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Discovering ‘Language Myths and Truths’: A Summer Enrichment Course in Linguistics for High-School Students

2010; Wiley; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1749-818x.2009.00179.x

1749-818X

Thomas W. Stewart, Alma B. Kuhlemann Cárdenez,

Discourse Analysis in Language Studies

Language and Linguistics CompassVolume 4, Issue 2 p. 80-95 Free Access Discovering 'Language Myths and Truths': A Summer Enrichment Course in Linguistics for High-School Students Thomas W. Stewart, Jr., Thomas W. Stewart, Jr. University of LouisvilleSearch for more papers by this authorAlma B. Kuhlemann Cárdenez, Alma B. Kuhlemann Cárdenez The Ohio State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Thomas W. Stewart, Jr., Thomas W. Stewart, Jr. University of LouisvilleSearch for more papers by this authorAlma B. Kuhlemann Cárdenez, Alma B. Kuhlemann Cárdenez The Ohio State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 04 February 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2009.00179.xCitations: 5AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract This article presents the rationale and curriculum for an intensive 3-week summer course in linguistics designed for students ages 13–16, and implemented within the Joseph Baldwin Academy, a residential program held annually on the campus of Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, USA, which aims to provide young and motivated learners with opportunities for academic enrichment beyond those offered within their regular high-school curriculum. 1. Introduction Students at the junior-high and high-school levels are bombarded both academically and socially with claims and assumptions about the nature of human language, for example, the legitimacy of variation and change in language, or the social significance of conformity versus difference in linguistic behavior. In the United States, prescriptive formal norms, together with a persistent tendency toward English monolingualism, continue to influence educational and other institutions that strongly tend to replicate traditional language ideologies (Lippi-Green 1997). As the adults around them (knowingly or not) assume and disseminate language myths, presented as common sense 'truths', young people are left vulnerable to internalizing not only misleading information but also patterns of inter- and intralinguistic discrimination (e.g., respectively, English as opposed to Spanish in the US, and Standard English as opposed to regional dialects; Bauer and Trudgill 1998; Lippi-Green 1997). The existence and inertia of this network of linguistic misinformation is certainly not news. Fortunately, there is resistance to language myths in both popular and academic publishing, in applied linguistics in curricula at all levels, and certainly in the work of the Linguistic Society of America's Committee on Language in the School Curriculum. This article reviews and evaluates a course designed in keeping with these efforts and presented within the framework of The Joseph Baldwin Academy, an established multidisciplinary residential summer enrichment program for highly motivated young learners ages 13-16 at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri (for more information on the student population and selection criteria for admission, see the Academy's website). The title and organizing theme for this course is 'Language Myths and Truths'. Over the course of one 3-week session, there were approximately 90 contact hours, distributed into 5-6 hours on weekdays, and 2-3 hours on intervening Saturdays. Within this concentrated period of study, most of the content of an introductory university-level course in linguistics was covered, with considerable time remaining for hands-on practical exploration. In this format, the course did not suffer from the 'whirlwind tour' effect possible in a college survey course with a similar range of topics and only half the number of contact hours. 2. Course Rationale, Approach, and Objectives The main reasons for offering this linguistics course to students aged 13-16 relate to the insufficient attention placed on fostering linguistic awareness in the primary and secondary school curricula. To begin with, US-American students are often led to engage in linguistic considerations about their own language, at least initially, from a prescriptive perspective. Giving young people some early conscious training in how to 'attack' and systematize linguistic data, and in how to 'tune in' to recurrent patterns, would seem to be an appropriate practical intervention. Accordingly, students in this course are introduced to how natural and artificial languages work, by digging into and experimenting with data from foreign and familiar languages, activities that help demote prescription in favor of empirically grounded description (exercises drawn/adapted from, e.g., Stewart and Vaillette 2001; O'Grady et al. 2005). Secondly, linguistic training can serve to tease apart the structural from the social factors that are at play in the creation and perpetuation of systems of language-based discrimination. Distinguishing plausible claims about how language works from implausible ones is an important strategy to combat such discrimination, and the sooner individuals are equipped with it, the better they will counteract received views about language that owe more to status quo-supporting cultural ideologies, and less to how people actually learn and use language in their daily lives. Rewards or consequences for certain language behaviors may indeed be sustainable on logical or stylistic criteria, but where judgments do not have such a basis, young people should be made aware of the hegemonic potential in prevailing linguistic practices. When the answer to a 'why' question is simply 'because,' is it any wonder that language myths spring up in an ad hoc fashion? Deconstructing the 'inherent' superiority of languages/language varieties is a difficult and uphill battle. In this course, students were encouraged to consider the legitimacy of linguistic alternatives in order to make reasoned, rather than conditioned, choices about their own language use. The myth of standardization as perfection in language, rather than as an exercise in applied social and political power, carries considerable force, especially in institutional structures, and identifying the dynamics of linguistic variation and change as at least partially analogous to fashion choices requires students to step outside of their social training about what they can (must!) or cannot do with language. This course was designed to create a safe space in which students can discuss language as a symbolic system, on the one hand, and as part of human behavior – both as an acquired system and a vehicle for interaction – on the other. This space enables students to discover how the subject matter can relate to their own experience, and how it can help them forge more meaningful relationships with their personal and learning environments. Toward this end, the approach taken to designing and implementing the curriculum is based on a deliberate and recurring interrelationship of the cognitive and the affective (cf. Moskowitz 1978: 5-20), because this dynamic supports the course's rationale, i.e., to equip and empower young people to interrogate the nature and structure of the linguistic systems that they have been socialized into, and the ways in which these systems continually, albeit gradually, change and evolve. This interrogation is undertaken to help students recognize their responsibility and capacity for agency in deconstructing dominant language ideologies. Accordingly, this course was conceived with the following learning objectives: 1 Students will be able to perform structural analyses of linguistic data, some of which they will collect themselves, according to their own interests. 2 On the basis of such analyses, students will be able to describe linguistic phenomena and variation in a manner that avoids hegemonic value judgments. The rationale, approach, and objectives outlined above are reflected in the organization of the curriculum, as the schedule developed in the next section indicates. 3. Detailed Schedule of Course Activities Figure 1 highlights the sequence and distribution of topics presented during the 3-week course, identifying key in-class activities, reading, online, and audiovisual materials, and homework assignments. In what follows, this schedule is unpacked in the format of questions addressed in the course and a selection of teaching materials and activities used to help students investigate said topics and discover creative ways to answer these questions. Figure 1Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Language Myths and Truths – Schedule. 3.1 'How is human language special?' or what features distinguish human language from other forms of communication? One of the first issues that must be clarified in an investigation of language is the definition of language itself. This is a notoriously tricky point, however, since language can be conflated with communication in general, symbols, signs, gestures, and codes, not to mention computer languages and other formal systems, as well as animal communication. In an effort to distinguish natural human language from other partially comparable systems, questions such as 'Why is cat the 'right' word to refer to a feline house pet?' or 'Why does the man bit the dog mean something different from the dog bit the man when all the words are the same?' were offered to open up discussion of some of the basic design features of symbolic systems, and of languages in particular, such as arbitrariness and discreteness. Students were encouraged to create parallel examples, and the back-and-forth, puzzle-like nature of the discussion helped to set the tone for a model of constant inquiry and a healthy search for counterexamples to any allegedly explanatory claims. With this group interaction as background, part 1 of Searchinger's (1995)Human Language Series of films was shown in segments, with breaks for comprehension checks and critical discussion. The film placed a scientific approach to language into conversation with students' personal linguistic experiences, as revealed by comments such as 'I always wondered why we said it that way' and 'That always bothered me, too.' 3.2 'What are the parts of language?' or what do the kinds of relationships among words show us about language and the mind? The question 'What are some words that you use to talk about grammar?' prompted a brainstorming session in which traditional grammar terms such as subject, preposition, etc. were elicited from and defined by the students. Following this, word association tests were performed that led students to generate lists of (i) words with the same first sound, (ii) rhyming words, (iii) words from a given grammatical category, (iv) words with a similar stress-pattern profile, (v) words in a given semantic field, and (vi) antonym pairs. These activities were used to motivate the theoretical construct of a richly structured lexicon; for example, the speed with which students generated the various lists demonstrated for them the extensive and efficient mental networks that relate lexical entries. Furthermore, students were led to consider, at a basic level, the complexity of the cognitive tasks necessary for language processing and acquisition to occur. 3.3 'How are words built?' or what are the relationships between form and meaning as found in words? This module was designed to tap students' intuitions and analytical skills with respect to the form and meaning of words. Beginning with English morphological analysis, students were placed in groups of three to collaboratively generate conceptual maps, in order to motivate grammatical category distinctions (and from there the notion of paradigmatic relations). On the basis of elementary examples, such as networks built from the word/concept dog, students worked their way to more abstract and metaphorical relations, such as from book to not only library and read, but also to story and even reservation. In tandem with this process, a set of graded exercises keyed to the various morphological phenomena was provided to support and test the adequacy of students' beliefs about English word structure (i.e., that words are basically made up by assembling meaningful pieces). Prefixes, suffixes, roots, and compounding only take one so far, however, as examples of morphological distinctions made by vowel alternations (man/men) or by no overt marking (sheep/sheep) motivate a broadening of the definition of 'word formation'. From here, students progressed to data sets from other languages, and the search for recurrent partials was extended to include morphological marking via stress shifts, reduplication, and consonant alternations as well. On an anecdotal note, one student rather timidly asked for some more morphology problem sets to work on overnight, and as students received no grades or extra credit within the framework of the course, the request clearly reflected a personal joy in solving language puzzles. The second phase of this module on words addressed semantics. A sequence of activities designed to demonstrate theoretical shortcomings of using dictionary definitions and binary semantic features (e.g., [±male] or [±old]) led students to gravitate quite naturally toward continua (e.g., more or less hot, more or less tall) and graded categories (e.g., within the category bird, a robin is, generally speaking, a more prototypical example than a penguin is). Students' drive toward precision of expression was readily exploited in this process, which involved an intense and lively debate, highlighting first the apparent impossibility of true synonymy (e.g., big and large mean basically the same thing, but they are not interchangeable in all contexts), then dialect-related lexical differences [soda versus pop versus coke is a perennial line in the sand, and made a useful reprise (see Section 3.14)], followed by the effects of semantic change. Finally, a few key examples of semantic mismatch across languages (e.g., not everything that can be referred to with the word desk in English may be referred to by bureau in French, and vice versa) brought into relief both the difficulties of translation and the caution that readers of translations would be wise to apply. 3.4 'How do we learn language?' or from langue to parole The film Out of the mouths of babes (Cook 1978) was presented to prompt students to reflect on their own (continuing!) experiences of acquiring language, and those students who had younger siblings, cousins, neighbors, etc. were encouraged to share anecdotes about what these children could and could not understand or produce, and how this situation changed over time. Students laughed at 'mistakes' that children in the film made with language and explored them further. For example, when a little girl claimed that a blindfolded baby doll is 'hard to see,' the question of what this girl must have been thinking when she produced this utterance led the class to reflect on the fact that even apparent errors may be rule-governed. The notion of developmental stages was presented at a general level, and from these stages, analogies to cognitive and linguistic development were drawn and expanded. 3.5 'Can you learn language if you are isolated from people as a child?' or missing the critical period Students were prompted to reflect upon their own success or difficulty with (or, in the case of the youngest students, their expectations about) foreign language learning in school, in order to make them aware of the fact that people do not always pick up language equally well and under all circumstances. Transitioning from foreign language learning back to first language acquisition, students were asked to consider what difficulties a person might face if he/she had limited or no linguistic input during their early years. A module on feral children was then introduced (Feral Children, The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, Watts 2007), including age-appropriate excerpts from the film Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (Herzog 1974) and the entirety of the film L'enfant sauvage (Truffaut 1970). Both films are set in late-18th/early-19th century Europe, and so in order to combat the impression that this is a 'long ago and far away' phenomenon, students were also shown Secret of the wild child (Garmon 1994), the story of Genie, which came to light in California in the 1970s. The latter film includes footage of Genie herself as a young woman, rather than actor portrayal, and demonstrates clearly the challenges faced in cases of delayed first language acquisition. It also includes clips from L'enfant sauvage, so the class was able to recognize the familiar and reinforce the connection among the cases. Not only did students become conscious of the importance of social interaction for language acquisition, but they also reacted against child abuse due to neglect and the conversion of young human beings into subjects of scientific inquiry and experimentation, developing empathy toward children in such situations. 3.6 'What happens with people who can't speak?' or what is sign language like? Capitalizing on Genie's differential success with sign, as opposed to spoken language, the next module compared and contrasted the structural features of American Sign Language (ASL) with spoken English and spoken language more generally. Students were introduced to the ASL-Pro Video Dictionary website, and according to their individual requests, entries were viewed. Certain key entries were deliberately included in this presentation in order to facilitate later viewing and understanding of video performances of ASL poetry on the Slope website. The poems on the latter website are presented in a fluent and somewhat stylized manner, but without simultaneous subtitles, so viewers without ASL expertise may remain free to focus on the formal aspects of the presentation. The poems are also available as English texts on separate web-pages within the issue of Slope. In this way, working back and forth among text, video dictionary, and performance, the class was able to make some initial headway into seeing the linguistic structure of ASL, even at its most idiomatic and figurative. The transition from receptive and parsing skills to productive skills was handled by means of a small-group homework assignment using print ASL dictionaries (Fant 1977; Costello 1983; Coleman and Wolf 1991), with supplementary access to the video dictionary as well. For homework, students were asked to learn three signs each, to teach these signs to everyone in their homework study group (four to five students), and then in class the following morning, the groups were instructed to teach the rest of the class the signs they had learned. Students' ability to model these signs patiently and carefully, and to correct their classmates respectfully but rigorously, was particularly impressive and satisfying to behold. Although the signs for happy, friend, and learn were popular choices, student interests also included football and flirt. 3.7 'My dog understands what I tell him' or to what extent and in what form can animals learn human language? This topic is as perennially popular as it is contentious. Pet owners, for instance, are often among those convinced of animal language abilities. Reaching back to the first day of this class, however, students recalled some of the design features of language in particular, as opposed to other forms of communication. In order to take the conversation to a more sophisticated level, two films about primate acquisition of ASL signs were presented for consideration and discussion, First signs of Washoe (Campbell-Jones 1976; cf. Friends of Washoe) and Koko, le gorille qui parle (Schroeder 1977; cf. The Gorilla Foundation). These viewings challenged students to distinguish between the use of a symbolic system, on the one hand, and employing such symbols with creativity and syntactic regularity, on the other. Although a few students remained mixed in their opinions about at least some animals and their capacity for language (understandably so, if the nature of bonds between pets and owners is considered), students in general became better-informed on the issue. This is revealed in the comment '[That chimp] is totally obsessed with food! It's all she signs about!', which shows that students perceive, beyond the phenomenon of using signs, the relatively limited and predominantly practical range of these animals' concerns, particularly in those interactions where the topic is left to them. 3.8 'How do people produce sounds when they talk?' or how do speech sounds work? Sign language had been chosen for primate language studies primarily on account of the fact that attempts to teach chimpanzees and gorillas to use spoken language had been clear failures. Comparing cross-sectional diagrams of chimpanzee and human vocal tracts made a suitable transition into a discussion of just how speech is produced. Starting with hand mirrors and tongue depressors, the class moved gradually through their respective oral tracts, identifying structures both familiar and surprising, with attention paid to which speech sounds are made where, and how. Mapping between oneself and a sagittal section diagram can be somewhat unnerving at first, but students overcame the 'gross out' factor quickly, as strange noises and facial gestures were not merely allowed, but encouraged in the pursuit of a uvular fricative or the elusive retroflex ejective. After considerable experimentation, mirrors were wiped down and fresh tongue depressors distributed for the presentation of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Students worked with the symbol chart, traveling across rows (manner of articulation) and down columns (place of articulation), challenging each other to try the next one and the one after that. The last vestiges of student shyness disappeared after these activities. Basic phonetic transcription exercises followed, first in recognition, and then in production, culminating in the use of 'The Interactive Sagittal Section,' a computer model nicknamed 'Sammy' that allows students to manipulate articulator parameters and predict the associated IPA symbol, or the reverse, to choose the symbol and to discover the articulator setting required to achieve it. The second day on speech sounds was held in a language laboratory with individual computer stations. The free open-source acoustic phonetic analysis software Praat had been loaded in advance on each student's workstation, and within a short period of time, students were recording their own voices for playback and analysis. Revisiting the previous day's work with vowel and consonant distinctions, students each prepared three utterances as homework with the following phonetic characteristics: (i) a sentence in which every consonant was voiced (e.g., The magazine I read was amazing), (ii) a sentence in which every consonant was voiceless (e.g., Coats fit fat cats), and (iii) a sentence with the same vowel in every syllable (e.g., She sees we three feel free). Sentences were to be relatively short in order to maximize visibility in spectrograms. At a basic level, students were able to see visual representations of the effects of voicing and frication, as well as formant frequencies in vowels, and generally how sounds produced in sequence can influence each other. Experimentation continued with students recording – and creating spectrograms for – their names and snippets of favorite songs, in order to see what these aspects of their own identities looked like acoustically. 3.9 'How does writing match up with what we say?' or sound and/or meaning in writing Building on this grounding in speech sounds, it becomes possible to ask the question of how spoken language can be represented in writing, and so a module was presented that considered alphabetic, syllabic, and logographic writing systems. Each system can be seen as jointly shaped by general linguistic structures (phonemes, syllables, roots, etc.), on the one hand, and by the particular facts of the language to be represented (e.g., a strict requirement of CV syllable structure, as opposed to the possibility of more complex constituents), on the other. If one adds to this the graphic aspect of the particular symbols chosen, students can easily get lost in detail. Therefore, students were invited, via links on the course website, to explore the Omniglot, Ancient Scripts, and Hindi Script Tutor websites outside of class, and to prepare and present a summary description of the writing system of a language of their choice, identifying the level(s) of linguistic structure represented in the language's written characters. In order to illustrate the distinct phoneme inventories of particular languages in a more engaging fashion, students were asked first to try to transcribe their own names into IPA. This ensured that the focus was taken off of spelling and placed explicitly on the sequences of sounds. Then, students used a table of the Korean Hangul writing system to render this IPA transcription of their names as closely as possible in Hangul. 3.10 'Couldn't English spelling be made simpler?' or synchronizing graphemes and phonemes Based on the preceding modules and anticipating those that follow on etymology and language change, the many discrepancies between English pronunciation and spelling were placed in focus. Because correct spelling is frequently so strongly rewarded in US-American primary and secondary schools (and furthermore in regional and even national competitions), it was both liberating and, at the same time, somewhat troubling for students to engage in critical discourse about such a socially prestigious system, which in spite of its many design flaws, users are still not at liberty to 'correct.''Can we really do this?' was the reaction that many students had when first given this license to consider hegemonic norms from a linguistically informed perspective. A spontaneous nomination of IPA transcription to replace traditional English spelling came from the class, and the pros and cons of such a change were weighed, failing primarily at the level of the daunting prospects of implementation and of overcoming the institutional entrenchment of the existing system (not to mention the questions of fine-grained allophonic distinctions or of dialect differences). An alternative phonemic writing system called 'Shavian', inspired by George Bernard Shaw's interest in the idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies of English spelling, was introduced by means of a table derived from the Omniglot website's presentation of the system, and students immediately got down to work attempting to find English words that would test Shavian's adequacy for representing the phonemes of the language. 3.11 'Where did English get its words?' or the hybrid nature of the English lexicon Some spelling discrepancies in English have their source in attempts to render borrowed words either quasi-phonetically in English orthography (e.g., canyon) or in imported spellings from the source language (e.g., spaghetti), which thereby introduce new grapheme–phoneme combinations into the established English spelling system. The scale of borrowing into English is typically underappreciated, as is evident in the popular but false assumption that English can be traced back to Latin, rather than to Germanic sources. In the interest of revealing the hybrid nature of the modern English lexicon, students were first asked to generate a list of 10 words that belonged to the same semantic field, focusing in particular on monomorphemic words and roots. Working in groups of four, students collaborated in helping one another to complete their respective lists. The Oxford English Dictionary's online searching capabilities, particularly the etymological function, were then demonstrated, using an example list based on the concept rock: sources in Germanic, Romance, Latin, Greek, and 'unknown' were found, even in such a small and limited sample. Students completed the investigation of their own lists overnight for sharing with their classmates the following morning. Similar results all around brought home not only the point of lexical diversity, but also the immense debt that English owes to other languages, ultimately deconstructing notions of linguistic purity. 3.12 'How similar/different are the languages of the world?' or the effects of shared inheritance and language contact An investigation of the Indo-European language family followed, using family-tree-diagram and cognate exercises from Algeo and Acevedo Butcher (2005: 74-5, 79-80). In order to verify the claims of family resemblance and subgrouping, students were divided into groups of two or three and were given excerpts from dictionaries of French, Swedish, Welsh, and German, as well as Hungarian and Indonesian, languages outside of Indo-European. Students were asked to count apparent form-meaning matches with English words, keeping in mind that such matches could arise from borrowing or from common inheritance (the previous discussion of etymology was recalled explicitly in this context). Results in terms of raw count and percentage of entries in each dictionary excerpt showed that French, Swedish, and German had numerous matches, Welsh relatively fewer, followed by Hungarian, and then Indonesian. Without doubt, the exercise is not scientifically reliable, as it was controlled with respect to neith