Back on Track!

Well, I have passed the French test and I can go back to reading and writing on language learning. I have read and studied this book years ago on my fourth year of studying English language and literature, during a "Language Teaching" course. I remember how excited and surprised I was when reading the chapter on the characteristics of a good language learner realizing I had almost all those attributes and I was following the rule of thumb. Now that I am reading this fifth edition, which includes the new theories on language learning, I am thinking to capitalize on these new theories in my book on best language learning strategies which is also going to be based on my experience in language learning.

What I like the most about this book and am going to benefit from is the end of each chapter which is dedicated to three subsequent sections: questions for study, suggested reading and journal entry the last of which is just the kind of gem I am looking for. This part is going to help me shape my thoughts and my experiences in language learning in accordance with each new topic and theories I learn about in the foregoing chapter and write them down in a journal type entry possibly in this blog. I am sure it could facilitate the process of writing my book to a great extent, since finally I can make more sense of all that have been going on in my mind whenever I think about my strategies during the years learning French and English.

Right now I have opened a file in my computer for a while in which I have determined roughly the major sections of my book and have contributed to some chapters every now and then when I have remembered a strategy or two. I have also written a kind of a foreword or introduction in a moment of sheer passion and belief in what I am going to do! But I have not had a serious plan. Since I have started reading this book and finding about the excellent section at the end of each chapter, I have come to the conclusion that it is about time to get more serious on this and work more vigorously and according to a plan.

Now that I come to think of it, I knew that I need exactly this book to boost me forward on this path, because the author and I had some common grounds on the best strategies to use in learning a new language!

The Language Evolution

The next chapter of Language Instinct is about how the language evolved. It sets forth questions answered in detail, through this part of the book. Pinker believes that language evolved gradually in what he calls "a sequence of intermediate forms" which were useful for its possessor's survival.

Who the first "grammar mutants" interacted with, What an intermediate form of language looks like, and how these intermediate language's evolution provided the survival means for the human being; are the three questions asked and answered by Pinker.

There are two possibilities for the answer to the first question:

1) The first men could have used their language instinct to communicate with the family members who inherited the same gene and instinct.

2) They could have talked with their neighbors who despite the lack of the "new fangled circuitry" understood them using the "overall intelligence". An example of the use of the mental ability and background knowledge to appreciate a language is when native speakers of English intuitively grasp the gist of the news on an Italian newspaper with the additional mercy of common words in both the languages.

The effort these neighbors took to decode the language of their cohabitants led to such ability being wired in their brains by the "natural selection".

The answer to the second question-the possible structure of an intermediate grammar-would be some kind of "grammar with intermediate complexity" in which for example"symbols would have a narrower range, rules would be less reliably applied or modules would have fewer rules". This language would look something like the"protolanguage of the chimps signing, pidgings, child language in the two-word stage, the language of immigrants and the unsuccessful partial language of Genie and other wolf-children learned after puberty".

Here, I came up with a question myself: If the intermediate language looks like the language of the immigrants and if the language evolves; does this mean that the spread of immigrants in a country and the use of their language is going to change or deteriorate the use of the native language of the country in which they live now? Or on another level is it possible that the desperate need to learn a second language for survival after the puberty change the "critical period" by "natural selection"? Later Pinker hints that living in the modern times and having everything needed for survival at hand, the humans have ceased to evolve by natural selection.

The author has found the way out of the third question by providing us with four reasons why the evolution of the human language is not as absurd as one might think:

1) We need to know that the small advantages will do for the natural selection to take place. For example a natural selection rule in a mouse that changes its size by one percent each generation will result in a mouse the size of an elephant by a few thousand generations. The author apparently fails to explain clearly how this works in the language evolution. Though, one might guess that a coined word or a change in a word order at a time would lead to what we see as language today.

2) Using the language to trade hard-won knowledge (biology, crafts, tools, ecology, animal and plants' behavior with kin and friends makes a big difference in conveying the "exact message" through more complex grammar. This conveyance of knowledge of the environment, tools, animals and so on serves as a fitness enhancer and therefor leads to better survival of the human race.

3) Using the language for "cooperative efforts for survival" like forming alliances and exchanging information and commitments could have led to its evolution. In Pinker words:"A cognitive arms race could propel a linguistic one." In other more clear words he explains: " There could easily have been a selection for any edge in the ability to frame an offer so that it appears to present maximal benefit and minimal cost to the negotiating partner and in the ability to see through such endeavors and to formulate attractive counter proposals."

4) According to the anthropologists the tribal chiefs were both "gifted orators" and "highly polygynous". They would have easily and effectively woven the language into the politics, economics, tech, family, sex and friendship which were the key roles in the "individual reproductive success.

A look at the past

Principles of Language Learning and Teaching by H. Douglas Brown



This was the book I read thoroughly once I was getting my EFL certificate from Cavendish College of England. Now I would like to re-read parts of it to help me in writing my own book.

Languages and Mammals!

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker

I can't help but wowing each time I read this book. The range, the depth, the exactness, the details and finally the clarity with which the author describes the languages just goes beyond imagination. Or maybe what fascinates me is the real dimensions of this phenomenon called "language" which unfolds itself by each explanation, comparison or intuition.

In the chapter called: "The Tower of Babel" (p.238-239), he most admirably and point to pointedly compares the diversity of languages to the diversity of mammals as a sub-specie descendants of animals. There is one and only one universal language from which all the other languages of the world come from. The grammar of this universal language is innately curved into our brains and is what we call the language instinct. Just as the mammals have a number of unchangeable shared characteristics among them, so do the languages.They all have subjects, verbs, objects; they all possess derivatives (to form new words) and inflections (to fit a word into its role in a sentence); they all deal with flexible and non-flexible word positions in a sentence and so on and so forth.

Through the centuries as the humans evolve (Darwinism), so do the languages of the world, getting its stamina or substance from three phenomena:innovation, learning and immigration. People of different cultures most strongly identify themselves with the language they speak. They evolve and they make the language evolve accordingly.

WOw...

The elephant in the dark

How Languages Are Learned by Patsy Lightbown

It is mainly an academic book and useful to have a quick brush up on theories of language learning as it does not go much into the details but provides excellent list of books on the areas mentioned for further reading.

So I only needed to know the theories of the second language learning for two reasons:
1) For my own curiosity as a second and third language learner and 2)To have a better idea and plan for how I want my book to look like. It definitely would not look like any thing like these sort of books. It would be mostly about my experience as a learner peppered with some relevant theories. So I started reading it from page 38 after having reviewed the first part through the list of the contents.

As I was reading the different theories, it sounded like all the theoreticians were standing in the same dark room with an elephant, each touching and discovering one part of it using their intuition. Being a successful language learner myself, I could clearly see the significance of each of these theories in my learning.

Friends-making with dry subjects

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker

Finally got the chance to put the link of the book here. It seems Pinker is in a mission to make the dry parts of the language science, like syntax, morphology and phonology juicier in three consecutive chapters (4,5,6).

As an NNS (non-native speaker) the word "cognoscenti" has captured my attention;so has the word: "curmudgeonly". I love encountering interesting words like these. Still I wonder if the native speakers can pronounce the first one correctly? Most probably yes.

I wonder how a second language learner's brain works around the rules of morphemes and sound production. I need to find some literature on that. I am so inquisitive about it.

The language instinct 1

Wow , I had never thought I would blog about this. It is only recently that I have decided to do so. I felt I need to register my insights from my linguistics readings somewhere. I thought talking about a science should be done in the language of science; since the language itself as Pinker (1994) has prophesied is considered beginning to "submit"to this phenomenon.

Currently I am reading "The language Instinct"by Steven Pinker. I finished chapter four last night.

The feeling I get after finishing each chapter is one of astonishment and awe-struck and it is more due to the awe-inspiring topic (language) than to Mr. Pinker's style of writing. I know I am not much better.

It seems to me that in each chapter he has a brief introduction after which he starts throwing in a bunch of seemingly unrelated ideas which makes the text hard to follow. Then finally, after pages of trailing breathlessly, you stumble over the conclusion explained in a clear language.

He starts his book by sketching a not complete but fathomable picture of what Chomsky has said before, on the Universal Grammar as a system on which all the languages of the world are based. Then in chapter two he goes on, amid interesting and funny examples, to profess that language is an instinct.

In chapter three, it was interesting to me that I could come up with the same conclusion plus a question that was raised after reading his.

He had invented the term "Mentalese" as the underlying language system in the brains of all human beings. Initially I guessed the same thing as I was monitoring him. The Mentalese is a language system installed in human brain since birth. This system allows the children to produce language even if they have not been exposed to one or in case of pidgin languages, to improve them into more structured and understandable ones.

What remains as a question to me is the possibility of producing new languages by placing children in a controlled environment where they are only exposed to a certain predetermined factors. My idea is extremely raw. I know. I can't argue the moral aspects of it either. At this point it is more of an intellectual retailing of my mind that might or might not go anywhere. After all I am only beginning to develop a researcher's mind.

And finally, what amazes me in chapter four is the universal grammar, anatomized in an understandable language which makes me like syntax as a linguistics subject.

In one part he proves that the function words form their own "closed club" that makes it impossible for people to generate new ones. That's why the attempts to produce "gender-neutral" pronouns ("hesh, thon",etc) have failed. This prompts my second muse: If this is true; then considering the existence of Mentalese; it must be a sexist language system. But then what about the languages without such gender-distinct pronouns? Is our mind sexist?
Maybe children being raised in such languages environments, not hearning them at all, will dismiss this part of predetermined grammar in their minds.

To be continued...