VIEWS OF LANGUAGE

VIEWS OF LANGUAGE

1. Language is "a definition of human beings in the world"

   • Viewed as:
     • System (Estructural)
       • Language works in a coherent and systematic manner, as a rule-governed discrete combinatory system, from phonemes, lexemes and morphemes to words, phrases, clauses and sentences.
         • Phonologic system, the patterns of sound; semantic system, the meaning of words; syntactic system, rules of grammar.
         • The ones who adopted this view:
           • Traditional, structural, descriptive, and generative linguists.
         • Its core:
         • In language education
           • Formal views are responsible for grammatical syllabi, in which linguistic structures are sequenced and graded according to the linguistic complexity.
         • Pedagogical practices
           • Use of inductive and deductive grammar exercises
         • Innatism
           • Chomsky proposed the theory of an abstract generative system of grammar, with his linguistic competence which corresponds to the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language, with the universal grammar set in his mind.
             • My reflection:
               • Studying language requires a hollistic exploraton of its branches, being careful and inquisitive, from the very surface of sounds to the vertiginous lakes of interpretation and critical analysis. Analyzing these kinds of texts allows us to develop a wider conception of what language is in the daily practices and what it should be when studied and explored in pedagogical practices. For me, having this theoretical evolution represents a reliable progress in language education and would be the key road, when applied, to a new education model.
     • Discourse (Functional)
       • This view privileges language functions and meanings over language forms, seeing language as a ‘social fact’. Form and meaning are related to an external communicative purpose and a given audience/interlocutor
       • For Halliday (1973)
         • Learning language is learning to mean, defining language as meaning potential, with options in meaning that are available to the users social contexts
           • Seeing 3 metafunctions
             • Ideational: the individual’s meaning potential, related to the expression and experience of the concepts, processes, and objects, governing the physical and natural phenomena around the world
             • Interpersonal: individual’s personal relationships with people
             • Textual: The linguistic realizations of the ideational and interpersonal functions enabling the individual to construct coherent spoken or written texts.
       • Language education
         • There's a call from Hymes (1972)
           • To move beyond linguistic competence to communicative competence, responding to “when, how - what to say, to whom”.
             • Hymes' model:
               • SPEAKING
                 • Settings: place and time of communicative event
                   • Participants: speakers and hearers, and their roles
                     • Ends: objectives
                       • Act: form, content and sequence of utterances
                         • Key: Manner and tone
                           • Instrumentalities: Channel (oral – written) and code (formal – informal);
                             • Norms: Conventions of interaction and interpretation
                               • Genre: Type of communication (lecture, report, poem, and so forth).
         • Speech acts replaced the grammatical syllabi, with notions such as modality, temporality, and make up notional-functional syllabi.
           • It is important to highlight the Austin’s speech acts: 1) Locutionary: a propositional statement; 2) Illocutionary: its intended meaning; 3) Perlocutionary: its expected response.
         • Areas of knowledge
           • The appropriate use of knowledge to achieve a communicative purpose in a context
             • 1) Organizational Knowledge: sentences and text organization. 2) Grammatical Knowledge: Vocabulary, syntax, phonology/graphology. 3) Textual Knowledge: Cohesion and rhetorical or conversational organization. 4) Pragmatic Knowledge: Communicative goals and features. 5) Functional Knowledge: Ideational, manipulative, heuristic and imaginative functions. 6) Sociolinguistic Knowledge: Dialects, registers, idioms, cultural references. (Bachman & Palmer, 1996, p.68)
     • Ideology (Critical)
       • Language serves the purpose of empowerment, recognized as a no-neutral medium of communication. To study ideology is to study the ways in which meaning serves to establish and sustain relations of domination (Thompson, 1990).
       • This view has led to a heightened sense of the political dimensions of language teaching and use.
       • Language education
         • A problem-posing approach in which students are encouraged “to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves” (Freire 1970:64).
           • Goals:
             • To help students to understand the social, historical and cultural forces that shaped the context in which they live.
             • To help empower students to take action and make decisions in order to gain control over their lives in that context.
       • Pedagogical practice
         • Involves the selection of real-life issues from student’s experience, the creation of short dialogues based upon these issues, and the engagement of students in an open-ended process of problem-solving.

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