These are some of my responses on the CI Fight Club group on Facebook, in a recent discussion with language teachers about "types" and "tokens".
0 Comments
It's normal for teachers new to CI (and experienced ones as well) to hear an internal voice saying: "That's too much repetition! The students are bored for sure! Move on!" In response, I want to illustrate a difference between repeating language forms and repeating situated meaning.
FIRST, JUST START READING: FROM WIKIPIEDIA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story) Archetypal story A shaggy dog, the archetypical subject of long-winded, pointless stories The commonly believed archetype of the shaggy dog story is a story that concerns a shaggy dog. The story builds up, repeatedly emphasizing how shaggy the dog is. At the climax of the story, someone in the story reacts with, "That dog's not so shaggy." The expectations of the audience that have been built up by the presentation of the story, that the story will end with a punchline, are thus disappointed. Ted Cohen gives the following example of this story:[1] AT THIS POINT IN THE READING, THE WORD "OF" HAS APPEARED 8 TIMES (INCLUDING IN THIS SENTENCE), AND THE WORD "THE" HAS APPEARED 21 TIMES. THAT'S PROBABLY ENOUGH, AND I'M AFRAID YOU WILL FEEL BORED, SO I REMOVED THESE TWO WORDS FROM NOW ON. A boy owned a dog that was uncommonly shaggy. Many people remarked upon its considerable shagginess. When boy learned that there are contests for shaggy dogs, he entered his dog. dog won first prize for shagginess in both local and regional competitions. boy entered dog in ever-larger contests, until finally he entered it in world championship for shaggy dogs. When judges had inspected all competing dogs, they remarked about boy's dog: "He's not that shaggy." THE WORD "SHAGGY" HAS APPEARED 11 TIMES, AND "STORY" 10 TIMES. PROBABLY ENOUGH. ALSO "IS" (8 TIMES ALREADY). I'LL STOP USING THEM SO THEY DON'T BOTHER YOU. However, authorities disagree as to whether this particular archetype after which category named. Eric Partridge, for example, provides a very different story, as do William and Mary Morrin Morris Dictionary Word and Phrase Origins. NOW LET'S STOP WITH "A", "AN", AND "TO". YOU'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THEM, I THINK. According Partridge and Morrises, archetypical dog involves advertisement placed in Times announcing search for dog. In Partridge story, aristocratic family living in Park Lane searching for lost dog, and American answers advertisement with dog that he has found and personally brought across Atlantic, only tbe received by butler at end who takes one look at dog and shuts door in his face, saying, "But not so as that, sir!" In Morris, advertiser organizing competition find dog in world, and after lengthy exposition search for such dog, winner presented aristocratic instigator competition, who says, "I don't think he's so."[3][4] My point here is that in order to combat that irrational voice in our heads, we should recognize that language forms can be repeated infinite times if its users (listeners, readers, speakers, writers) are focused on the meaning in each situation. This situated meaning keeps changing and progressing logically as we work through our stories, personal info, opinions, experiences, etc., and so everyone can remain engaged in the discussion. When reading, we just wanted to know if Oprah will get the Sriracha, if the worms in my backpack were bloody or not, and if Dan's house had rats or not. Other people would want to talk about other things, and that's the challenge for the teacher: keep offering learners topics to talk about until we show interest. Then talk about that. One discussion that comes up from time to time among CI teachers is how to choose the language chunks, or "items", or "structures", that we teach. Martina Bex has a very useful description of "language chunks" on her blog here. In addition, for extra perspective, I would like to describe here what Usage-based Linguistics researchers call "constructions".
Constructions are not simply language written on a page, but are a psychological construct, measured in the human mind through corpus research. A construction is defined as any linguistic symbol of any length that the mind connects with meaning. A word is a construction because it is a sound (or written string of writing, or sign language signs) that represents meaning. A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that represents meaning, and so it is also a construction. The more interesting constructions in the Usage-based Linguistics literature are those that help explain grammar in the mind. As VanPatten often says on his podcast, Tea with BVP, language is shaped by Universal Grammar and general learning architecture. Usage-based linguists seeks to better understand this general learning architecture, holding to what we call the "cognitive commitment". This means assuming that Universal Grammar is not real, and instead looking to exhaust all possible other learning mechanisms before allowing for which parts of language may indeed be shaped by Universal Grammar. Usage-based linguists seek to explain grammar as general pattern recognition and human categorization processes, which will be explained below as we look at phrase-length constructions. To be clear, both Usage-based AND Universal Grammar models of language view input as central to language development. Neither of these research camps argue that learners should learn an explicit rule, and then practice that rule, nor should they use problem solving abilities to master a rule. Input as raw language data (hearing and reading the language itself) is still necessary and central to acquisition in Usage-based models. So what is a multi-word construction? A multi-word construction consists of multiple slots in a particular order, that together represent meaning. Each slot can be either fixed, or open but limited to certain categories. For example, "wants to X" is a construction with two fixed words and an open slot. The open slot in this construction is limited to the verbs category. Another example is "put X Loc", where "put" is a fixed word, the X slot is limited to grammatical objects (the cat, the car, a fork), and Loc = locative phrase, is composed of a preposition (on, into, under) and a location (the table, the cave, the bed). So a construction contains not only the known words, but also the open slots for a limited selection of other words. Corpus research has shown that some words are more common in each construction than are other words, but that's for another post. Does it make much difference whether teachers plan to input only fixed "language chunks" or we plan for the fixed words plus open slots together in constructions? Maybe not, because teachers will fill in those open slots anyways when giving input to students. But human categorization needs exposure to a limited number of different examples in those slots before a category unconsciously develops in the mind. So if we are going to teach "sees a movie", the acquirer's mind is more likely to unconsciously build a category of "things we can see" in the construction's X slot (in a "sees X" construction), compared to if they only hear "sees a movie" (all words fixed) hundreds of times. This is one of the beautiful features of Circling, in which the slot openness is automatically built into the input. There is a lot more to be said about Cognitive Science, Cognitive Linguistics, Usage-based Linguistics, and Construction Grammar. I recognize that I have done them all very little justice in writing such a short post, but I hope this basic concept might offer a new perspective on the language we choose to offer our learners in their input. |
Reed Riggs (Author)
Archives
April 2022
Categories
All
|