What Educators Need to Know About Language

Why talking this? Course or curriculum designers need to know what they are going to plan.

Environment analysis

Needs analysis

Goals and Objectives

Format and Presentation

Monitoring and Assessment or Testing

What Is a Language? Language is far more than a means for labeling objects and ideas in the world around us.

We learn our language from the people around us as we learn the world. Our language is an encoding system for the complex network of meanings that make up our experience.

Whether you believe, as some theorists do, that language shapes the way we perceive the world, or as others propose, that the world shapes the language we use, it is inarguable that our perceptions of reality and our language are inextricably linked.

Language Communicates The primary purpose of language is communication. Therefore, despite common misperceptions, mastery of a language does not require near-native pronunciation or grammar.

What theorists call communicative competence is far more important than a good accent or perfectly constructed sentences.

With a focus on communication, nativelike proficiency is not the goal of language teaching, but rather a happy by-product of the basic need that people have to communicate with each other.

Language Is Systematic Language communicates with words—arbitrary symbols systematically organized to convey meaning.

Languages also systematically order parts of words, such as prefixes, suffixes, and roots, in a system called morphology.

The sounds and architecture of a language are relatively easy to discern. Often less transparent is the system of mean-ings, or semantics.

Semantics: syntax & pragmatics

Language Varieties Different parts of the country have different accents, different words for familiar objects, and structure of sentences.

Implications for Educators Language communicates, and does so systematically. Without analyzing the details of any language teaching methodology, a focus on those two ideas may well alter how you look at language teaching and learning.

Although we all ultimately want students to develop their new language to the fullest possible extent, what we know about the nature of language should lead us to think carefully about how we go about meeting that goal.

Teachers, being teachers, are fond of correctness. As a result, teachers rely all too often on repetition, memorization, and especially correction when instead they should create situations that motivate children to communicate.

Consider what constant correction does to communication: what would the effect be? How long before you gave up trying to talk altogether?

Finally, language is tied to deep identity. When you speak a language you participate in its culture.

It needs to be understood that language replacement implies cultural replacement as well.

Language Learning Most language learning seems to be a function of the mind, a far more elusive subject for research than the brain.

Psycholinguists’ data is limited to their subjects’ output, often gathered in case studies of young children as they learn first and subsequent languages.

Language acquisition (20th century)

Lessow-Hurley, Judith.2003. Meeting the needs of second language learners: An educator’s guide. Chapter 2