What does it mean to say that you
“know” a language? The English verb know can refer to
different kinds of knowledge, two of which are especially relevant
to matters of language and language learning.
One
kind of knowledge, sometimes called procedural
knowledge, involves know-how:
you know how to tie your shoelaces, for example, because you’ve
practised
doing it over and over again, without necessarily being able to
explain what is involved in shoelace-tying. The other, declarative
knowledge, involves know-that:
you may talk about what people do when they tie their shoelaces,
without necessarily being able to do it yourself.
All
of us have know-how
knowledge of the languages that we need to use regularly, simply by
using them regularly.
In contrast, know-that
knowledge about our languages, that is, awareness of the
machinery which
makes them work and of the technical terminology that describes it,
comes through deliberate study. Knowing the latter kinds of things
about
languages is the job of linguists – or grammarians, which often
amounts to pretty much the same. Linguists and grammarians may know, declaratively,
that Portuguese has personal infinitives and double negatives, say,
without knowing, procedurally, how to use them.
The
issue is then what do learners mean, when they enrol in language
courses because they want to “know” a new language. Some of them
will be happy to acquire both
kinds of knowledge of that language, which is fine: it’s a matter
of choice and of learning preferences. But most, I suspect, will just
want to be able to use
the language. To me, choice and learning preferences are precisely
the issue: I think it odd that imparting declarative knowledge of languages to learners
has virtually become synonymous with language teaching across the
board. You can read an account of the resilient confusion between
linguistic know-how
and linguistic know-that,
among specialists and laypeople alike, in my paper ‘First language acquisition and teaching’, included in a
collection titled Applied
Folk Linguistics.
Assuming
that language learners must
learn the components and workings of their new languages is like
assuming that in order to be able to use a mobile phone device you
must learn what microprocessors, amplifiers and bandpass filters are,
and what they do to make your phone work.
 |
| Teaching the
grammar of a phone in order to teach how to use a phone?
Image © Techie111
(Wikimedia Commons)
|
Maybe
this assumption explains why so many of us have come to see language
learning as boring, difficult, useless, technical and “not for me”?
The
belief that what language learners really
want is to become linguists could have its roots in the perception
that know-that
knowledge is (more) easily testable:
the learner ticks boxes for questions like “Is this an example of
active or passive voice?” or “How many short rounded close
front vowels do you hear in Example 26?”, or underlines the object
complements in a couple of example sentences, to match the set
answers in a marking key. Or it could be that knowledge of grammar
has long enjoyed the reputation of enhancing intellectual abilities
and thus promoting civilised (linguistic) behaviour. Deborah Cameron,
in a piece titled ‘Fantasy Grammar’,
adds to this the “collective cultural fantasy” which has
conceptualised the teaching of grammar “as a way of inculcating the
values grammar stands for – discipline, order and respect for the
rules.” (Thank you for pointing me to this article, Sunita!)
Someone,
in the classroom, must of course know about
the language you’re being taught – and, if you’re lucky, also
about
your other languages. That will be your language teacher, who is
trained to use this knowledge in order to help you make sense of your
new language for your purposes.
I nevertheless find it also odd that the specialist knowledge about
language “properties” which is routinely taught to language teachers and, through them, to language learners, turns out to be a rather selective kind of
knowledge. We do have to learn about plural umlauts, the passé
composé and noun phrase concord affixes, but seldom, if at all,
about what makes a spoken language a spoken language: its prosody,
which remains a source of breakdowns in spoken communication, by all
(specialist) accounts known to me ever since I first set out, many
years ago, to investigate how and why this is so.
The
next post will have something to say about how and why prosody is
crucial for hassle-free language use.
© MCF 2012
Hi Madalena
ReplyDeleteDo you think procedural and declarative knowledge (about languages and otherwise) are always at odds with one another, as in the more one knows about something declaratively, the less one is able to use it procedurally?
Deborah
Not at all, Deborah. My point is just that declarative and procedural knowledge are two quite different kinds of knowledge. Linguists who are also multilinguals, for example, may have both kinds of knowledge about their languages, but there is no “zero-sum” effect such as the one you suggest on these knowledges as a result.
ReplyDeleteThe traditional take is that declarative linguistic knowledge will have the opposite effect to what you suggest on procedural linguistic knowledge: if you know the grammar of a language, you’ll speak/use it “better”. Linguists are again a good counterexample to this claim: many of us know the grammar of languages that we neither speak nor use in any other way.
Thanks for asking!
Madalena