THINKING ABOUT LANGUAGE AS A MULTI-RELATIONAL DISCIPLINE

Making my studies in linguistic, I have noticed that linguistics need to be supported by other sciences and disciplines. One of them is neurology, the science that studies the brain and its functions. Language is one of these functions, according to the studies there are some areas in charged to produce and comprehend language. Our role as a teacher of foreign language is to know how these areas work in order to understand, comprehend, and produce language, specially a second one. It is important that the teacher has an idea about how the language is learned and helps the student to overcome difficulties or guides their families in the process to comprehend that their children are suffering some of these phenomena. In my experience, this knowledge has been vital because I have had students with this kind of learning difficulties and their families do not accept it easily. Having idea is a wonderful tool to face this kind of situations.

The disciplines like neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics help us to understand how the language is comprehended, learned and produced. The neurolinguistics studies the language as a function and what areas of the brain comprehend and produce it. While the psycholinguistics helps us to study the psychological process of comprehension and production of language. Furthermore, these disciplines are useful in order to analyze how some pathologies like Aphasia, Alexia, Dysgraphia, Acalculia, Hemiagraphia, Apraxia, Agnosia, Amnesia, which could affect the language comprehension and production.  Paredes y Varo citing Ch. Bouton (1984), affirm that the neurolinguistics is in charge of which cerebral mechanisms hold the phonological oppositions, which the logic-grammatical ones or the fact of reached annunciation.  While the psycholinguistics, according to Paredes and Varo, studies the communicative process taking into account not only the messages but also the participants in it. For that reason, psycholinguistic also studies the acquisition and linguistic procedure trying to give an explanation from different theoretical models based on observation and comparison of normal individual and individual who presents verbal dysfunctions´ linguistic behavior.

According to Ardila and Roselli (2007) the language development is a result of interaction between the neuronal development and environmental stimulation. In spite of the environmental development, the language acquisition is a result of neuronal maturation. The control of smooth movements and symbolic skills development are needed to get a well-developed language. Following Kolb and Fantie (1997) the language acquisition is related with the frontal and temporal lobules. The language like the other complex behaviors is not well-known how occurs but it is the result of multiple relationships among cells through electrical stimulations. Following to Bernardez (2004) the language seen as a whole: use and structures, requires the use of many parts of the brain. The most automatic processes are found in Broca and Wernicke´s area, although there is nothing which has a specific localization. 

I keep saying that the language is a result of experience with language. Michael Tomasello and others cited by Bernardez consider that the child acquires the linguistic experience which is going to form the neuronal connections making some of them more sensitive than the others and at the same time making some more specialized than others. Basically, we can say that the language is a result of interaction with external factors and the stimulation of neuronal connections from those experiences with the factors. The language comes from different places as a result of interaction, and it is localized in many parts of the brain but we cannot know where specifically.

Dear colleagues: You can read more about the authors I mentioned in my post: Enrique Bernardez with his Book; Qué son las lenguas? 2004. And the next link: 

http://www.uv.es/perla/1[09]%20Paredes%20y%20Varo.pdf

Where you can find the article; Lenguage y Cerebro: Conexiones entre Neurolingüistica y Psicolingüistica, de M de Jesus Paredes Duarte  y Carmen Varo Varo. Universidad de Cádiz.

Finally, I want to ask you: What relationship can you find between the Gestalt Group with its theory about pregnancy and Language learning? 

JUST FIVE IN ONE: Teacher as a Super Hero

Watching the movie Awakenings, directed by Penny Marshall, I was thinking about the fears the teacher has to face every day in front of the students. According to the movie, the scientist feels fear to discover and assumes the bad or good consequences. The teacher every day has to take risk to teach new things but I think the most defiant challenge is to awake teenagers to learn and it is a discovering and challenge.

The second fear is to make the difference. It is easily to comprehend, when you as a teacher tries to innovate the teaching process and maybe (This is no maybe, this is sure!!!) the colleagues start to mock and make that teacher loses his/her enthusiasm because they prefer to stay in the “comfortable place”. The last fear is to defiant the  authorities in order to get the  goal and help the students as the scientist who had to face his authorities in order to help the ill people to overcome without any kind of supporting.

The education in Language reacquires super heroes: teacher has to be just in five, just a real super hero because education needs a person who assumes the challenges of innovation, someone who wants to be awake, someone who believes everything is possible, someone who wants to be resourceful person and someone who supports and cheers up the learning teaching process.

This super hero has to face and go beyond the evident, beyond the “normal” pedagogical issue, not only someone who does not let go deeply in an education as a business  but also someone who makes a stop in the way and criticizes the way he or she is teaching. This super hero should develop the researchable strategy to change the paradigms.

We as a students of M. A. language teaching must awake because we are studying theories that maybe are reevaluated and another theories which are rising but we do not know and perhaps we are following others who do not want to change. So my questions are: Are we super heroes? Are we awake? What are we doing for being awake? How do we make our students awake?

LANGUAGE IS THE RESULT OF EXPERIENCES WITH LANGUAGE

In the last months, I have read about language according different authors, researchers and teachers, and almost the majority say that the language is the result of experiences with the language and then those are described and a new perspective of language is emerging.

The study of language arises from wonderful experiences where the linguist is observing, asking, discovering and showing what wonderful the language is. In the first chapter of his book, Crystal (2009) shows how the language is a widely-known field of research because every day it gives new phenomenon to study, to observe, to discover. He shows how each single experience with language gives another opportunity to discover a new world, which is filled of possibilities to keep researching.

According to this author, the main reason because many disciplines study and observe the language is the wide variety of proposals language offers; You can study a single world and discover that it can be studied from sociolinguistics due to the ways it is used, or from psycholinguistics because of the way how this word can be used, or from phonology owing to the way it is pronounced and it is possible to study this word from anthropology: it would be to study it from human being evolution (I do not know if any science about the origin and evolution of words certainly exist, it would be wonderful!!!).

Being linguist is more than knowing theories about language, perhaps it is to be conscious and take advantage of each single situation to study, go deeply and discover a new world inside language. Finally, I just want to say that I as a teacher have the enormous blessing to study and teach the language, to live with those new experiences, to discover new possibilities and teach from those ones. The language is here and there, inside and outside, near and far away.

What is Language?

How to say its meaning
but it is meaningful by itself

How to define it
if it is more than a single definition

How to say something about it
if anything says everything about it

It is just a world, It is just a word
it is just language!