This is the promised blog on the book which encapsulates the current revolution in the approach to the study of language.

When I was lucky enough to be sent off to the University of Essex to do an MA in Applied Linguistics in 1976, the core of the course was the then revolutionary approach to language study of Noam Chomsky. He had thrown down the gauntlet to the previous paradigm of Skinner and the behaviourists by proposing that language, especially the grammar, was too complex to be learned by small children and therefore had to be innate i.e. programmed into the human brain. This idea, known as Transformational Generative Grammar, has dominated the field of the scientific study of language for the last fifty years. It has got increasingly mathematic and esoteric.

I never found it useful for my own purposes, which was, first, the description of the language of literature and, secondly, the description and teaching of the abstract language of school discourse. I used Systemic Linguistics, the traditionally based analysis of language, brilliantly developed and refined by the English linguist, MAK Halliday (since developed in Australia).

When trying more recently to catch up with developments in Linguistics, I was surprised to find that research workers like Tomasello, needing a system that described varieties of language, automatically turned to Transformational Generative Grammar as the only possible descriptive tool and, not surprisingly, found it inadequate.

Disquietude with Chomskyan Linguistics has been evident in many quarters and, finally, Daniel Everett, the linguist who made his name by recounting his hands-on experience in the field of recording and analysing the language of remote tribes in the Amazon rainforest, has thrown down the gauntlet to Transformational Generative Linguistics by his 2017 book How Language Began.

I find it fascinating to behold another paradigm shift in action!

Daniel Everett: How Language Began.

To summarise it is a formidable task and I will embark on it soon. It has been worth waiting for!

It is nice to see how relaxed and happy are the fluent Sign users – unlike our odd words, BSL is clearly a complex and arbitrary system, like any other language.

However, I sometimes watch the television programmes accompanied by an interpreter in BSL. It seems to me that they use a variety of semiotic systems, including lip-reading and finger spelling as well as BSL. I’d like to follow this up sometime.

My friends and I have been pursuing our linguistic interests by working through two books:

An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Malcolm Coulthard and Alison Johnson

Exploring Health Communication: Kevin Harvey and Nelya Koteyko

I thought I had reported some of the more interesting things we had learned on my blog, but apparently not.

It has been fascinating to see how linguistic insights can sharpen the work of two of the oldest professions – law and medicine. We have now moved on to the purely theoretical area of Pragmatics. We have taken the precaution of starting on a workbook, which has led us immediately to the most basic part of language study – and the oldest – which is Semantics.

I’ll delay sharing our insights until I make sure they are being received!

Our new book is: Pragmatics: Jean Stilwell Peccei.

I have just been reading a paper on nominalization in texts at MA level, where many of the subjects under discussion are produced by nominalization, but, in addition, the mechanism is used to create very dense nominal groups.*

The introduction to the paper gives the same description of the use of nominalization for creating abstract concepts as mine:

“Long noun phrases very often relate to abstract concepts: insights, collocation, demands, creativity, conformity and so on. Understanding academic writing in English depends on being able to understand these concepts and to see how they relate to each other.”

The main intention of the paper takes this for granted and is meant to help the post-graduate student to process the very dense, not to say cumbersome noun phrases which are found at this level of scholarship. For example:

“theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and learning”

Oakey helps students to process such long phrases by showing them how to pick out the head word, to recognize relative and non-finite clauses which often form part of such nominal groups and also how to make sense of lists of noun phrases.

I did not find such long noun phrases in texts in use in secondary schools and it would be very interesting (and useful) to trace at what point they enter academic language – sixth form? Undergraduate? Post-graduate? I wonder what research has been done on this topic.

*David Oakey: Understanding nominal groups in ed. Susan Hunston and David Oakey: Introducing Applied Linguistics

Last week I read Chapter 2 Language and Education in the Nineteenth Century. I thought I “knew” about this process in general terms at least, but there were many processes at work which I now see in a new light, and one that I had never heard of: the influence of the Indian Civil Service on the teaching of English Literature.

I quote the relevant paragraph:

“The relationship  between language, knowledge and power can also be illustrated with regards to education policy in colonial India during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Very briefly, the 1835 English Education Act made it compulsory for Indians to study English language and English literature, with proficiency in both areas serving as prerequisites for employment in both the East India Company and the British colonial Civil Service. Learning English, it was thought, would have a ‘civilising’ influence on a non-Christian native population, primarily as a means of accessing the Bible and Christian morality. The curriculum provided a means whereby Indians would come to know an English lifestyle, with its literature acting as a kind of mould for reproducing that way of life. (So much importance was in fact attached to this idea that the Victorians also inserted English literature into the Civil Service examinations back in England: thus, ‘…armed with this conveniently packaged version of their national identity and …cultural superiority’ – Eagleton, 1983: 28-29). Consequently, the subject was called ‘English’ and not – as was the case in other European countries ‘literature’. But it was English literature then (rather than the Bible) which provided the ‘civilising’ influence upon Indian natives, in ways which were then imported back into England as a blueprint for a curriculum designed for mass education (Viswanathan, 1989; see also: Viswanthan, 1992; Donald and Tattansi, 1992)”

I have to read up on this fascinating insight into the interaction of empire, education and literature!

Last week I think we made a breakthrough. She had been expecting me to relate my work to cognitive psychology. The text which I commented on in my last blog – on the changes to consciousness made by literacy – are examples of work in this field. This was going on in the eighties at the same time as Breakthrough to Learning was being devised and tested.

The problem with psychology is that it is all theoretical – the testing that is done is all indirect. This situation, according to the many books now explaining neuroscience to the layman, is changing. The new generation of machinery (particularly magnetic resonance scanners) means that the physical basis of psychological processes can be tracked in the brain. This will challenge the very basis of our understanding of the way human beings think and feel.

Breakthrough to Learning was based not on psychology but on Applied Linguistics. Its basis in the physical world is language, in particular the English language, which is well described by modern linguistics. The problem which it tackled was the failure of many secondary school pupils in this country to achieve academic success. Psychologists have made valuable contributions to this problem on an individual basis – in diagnosing and remedying dyslexia, for example. However, traditionally their approach is related to the discredited ideas of innate intelligence.

By treating the problem as a purely linguistic one, the whole matter became very simple: I analysed the academic texts which pupils struggled with on three linguistic levels – word, sentence and discourse structure. Their peculiar features were listed and then taught, using the well-tried metods of Applied Linguistics (TEFL). The result was a doubling of the percentage of pupils gaining five or more good GCSE’s in the comprehensive school where it was tested.

Why it failed to be widely adopted is the subject of my article Mind Your Language in this month’s issue of Creative Teaching and Learning by Imaginative Minds.

He asked me to write an update to that article giving my views on why the Wigan Language Project, in spite of its proven success, failed to be more widely used. I enjoyed writing the article, especially putting the boot into a few of the chumps who blocked its dissemination. I have sent the article off to Howard and I hope it will appear in the next issue.

Work has also started on converting Book 3 into electronic form.