Post 10: The Power of Linguistics

October 29^th, 2012

Blog Post 10

Kumar chapters  9 & 10

Brown chapter 17

            Kumar’s chapter 9, Contextualizing Linguistic Input, is probably my favorite chapter so far.  I really enjoy learning about linguistics and find sociolinguistics absolutely fascinating.  Kumar discusses how to join together realities that make up a context.  The four realities that he presents are linguistic, extralinguistic, situational, and extrasituational.

            The linguistic context is the immediate linguistic environment that contains formal aspects of language required for the process of meaning-making (205).  This can pertain to the sentence or sentence to sentence levels.  Kumar then gives the example of the word ‘table’ and the different meanings that can be inferred by using the contextual clues. While the word ‘table’ will usually evoke the referent of an object to place things on in a dining room, the linguistic environment must be assessed to determine if that is indeed what is being referred to.   

While reading this I kept wondering if this was the same thing as pragmatics.  That word is not used while explaining linguistic environment but that is what I think of to describe the concept.  While spending time with my conversation partner, I asked her what the hardest part of the English language is to learn.  She said that the hardest part is knowing all of the different meanings of the same word.  I found that very coincidental because I had just finished reading this chapter!

Another phenomenon that ELLs learn is the linguistic context, mainly the notion of cohesion.  Productive communication depends on the understanding of cohesion.  I cannot answer a question properly if I do not understand the question. My answer is dependent on the question.  The other aspect of cohesion, the fusing of sentences, reminded me of Spanish class in high school.  When you fuse sentences you do not need to repeat the question within your answer, your answer can be an incomplete sentence and still be mutually intelligible.  In Spanish class we were always forced to not fuse our sentences while engaging in dialogue.  I guess this just gives us more practice speaking, but it always felt overly formal and unnatural.

The extralinguistic context referrers to the immediate linguistics environment that contains prosodic signals, such as stress and tone (207).  While reading this, I was overwhelmed thinking about the task of teaching all of these things.  This seems like such an important concept to be taught be 1) not all languages have these aspects, and 2) not knowing these aspects of the English language and societal norms can cause some problems.  Like in the example given, the Asian woman who offered gravy had a spoken the word with a falling intonation which in turn, rubbed the Americans the wrong way because usually when offered something, the word has a rising intonation to signal an offering.

The reflective task 9.2 asks if we have ever experienced a situation where incorrect intonation led to a misunderstanding.  Something that I immediately thought of is how in English, when you put the stress on the front syllable of certain words, it makes the word a noun.  When you put the stress on the back syllable is makes the word a verb.  For example, the word ‘subject’ or ‘construct.’  I remember when I learned that rule, it blew my mind.

Brown’s chapter 17 discusses the integration of the four main language learning skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking.  While many institutions separate these skills, ESL teachers need to make sure to integrate all of these within our lessons.  In a lot of our C&I methods courses we learn about the Multiple Intelligences and how we can tap in to each of them in our lessons.  We have all different types of learners in the classroom; it is impossible not to.  Even if we learn a certain way and we feel comfortable teaching a certain way, it is imperative that we realize our students differ from us and our teaching methods always need to vary.  By varying our lessons amongst listening lessons, speaking lessons, hands on lessons, etc. we can try to best teach each of our students equally.