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EAL - Theories of Language :star: - Coggle Diagram
EAL - Theories of Language :star:
Language, teaching and learning are multidimensional and powerful; much of what happens in the classroom is spoken and written.
Information is delivered through speech or writing while assessment depends on children 'performing' using linguistic means.
Therefore, having language is important as we are unable to assess children's knowledge if their language skills are not up to par.
Feedback through misunderstandings are corrected through language and are refined or elaborated on.
Without language children will be unable to access misconceptions and therefore will be unable to properly assess these misconceptions.
Language underpins regulatory frameworks of the classroom eg. instructions which the teacher manages behaviour and through individuals managing and expressing frustration.
Difficult for children to access if they do not have the correct linguistic skills.
Language is a critical tool in the classroom
The importance of language runs much deeper, representing not only tools but the core structure through which thinking occurs.
Linguistic Determinism
We use language for thinking and therefore the language that we use defines capacities and capabilities of our thoughts.
Language we use not only brings with it the tools to access learning but also governs much deeper processes around what it is possible to understand.
Hard linguistic determinism
where we cannot think beyond the categories that language makes available to use - has had contention and has a range of criticisms.
it is difficult to evidence that thought is distinct across different language users
question the parallel between internal perception and outside expression (just because we cannot express the difference between helicopter and aeroplane doesn't mean that we do not recognise the objects as different.
Soft linguistic determinism
languages may not determine thought it certainly influences it.
Our conceptual repertoire acts as 'tools' through which we can perceive subtleties in stimuli (perceiving different shades of colour without categorisation to draw upon).
Implications for the classroom
Poor command of language will limit the individual capacity to learn, either because it creates barriers in communication of ideas or in their perception and classification of the external world.
Lev Vygotsky (1986)
Learning was governed by the gradual internalisation of society's culture (it's 'way of seeing things') which is encoded in its linguistic systems.
Language brings with it meaning. of manipulating new understandings - he calls them 'tools of intellectual adaptation'.
Language contains not only the 'what' of thinking but also the rules governing how we should think, the structures by which new information is handled.
Link between language and thought has been expressed in
ethno-linguistics
especially in the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Whorf 1956; Sapir 1983)
theorists
argue
that vocabulary and grammar shared by a community don't just represent a means of describing the world - language is a set of categorisations which define how we perceive the world.
eg. if a culture or individual has multiple words for rain they will think about rain as lots of distinct (but related) phenomena.
whereas a culture with no linguistic labels will have trouble distinguishing between 'helicopter' and 'aeroplane'.
Poststructural and postmodern theorists
Lyotard (1989)
argue that in thinking we make use of socially constructed sets of meaning or discourses which normalise particular beliefs and ways of seeing the world as normal.
language and thought may be entirely different phenomena and that it is only useful in communication and is generally achieved linguistically.