CCHLL, Part 2: A language can be analyzed and studied as science

Contemplating a Curriculum for Human Languages Literacy, Part 2: A language can be analyzed and studied as science

This blog entry is the second (2nd) in a multi-part series describing what a curriculum for human languages literacy might look like.

Today’s topic was an important concept for me to grasp on my way to becoming interested in languages. So let me start by giving some of my language experience:

When I was in Junior High School, High School and even early college, I found learning a foreign language to be very frustrating (as many others certainly did as well). I was a good student, got good grades and could even get by in Spanish class. But I knew I couldn’t really use the language. Nor did I have immediate opportunities to try out my Spanish. (Actually, there were many opportunities right nearby, but I didn’t realize it and no one encouraged me to seek those opportunities out.) My overwhelming sense about languages was that they were highly arbitrary, maybe even mostly arbitrary. I figured you pretty much had to memorize all the random words and haphazard grammar. And as for the sounds, I had no idea how someone could make the correct sounds, unless they were, er, you know, a native speaker. Of course, someone might be able to speak a second language well if they had a phenomenally good ear and an accompanying talent. Not being good at memorization and not having a good ear, I resigned myself to the fact that I just wasn’t one of the people who was going to be good at languages. I can partly blame the language teaching method for this perspective. But even more basic than that, I just wasn’t grasping how analyzable and learnable languages were. (Please note that I’m not saying here that learning languages is necessarily easy, just that learning them is actually possible!)

Fortunately, my interest in other cultures was eventually sparked by friendships with several international students. And I wondered what it would take to get into their world, to understand their language. Later I learned that computers were being used to assist translators in their translation work. That’s about the time it “clicked” for me. I grasped the concept that languages could be analyzed, parsed, dissected, stored, reassembled… It’s now more than obvious to me. But back then it wasn’t. If I had understood that languages could be analyzed and studied as science, I think I would have approached my attempted learning of Spanish differently. I would have believed there was rhyme and reason in languages, not just arbitrary blobs of data to ingest and “black boxes” for processing.

Now, I want to be very clear here, analyzing and studying a language as a science does NOT necessarily lead to learning that language in a way you can understand and speak it in daily life. Someone can know a bunch of “stuff” about a language and still not really be able to converse in that language. We’ll get to how languages are best learned in a later blog entry.

But the fact that languages are highly systematic means that they are highly analyzable AND highly learnable. Research has shown that adult learners (and in many cases even young children) will assess if something is “learnable” or not. Whether assessing correctly or incorrectly, if they determine something is not learnable, they usually mentally check out and choose to do something else. I think that is where many second language learners are at. I was certainly there years ago. (For a deeper academic dive into the cognitive science related to perceived learnability, consider checking out the research done at the Metacognition and Memory Lab at Columbia University or the Child Cognition Lab at the University of Arizona.)

So, what is it that linguists “analyze” about languages? What can be studied? Here is a list of more or less commonly accepted aspects or branches of language study:

• phonetics – the study of human speech sounds
• phonology – the study of how sounds are organized and used
• syntax – the study of word order (grammar)
• morphology – the study of parts of words and how they go together, that is, the internal structure of words
• semantics – the study of the meaning of words, sentences and discourse
• pragmatics – the study of how language is used
• lexicology – the study of words
• cognitive linguistics – the study of how people organize their thinking around language
• pyscholinguistics – the study of physiological processes in relation to language use
• neurolinguistics – the study of how the brain functions when using language
• sociolinguistics – the study of how people relate to language and use it in social contexts
• discourse analysis – the study of how people organize their speech and writing to communicate what they want
• historical linguistics – the study of language change over time
• computational linguistics – the study of language using computers
• corpus linguistics – the study of language using large quantities of texts

By no means am I saying that all these topics should be covered in a curriculum for language literatcy. I’m simply giving this list to demonstrate the variety of ways that we can look at and think about languages.

Now, most people will want to learn a foreign language in order to communicate with people rather than to just learn “about” the language. But the cornerstone of a curriculum on language literacy is establishing that languages can be analyzed and studied as science.

Next up will be Languages have specific differences which can be compared and contrasted.

Scientifically yours,

Mike
(Mike’s bio)

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