Re: [xmca] Wetaphors for Language Learning

Bella-

So its true!

"Ne klebom edinom."
:-)

mike

Ps-- "Not by bread alone" for Anglophones, an expression that plays a
special role in
those with a Soviet past.

On 9/6/07, bella kotik <bella.kotik@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear David:
> For explaining the advantage of vocabulary representation in FLL
> (immediate
> vs mediated by translation in L1) I suggested such a picture metaphor.(
> this is from my book "How to learn foreign languages successfully (In
> Russian). Students accept it very well especially when we discuss
> minimisation of L1 usage after observation of them in EFL lessons.
>
>
> .
>
>
> in case it is not seen in this letter (I pasted it here) see the
> attachment
> Sincerely yours Bella Kotik-Friedgut
>
>
> On 9/6/07, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > Dear Bruce:
> >
> > Thanks for the ref, which I didn't know at all but have now ordered. I
> got
> > my idea from David Byrne's "Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences"
> > (Routledge, 1998).
> >
> > It's a good read too, but it wasn't what I was looking for. I need some
> > way of integrating complexity theory and VOLITION (or CONSCIOUSNESS). In
> > language teaching (which is what I do) volition-free approaches are very
> > popular (nativism, subconscious acquisition, and now chaos-complexity
> > theory).But foreign language learning is, as LSV points out in Chapter
> Six
> > of Thinking and Speech, a volitional activity par excellence.
> >
> > Monday night in my graduate seminar I offered the metaphor of adding a
> > second story to a house. It's a metaphor for additional language
> learning
> > that I like very much: it's conscious, deliberate, and also PARTIAL (we
> > don't necessarily need to include a kitchen or another master bedroom;
> we
> > may only want to put in rooms for guests to stay in). Best of all, it's
> a
> > TERRESTRIAL metaphor; it avoids the WATER metaphors that saturate
> thinking
> > about language teaching today (and even, alas, some of LSV's writings!)
> >
> > My grads didn't like it very much: they prefer semi-aquaeous metaphors
> > like:
> >
> > ACQUISITION (They perceive this rather as a matter of squeezing out the
> > old native language and allowing learners to be "saturated" in the new.)
> >
> > IMMERSION (ditto)
> >
> > LEVEL, INPUT, OUTPUT, FILTER...etc. etc. etc.
> >
> > Lakoff and Johnson would describe all of these as realizations of a
> single
> > underlying cognitive metaphor: 'LANGUAGE IS A LIQUID".
> >
> > Why are these metaphors so powerful in the classroom when they are so
> > DISEMPOWERING, when the operational conclusion is always that we have to
> > pump stuff through pipes into the learner's sodden wetware? Why are they
> so
> > powerful in the seminar room when they lead to the absurd spectacle of
> Asian
> > educators going begging, cap in hand, to precisely the handful of
> countries
> > which have been IGNOMINIOUS FAILURES in foreign language teaching and
> > learning at the primary level--the UK, the USA, Australia?
> >
> > Believe it or not, I think your quote from "The Dialectical Biologist"
> > holds the answer. A purely chemotherapeutic approach to TB obviates a
> > conscious change of THINKING. And so does a purely hydraulic approach to
> > language learning. But how to prevent chaos/complexity theory from
> falling
> > into this trap, how to include learner and teacher volition into the
> > chaos/complexity model? I don't think the social science approach
> offered by
> > Byrne really gives much of an answer, because there simply isn't enough
> room
> > for INDIVIDUAL agency in learning. We need a model with rooms that show
> how
> > people change can their own minds.
> >
> > David Kellogg
> > Seoul National University of Education
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Bruce Robinson <bruce@brucerob.eu> wrote:
> > David,
> >
> > Belated thanks for a very thought-provoking post.
> >
> > >
> > > Of course, there is another explanation for Needham's problem, and
> when
> > I am not thinking like a white immigrant to Asia, it is the one that I
> > accept. It is Mike's explanation in "Psychology of Literacy" that tools
> are
> > not thoughts; that technologies like literacy do not have cognitive
> benefits
> > that stand head and shoulders above the contexts in which they emerge,
> that
> > the meaningful uses of tools cannot far outstrip the material and social
> > environments in which the tools arise and the challenges that those
> > environments present. Westerners took Chinese tools and turned them to
> > imperialistic ends because those ends corresponded to the perceived
> > challenge that they found themselves in.
> > >
> > > For the same reasons, although we have the "tool" of modern medicine,
> > and anti-bacterial drugs, and public health measures implicit in the
> > scientific discoveries of Pasteur, the white plague which killed our
> beloved
> > LSV (and also Volosinov) is on the rise again. The problem is simply
> that
> > the tool Pasteur bequeathed us to vanquish tuberculosis is not enough
> (and
> > in fact was largely not responsible for the decline in the disease in
> the
> > first place).
> > >
> > > In order to conquer TB, we need a SOCIAL environment that recognizes
> > poor housing, poor education, poor public health and the very gap
> between
> > rich and poor as the true causes of the disease rather than a humble
> > bacillus. But that requires more than a new tool; it requires a new mode
> of
> > thinking. It requires, in other words, thoughtsnotools.
> > >
> > > David Kellogg
> > > Seoul National University of Education
> > >
> > I don't know if you're familiar with Lewontin and Levins' book 'The
> > Dialectical Biologist" but they make exactly the same point:
> >
> > "The tubercule bacillus became _the_ cause of TB, as opposed, say to
> > unregulated industrial capitalism, because the bacillus was made the
> > point of medical attack on the disease. The alternative would not be a
> > 'medical' but a 'political' approach to TB and so not the business of
> > medicine in an alientated social structure. Having identified the
> > bacillus as the cause a chemotherapy had to be developed to treat it,
> > rather than, say a social revolution."
> >
> > They tie this to the non-dialectical forms of thought and fractured
> > practices characteristic of modern science: " The dialectical emphasis
> > on wholes is shared by other schools of thought which rebel against the
> > fragmentation of life under capitalism, the narrowness of
> > specialization, the reductionism of medical and agricultural theory."
> > ... which brings us back to Descartes, Newton, Galileo and co. again.
> > The fragmentation of knowledge must have been linked to the changing
> > division of labour and the increased division of manual and intellectual
> > labour that went with the decline of craft production. The problem with
> > classical scientific method, as Levins states elsewhere, is obviously
> > not that that abstract way of thinking cannot grasp aspects of reality
> > but rather that there is then no move back from the abstract part to the
> > concrete whole so that things outside its narrow view simply get
> > ignored as possible explanatory factors.
> >
> > Bruce R
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
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Received on Thu Sep 6 08:51 PDT 2007