Educational screen & audio-visual guide (c1956-1971])

Automaticity: Language Learning Goal by Dan Desberg The Theory In my field, that of structural linguistics, a language, in two words, is organized noise. This definition is less than facetious; it is a scientifically tenable statement of the two characteristics found in every language in the world. Every human being spends part of his existence making noises. Most of the noises he makes with liis so-called vocal organs are part of an organized system, called language. Every social group is held together by a number of conventionalized habits, and among these habits is speech. Writing is also a conventionalized habit within a social group, but unlike speech, writing is not a property of every social group. On the contrary, most of the thousands of languages spoken throughout the world have no writing systems at all. We are forced to distinguish between people who are illiterate, which means they speak a language which happens to have a writing system, although they do not know how to use it, and analphabets, who could not read nor write even if they tried, because their language does not have a writing system. Language, then, is speech, and speech is one of the ways in which man communicates with his fellow men. There are at least two other systems which exist alongside the speaking system in the communication process. The paralingiiistic system also involves the making of noises, but these noises are not normally considered as speech. For example, if I clear my tliroat because it needs clearing, I have provided no message for you. But, if I clear my throat in order to open a meeting, I have provided, by paralinguistic means, the message that I want your attention. "Hems and haws" and hesitation forms— uh, uh, uh— are paralinguistic features having a definite and definable role in communication. Besides the speaking and paralinguistic systems, there is the kinesic system-gestures. Let me do a little counting for you on my fingers: in Japanese: ichi, ni, san, shi; in French: un, deux, trois, quatre; in German: ein, zwei, drei, vier. Note that the first number for the Japanese may be counted as the little finger, for the Frenchman as the thumb, held at an angle; for the Gerinan the thumb held upright— and we know From an address presented before the 1960 NAVA MidWinter Conference. 172 that for every American the index finger represents the number one. Gestures, you see, are systemic and may be intimately linked with a particular language. A native speaker of any language has not only linguistic control but paralinguistic and kinesic control as well. All human communication therefore involves patterned behavior-organized noise and organized body movements. Communication is something that people do and they do it according to a system that they learned when they were very, very young. What implications does this anthropological view of language and communication hold for learning a language? Again, in a two-word definition, language learning is noise making. Language learning is a process of learning to make noises that fit into a system. The procedure implies imposing a set of habits on our nervous system. Just as we learned to gesture,! just as we learned to make noises that did not come out as "words," just as we learned to walk, just as we learned to eat with our right hand and our left hand, just as we all learned to do various things that, as adults, we no longer even think about, so we learned to speak. We did not go to school to learn to speak We spoke perfectly nomial English by the time \vi were six years old. We did not know a noun from j verb until we went into an English class and learnec about "the parts of speech," but we did know how t( use nouns and verbs and many other "parts of speech without ever being able to identify them as such. Our real problem in learning language is learnin; a foreign language, a second language. Second-lanj guage learning means imposing a second set of habit upon— and in confhct with— your first set of habit;! It is not like learning to walk; it is, perhaps, more lik I learning, as an adult, to walk on your hands-side j ways and blindfolded. Such a difficult skill takes muc| practice, much doing, before it becomes automatic. Second-language learning is not an informatiol subject, it is a skill subject. It involves essentially tlirel skills: speaking, hearing and remembering. Speakinl is an athletic event more than anything else: leamiol to move muscles, learning to put your tongue, yovl lips, your jaw, and other parts of your vocal apparati f into places you have never put them before. Hearim involves not only the reception of sound waves in yotrj ear but the classification of a sound wave complil in your brain. You learn to accept differences of sourJ in terms of the language you know and at the san| time you learn to ignore other differences in terms that same language. For example, we accept "tol and "pop" as being different words because they bj gin with different sounds. At the same time we ignof the fact that the word "pop" begins and ends wif different sounds, although it is evident upon exav . , c^ .