as all languages have sounds; all languages have rules that form sounds into words, words into phrases and clauses; and all languages have transformation rules that enable speakers to ask questions, negate sentences, issue orders, defocus the doer of the action, etc. 2.

The functionalists believe that language is a dynamic system through which members of speech community exchange information. It is a vehicle for the expression of functional meaning such as expressing one’s emotions, persuading people, asking and giving information, making people do things for others. This view of language emphasizes the meaning and functions rather than the grammatical characteristics of language, and leads to a language teaching content consisting of categories of meaning/notions and functions rather than of elements of structure and grammar.

3.

B.

The interactionists believe that language is a vehicle for establishing interpersonal relations and for performing social transactions between individuals. It is a tool for creating and maintaining social relations through conversations. Language teaching content, according to this view, may be specified and organized by patterns of exchange and interaction.

Acquisition of Language 1.

Behaviorist learning theory. Derived from a general theory of learning, the behaviorist view states that the language behavior of the individual is conditioned by sequences of differential rewards in his/her environment. It regards language learning as a behavior like other forms of human behavior, not a mental phenomenon, learned by a process of habit formation. Since language is viewed as mechanistic and as a human activity, it is believed that learning a language is achieved by building up habits on the basis of stimulus-response chains. Behaviorism emphasizes the consequences of the response and argues that it is the behavior that follows a response which reinforces it and thus helps to strengthen the association. According to Littlewood (1984), the process of habit formation includes the following: a. The child imitates the sounds and patterns which s/he hears around her/him. b. People recognize the child’s attempts as being similar to the

adult models and reinforce (reward) the sounds by approval or some other desirable reaction.

c. In order to obtain more of these rewards, the child repeats the sounds and patterns so that these become habits. d. In this way the child’s verbal behavior is conditioned (‘shaped’) until the habits coincide with the adult models. The behaviorists claim that the three crucial elements of learning are: a stimulus, which serves to elicit behavior; a response triggered by the stimulus, and reinforcement, which serves to mark the response as being appropriate (or inappropriate) and encourages the repetition (or suppression) of the response. 2. Cognitive learning theory. Chomsky argues that language is not acquired by children by sheer imitation and through a form of conditioning on reinforcement and reward. He believes that all normal human beings have an inborn biological internal mechanism that makes language learning possible. Cognitivists/ innatists claim that the child is born with an ‘initial’ state’ about language which predisposes him/her to acquire a grammar of that language. They maintain that the language acquisition device (LAD) is what the child brings to the task of language acquisition, giving him/her an active role in language learning. One important feature of the mentalist account of second language acquisition is hypothesis testing, a process of formulating rules and testing the same with competent speakers of the target language. 3.

Krashen’s Monitor Model (1981). Probably this is the most often cited among theories of second language acquisition; considered the most comprehensive, if not the most ambitious, consisting of five central hypotheses: The five hypotheses are: a. The acquisition/ learning hypothesis. It claims that there are two ways of developing competence in L2: Acquisition - the subconscious process that results from informal, natural communication between people where language is a means, not a focus nor an end, in itself. Learning - the conscious process of knowing about language and being able to talk about it, that occurs in a more formal situation where the properties or rules of a language are taught. Language learning has traditionally involved grammar and vocabulary learning. Acquisition parallels first language development in

children while learning approximates the formal teaching of grammar in classrooms. Conscious thinking about the rules is said to occur in second language

learning while unconscious feeling about what is correct and appropriate occurs in language acquisition. b. The natural order hypothesis. It suggests that grammatical structures are acquired in a predictable order for both children and adults, that is, certain grammatical structures are acquired before others, irrespective of the language being learned. When a learner engages in natural communication, then the standard order below will occur.

Group 1: present progressive -ing (She is reading) plural -s (bags) copula ‘to be’ (The girl is at the library.)

Group 2: auxiliary ‘to be’ (She is reading.) articles the and an (That’s a book.)

Group 3: irregular past forms (She drank milk.)

Group 4: regular past -ed (She prayed last night.) third-person-singular -s (She prays every day.) possessive -s (The girl’s bag is new.)

b. The monitor hypothesis. It claims that conscious learning of grammatical rules has an extremely limited function in language performance: as a monitor or editor that checks output. The monitor is an editing device that may normally operate before language performance. Such editing may occur before the natural output or after the ouput. Krashen suggests that monitoring occurs when there is sufficient time, where there is pressure to communicate correctly and not just convey meaning, and when the appropriate rules are known. d. The input hypothesis. Krashen proposes that when learners are exposed to grammatical features a little beyond their current level (i.e., i + 1), those features are ‘acquired’. Acquisition results from comprehensible input, which is made understandable with the help provided by the context. If learners receive understandable input, language structures will be naturally acquired. Ability to communicate in a second language ‘emerges’ rather than indirectly put in place

by teaching. c. The affective filter hypothesis. Filter consists of attitude to language, motivation, self-confidence and anxiety. Thus

learners with favorable attitude and self-confidence may have a ‘low filter’ which promotes language learning. Learners with a low affective filter seek and receive more input, interact with confidence, and are more receptive to the input they are exposed to. On the other hand, anxious learners have a high affective filter which prevents acquisition from taking place.

d. Implications for teaching: 1. Teachers must continuously deliver at a level understandable by learners. 2. Teaching must prepare the learners for real life communication situations. Classrooms must provide conversational confidence so that when in the outside world, the student can cope with and continue learning. 3. Teachers must ensure that learners do not become anxious or defensive in language learning. The confidence of a language learner must be encouraged in a language acquisition process. Teachers should not insist on learners conversing before they feel comfortable in doing so; neither should they correct errors nor make negative remarks that inhibit learners from learning. They should devise specific techniques to relax learners and protect their egos. 4. Teachers must create an atmosphere where learners are not embarrassed by their errors. Errors should not be corrected when acquisition is occurring. Error correction is valuable when learning simple rules but may have negative effects in terms of anxiety and inhibitions. 5. Formal grammar teaching is of limited value because it contributes to learning rather than acquisition. Only simple rules should be learned. 6. Teachers should not expect learners to learn ‘late structures’ such as third person singular early. C.

Influences of Theories on Language Teaching 1. Applied linguists claim that theories of language learning as well as theories of language may provide the basis for a particular teaching approach/method. To illustrate, the linking of structuralism and behaviorism has produced the audiolingual method (ALM), oral approach/situational language teaching,

operant conditioning approach, bottom-up text processing, controlled-to-free writing, to cite a few. These methods underscore the necessity of overlearning, a principle that leads to endless and

mindless mimicry and memorization (‘mim-mem’). They are also characterized by mechanical habit-formation teaching, done through unremitting practice: sentence patterns are repeated and drilled until they become habitual and automatic to minimize occurrences of mistakes. Grammar is taught through analogy, hence, explanations of rules are not given until the students have practiced a pattern in a variety of contexts. 2. The cognitive learning theory has given birth to the cognitive approach to learning that puts language analysis before language use and instruction by the teacher, before the students practice forms. It is compatible with the view that learning is a thinking process, a belief that underpins cognitive-based and schemaenhancing strategies such as Directed Reading Thinking Activity, Story Grammar, Think-Aloud, to name a few. 3. The functional view of language has resulted in communicationbased methods such as Communicative Language Teaching/Communicative Approach, Notional-Functional Approach, Natural Approach, Task-Based Language Teaching. These methods are learner-centered, allowing learners to work in pairs or groups in information gap tasks and problem-solving activities where such communication strategies as information sharing, negotiation of meaning, and interaction are used. 4. The view that is both cognitive and affective has given rise to a holistic approach to language learning or whole-person learning which has spawned humanistic techniques in language learning and Community Language Learning. In these methods, the whole person including emotions and feelings as well as language knowledge and behavior skills become central to teaching. The humanistic approach equips learners “vocabulary for expressing one’s feelings, for sharing one’s values and viewpoints with others, and for developing a better understanding of their feelings and needs.” D.

Linguistic Concepts: Scope of Linguistic Studies: 1. Phonology. It studies the combination of sounds into organized units of speech, the combination of syllables and larger units. It describes the sound system of a particular language and distribution of sounds which occur in that language. Classification is made on the basis of the concept of the phoneme. Phonology is the study of the sound system of language: the rules that govern pronunciation. It comprises the elements and principles that determine sound patterns in a language. 2. Phonetics. It studies language at the level of sounds: how sounds are

articulated by the human speech mechanism and received by the auditory mechanism, as well as how sounds can be distinguished and characterized by the manner in which they are produced.

3. Morphology. It studies the patterns of forming words by combining sounds into minimal distinctive units of meaning called morphemes. It deals with the rules of attaching suffixes or prefixes to single morphemes to form words. Morphology is the study of word formation; it deals with the internal structure of words. It also studies the changes that take place in the structure of words, e.g. the morpheme ‘go’ changes to ‘went’ and ‘gone’ to signify changes in tense and aspect. 4. Syntax. It deals with how words combine to form phrases, phrases combine to form clauses, and clauses conjoin to make sentences. Syntax is the study of the way phrases, clauses and sentences are constructed. It is the system of rules and categories that underlies sentence formation. It also involves the description of rules, of positioning of elements in the sentence s...