Sociological Principle of Language Teaching Essay Example for Free

Sociological Principle of Language Teaching Essay A theory of language based on J. L. Austins How to Do Things with Words (second edition, 1975), the major premise of which is that language is as much, if not more, a mode of action as it is a means of conveying information. As John Searle puts it, All linguistic communication involves linguistic acts. The unit of linguistic communication is not, as has generally been supposed, the symbol, word, or sentence, or even the token of the symbol, word, or sentence, but rather the production or issuance of the symbol or word or sentence in the performance of a speech act. Meaning, then, should be regarded as a species within the genus intending-tocommunicate, since language itself is highly complex, rule-governed intentional behavior. A theory of language is part of a theory of action. The basic emphasis of speech act theory is on what an utterer (U) means by his utterance (x) rather than what x means in a language (L). As H.P. Grice notes, meaning is a kind of intending, and the hearers or readers recognition that the speaker or writer means something by x is part of the meaning of x. In contrast to the assumptions of structuralism (a theory that privileges langue, the system, over parole, the speech act), speech act theory holds that the investigation of structure always presupposes something about meanings, language use, and extralinguistic functions In How to Do Things with Words, Austin commences by enunciating a reasonably clear-cut distinction between constative and performative utterances. According to him, an utterance is constative if it describes or reports some state of affairs such that one could say its correspondence with the facts is either true or false. Performatives, on the other hand, do not describe or report or constate anything at all, are no t true or false. . . . The uttering of the sentence is, or is part of. the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as saying something. Marrying, betting, bequeathing, umpiring, passing sentence, christening, knighting, blessing, firing, baptizing, bidding, and so forth involve performatives. The attitude of the person performing the linguistic act his thoughts, feelings, or intentions is of paramount importance. Whereas the constative utterance is true or false, the performative utterance is felicitous or infelicitous, sincere or insincere, authentic or inauthentic, well invoked or misinvoked. An I do at a marriage ceremony is insincere and misinvoked if the utterer is already married and has no intention of abiding by the conditions of the contract. Austin divides the linguistic act into three componentsLocutionary Act: In linguistics and the philosophy of mind, a locutionary act is the performance of an utterance, and hence of a speech act. The term equally refers to the surface meaning of an utterance because, according to J. L. Austins posthumous How To Do Things With Words, a speech act should be analyzed as alocutionary act (i.e. the actual utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts corresponding to the verbal, syntactic and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance), as well as an illocutionary act (the semantic illocutionary force of the utterance, thus its real, intended meaning), and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act (i.e. its actual effect, whether intended or not). For example, my saying to you Dont go into the water (a locutionary act with distinct phonetic, syntactic and semantic features) counts as warning you not to go into the water (an illocutionary act), and if you heed my warning I have thereby succeeded in persuading you not to go into the water (a perlocutionary act). This taxonomy of speech acts was inherited by John R. Searle, Austins pupil at Oxford and subsequently an influential exponent of speech act theory. Illocutionary Act: Illocutionary act is a term in linguistics introduced by John L. Austin in his investigation of the various aspects of speech acts. We may sum up Austins theory of speech acts with the following example. In uttering the locution Is there any salt? at the dinner table, one may thereby perform the illocutionary act of requesting salt, as well as the distinct locutionary act of uttering the interrogatory sentence about the presence of salt, and the further perlocutionary act of causing somebody to hand one the salt. The notion of an illocutionary act is closely connected with Austins doctrine of the socalled performative and constative utterances: an utterance is performative just in case it is issued in the course of the doing of an action (1975, 5), by which, again, Austin means the performance of an illocutionary act (Austin 1975, 6 n2, 133). According to Austins original exposition in How to Do Things With Words, an illocutionary act is an act (1) for the performance of which I must make it clear to some other person that the act is performed (Austin speaks of the securing of uptake), and (2) the performance of which involves the production of what Austin calls conventional consequences as, e.g., rights, commitments, or obligations (Austin 1975, 116f., 121, 139). Thus, for example, in order to make a promise I must make clear to my audience that the act I am performing is a promise, and in the performance of the act I will be undertaking an obligation to do the promised thing: so promising is an illocutionary act in the present sense. Since Austins death, the term has been defined differently by various authors. Perlocutionary Act: A perlocutionary act (or perlocutionary effect) is a speech act, as viewed at the level of its psychological consequences, such as persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise getting someone to do or realize something. This is contrasted with locutionary and illocutionary acts (which are other levels of description, rather than different types of speech acts). Unlike the notion of locutionary act, which describes the linguistic function of an utterance, a perlocutionary effect is in some sense external to the performance. It may be thought of, in a sense, as the effect of the illocutionary act via the locutionary act. Therefore, when examining perlocutionary acts, the effect on the hearer or reader is emphasized. As an example, consider the following utterance: By the way, I have a CD of Debussy; would you like to borrow it? Its illocutionary function is an offer, while its intended perlocutionary effect might be to impress the listener, or to show a friendly attitude, or to encourage an interest in a particular type of music. The Ethnography of communication (EOC) The Ethnography of communication (EOC) is a method of discourse analysis in linguistics, which draws on the anthropological field of ethnography. Unlike ethnography proper, though, it takes both language and culture to be constitutive as well as constructive. In their book Qualitative Communication Research Methods, communications scholars Thomas R. Lindlof and Bryan C. Taylor (2002) explain Ethnography of communication conceptualizes communication as a continuous flow of information, rather than as a segmented exchange of messages (p. 44). According to Deborah Cameron (2001), EOC can be thought of as the application of ethnographic methods to the communication patterns of a group. Littlejohn Foss (2005) recall that Dell Hymes suggests that â€Å"cultures communicate in different ways, but all forms of communication require a shared code, communicators who know and use the code, a channel, a setting, a message form, a topic, and an event created by transmission of the message (p. 3 12). EOC can be used as a means by which to study the interactions among members of a specific culture or, what Gerry Philipsen (1975) calls a speech community. Speech communities create and establish their own speaking codes/norms. Philipsen (1975) explains that â€Å"Each community has its own cultural values about speaking and these are linked to judgments of situational appropriateness† (p. 13). The meaning and understanding of the presence or absence of speech within different communities will vary. Local cultural patterns and norms must be understood for analysis and interpretation of the appropriateness of speech acts situated within specific communities. Thus, â€Å"the statement that talk is not anywhere valued equally in all social contexts suggests a research strategy for discovering and describing cultural or subcultural differences in the value of speaking. Speaking is one among other symbolic resources which are allocated and distributed in social situations according to distinctive culture patterns† (Philipsen, 1975, p. 21). General aims of this qualitative research method include: being able to discern which communication acts and/or codes are important to different groups, what types of meanings groups apply to different communication events, and how group members learn these codes provides insight into particular communities. This additional insight may be used to enhance communication with group members, make sense of group members’ decisions, and distinguish groups from one another, among other things. ECO studies, according to Lindlof and Taylor (2002), produce highly detailed analysis of communication cod es and their moment-to-moment functions in various contexts. In these analyses, speech communities are constituted in local and continuous performances of cultural and moral matters (p. 45). The innateness hypothesis The innateness hypothesis is a linguistic theory of language acquisition which holds that at least some linguistic knowledge exists in humans at birth. [1]Facts about the complexity of human language systems, the universality of language acquisition, the facility that children demonstrate in acquiring these systems, and the comparative performance of adults in attempting the same task are all commonly invoked in support. The idea that there may be an age by which this learning must be accomplished is known as the critical period hypothesis. Noam Chomsky is responsible for the innateness hypothesis. Hilary Putnam published a critique of the innateness hypothesis entitled The Innateness Hypothesis and Explanatory Models in Linguistics. Interlanguage Pragmatics The type of language (or linguistic system) used by second- and foreign-language learners who are in the process of learning a target language. Interlanguage pragmatics is the study of the ways in which nonnative speakers acquire, comprehend, and use linguistic patterns (or speech acts) in a second language. Interlanguage theory is generally credited to Larry Selinker, an American professor of applied linguistics, whose article Interlanguage appeared in the January 1972 issue of the journal International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching. Interference of Mother Tongue in the acquisition of second language The second language learning environment encompasses everything the language learner hears and sees in the new language. It may include a wide variety of situations such as exchanges in restaurants and stores, conversations with friends, reading street signs and newspapers, as well as classroom activities, or it may be very sparse, including only language classroom activities and a few books.Regardless of the learning environment, the learner’s goal is mastery of the target language. The learner begins the task of learning a second language from point zero (or close to it) and, through the steady accumulation of the mastered entities of the target language, eventually amasses them in quantities sufficient to constitute a particular level of proficiency (Dulay, Burt Krashen, 1982 and Ellis, 1984). This characterisation of language learning entails the successful mastery of steadily accumulating structural entities and organising this knowledge into coherent structures which lead to effective communication in the target language (Rutherford, 1987). If this is the case, then we would expect that well-formed accurate and complete target language structures would, one after another, emerge on the learner’s path towards eventual mastery of the language. If the learner went on to master the language, we could, in principle, tabulate the expansion of his/her repertoire up to the point where all of the well-formed structures of the target language had been accounted for (Beardsmore, 1982 and Hoffman, 1991). In reality this is not the case. Second language learners appear to accumulate structural entities of the target language but demonstrate difficulty in organising this knowledge into appropriate, coherent structures. There appears to be a significant gap between the accumulation and the organisation of the knowledge. This then raises a critical question what kinds of language do second language learners produce in speaking and writing? When writing or speaking the target language (L2), second language learners tend to rely on their native language (L1) structures to produce a response. If the structures of the two languages are distinctly different, then one could expect a relatively high frequency of errors to occur in L2, thus indicating an interference of L1 onL2 (Dechert, 1983 and Ellis, 1997). References ï‚ · ï‚ · http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act http://books.google.com/books?hl=enlr=id=iJ3Y_wkkwa8Coi=fndpg=PR7dq=sociolo gical+principles+of+language+teachingots=FC11b_8K7Jsig=Rmp2yakmAdrsBi3Faoy19j _T7I#v=onepageq=so ï‚ · http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052context=barbara_joh nstonese iredir=1referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Furl%3Fsa%3Dt%26rct%3Dj%26q %3Dethnography%2Bof%2Bcommunication%26source%3Dweb%26cd%3D2%26cad%3Dr ja%26ved%3D0CCoQFjAB%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fworks.bepress.com%252F cgi%252Fviewcontent.cgi%253Farticle%253D1052%2526contex ï‚ · ï‚ · ï‚ · ï‚ · ï‚ · http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/education/iej/articles/v1n1/bhela/bhela.pdf http://www.academicjournals.org/AJPC/PDF/Pdf2009/Sept/Sinha%20et%20al.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-language_attrition#Interference_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnography_of_communication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utterance International Education Journal Vol 1, No 1, 1999(http://iej.cjb.net)