Language & Teaching

A Psychological View

Peter Herriot

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415694865
• eBook ISBN: 9781136510663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Language is the basic means of communication in the classroom. It is therefore vital that teachers should know something about its acquisition, development, possible defects and the ways in which they may understand and develop its communicative powers.

Peter Herriot describes the relationship with thinking, with personal and social development and its manifestations in the classroom. All this is described from the point of view of the psychologist and incorporates many of the findings of contemporaneous psychological research. But the author carefully avoids the jargon of psychology nor does he assume any prior knowledge of linguistics or psychology. Thus Language and Teaching should be especially useful to the student of education or those already engaged in teaching. It is a primer of communication.

1 Communication

1 COMMUNICATION AS A PROCESS

Consider a lecture and a conversation. Suppose that the lecture is of a formal nature, with the lecturer either reading from notes or sticking to them very closely; and suppose that the conversation is between husband and wife deciding where they should go for an evening’s entertainment. What features have these two situations in common, and in what ways do they differ?

Firstly they are both examples of communication. For in both cases people are behaving in such a way that they are affecting the behaviour of others; and they are doing so in a symbolic and indirect rather than in a direct way. Both these criteria seem necessary for communication to occur; I may kick someone downstairs, thereby affecting his behaviour, but in a very direct way. If, however, I were to call him downstairs, or merely ring the dinner gong, communication has taken place. For I have used the utterance or the gong as cues, or signals, to affect his behaviour. To return to our two situations: the lecturer, too, is seeking to affect the behaviour of his audience. Hopefully, he is trying to enable them to analyse a topic in a more useful way; possibly he is aiming at producing certain specific responses in a written examination. The husband and wife, too, are aiming at affecting their behaviour by communicating, in this case at going somewhere together.

These two situations are not so much events as processes. That is, there is no sudden transition from when communication has not occurred to when it has. Rather, there is a very complex series of events, each of which affects the others. In the case of the lecture, the lecturer has to give utterance in an audible and comprehensible way, and the audience has to perceive, or identify, what he is saying and understand it. This series of events requires some very complex skills indeed. The lecturer has to select and relate his subject matter, choose the words to express himself by, order those words grammatically in sentences, and articulate them clearly. The audience has to identify what he is saying, using the sounds he makes and their surrounding context to do so; and they have to relate their perception of the utterance to what they know about the subject under discussion. These skills will be described in more detail in . Obviously, in the communication situation, many of them are occurring simultaneously.

There are, however, differences between our two communication situations. The first difference is the amount of feedback which occurs in each of them. The function of feedback is to allow a system to regulate itself. For example, a thermostatically controlled radiator is just such a self-regulating system. The radiator emits heat into the room until the room temperature reaches such a point that the thermostat switches it off; when the room cools again, the thermostat switches the radiator on. The result is a stable and steady system. Putting it another way, the radiator uses information from its environment in order to modify its behaviour. Now take the case of the lecturer; he is emitting utterances just as the radiator is emitting heat. But there is little feedback information to make him modify what he is doing. He may notice that the audience is scribbling furiously and slow down a bit as a result; or he may see that they are dozing off, or chatting to each other, so he raises his voice. He may even perceive a look of puzzlement or boredom on some faces, in which case he will ask ‘That’s clear enough, isn’t it?’ (a rhetorical question) or try to crack a joke. But the point is that he will not change the basic nature of his utterances. There will, in other words, be little feedback; as a result, there is unlikely to be a steady state, with the lecturer producing utterances capable of being understood by the audience. Instead, he will guess, probably incorrectly, the level at which he should pitch his lecture. It is worth noting at this point that this book is an excellent example of absence of feedback.

Consider, by way of contrast, the conversation. The husband may start off by suggesting an evening at the pub, to which his wife might reply, ‘Well . . .’, in a certain tone of voice. Or she might even say no! As a result the husband modifies his behaviour, suggesting instead a visit to the theatre (where at least there’s a bar). At this his wife perks up. She may say that that’s a good idea, but wouldn’t it be nicer to go to the pictures. Her behaviour too, has been modified by outside events; for she has heard her husband change his original proposal for another closer to her own preference, the cinema. She therefore suggests this preferred activity, thinking it has a good chance of acceptance. However, she had not realized that the reason her husband suggested the theatre was that there was a bar there. Therefore his subsequent short-tempered refusal to even consider the cinema is her cue to suggest a licensed restaurant. In this situation, feedback is constantly operating. Moreover, it is operating in a far more complex way than in the case of the lecture. For here, the husband is modifying his behaviour as a result of its effects on his wife, and the wife is modifying her behaviour as a result of its effects on her husband. In other words the wife’s utterances (for example) are acting both as behaviour that is being modified and also as cues to the husband to modify his behaviour.

A final difference between the two situations, the lecture and the conversation, is the part which language plays in communication. The lecturer’s audience has to concentrate carefully on what he is saying, since there are few other cues available. He is probably too far away from them for his facial expression to be clearly visible, and few lecturers gesture in the grand manner. If he is reading, he is unlikely to break off and use the blackboard. Because he is so dependent on language to communicate, the lecturer will probably employ it in the optimal way. He will structure his sentences to provide maximum redundancy. In other words, he will include many words that would not be strictly necessary if he were presenting his subject in the briefest way possible. He will include a lot of ‘howevers’, ‘therefores’, ‘in point of facts’; he will ask himself questions which he will then proceed to answer; and he will define his terms. All these procedures involve using extra language, which, hopefully, decrease the uncertainty of the audience as to what he is talking about. (Compare the account of being burgled you would give to a friend over the telephone with the telegram you would send.) There is, of course, one possible drawback in the use of redundancy; the lecturer may use so many ‘therefores’ and ‘howevers’, he may define his terms so thoroughly, that it becomes impossible to remember at the end of a sentence what he said at the beginning!

Contrast the conversation. The husband and wife are employing many cues besides the language they use to each other. They are face to face, and so the facial cues are available. In the account of their conversation I gave earlier, I said that the wife perked up when her husband suggested the theatre. Perking up is signalled by all sorts of events. Perhaps she smiled a little, and replied more quickly to that suggestion than to the previous one. The part played by the eyes in face-to-face communication is particularly important. In this case they could signal interest in the proposal by making contact with the husband’s eyes. Eye-contact is often used to signal when one is going to stop speaking or when one wishes the other person to stop speaking. If you place two equally talkative people, a man and a woman, opposite each other, they will probably talk equal lengths of time. However, if you put a board between them so that eye-contact is impossible, the man monopolizes the conversation. He is less sensitive to eye-contact and its implications than the woman. Furthermore, there are subtle aspects of speaking which are probably open to face-to-face conversers but not to the lecturer. When the husband proposed the pub, his wife probably paused slightly before replying, then said ‘well’ in such a way as to lengthen the vowel and raise the pitch at the end of the word; try it. In addition, of course, the husband and wife have their expectations of how the other will behave, based on their experience of each other. In our example, the wife probably expected her husband to want a drink, although it required several exchanges before this expectation modified her behaviour and she suggested a licensed restaurant. Such similar expectations cannot be assumed in the lecture, where the lecturer may not know to what extent his audience is familiar with the subject.

2 COMMUNICATION AND TEACHING

The view of communication which we have been considering differs considerably from the way many people talk about teaching. I have stressed both the production of the message and its comprehension. Above all, I have emphasized the importance of feedback. The producer of the message cannot know whether he has been understood or not unless the receiver gives some evidence that he has understood. This evidence will act as feedback in the following way. If the receiver indicates by his behaviour that he has understood, then the producer can continue with the message; if there is any doubt, the producer can repeat or rephrase the message. Clearly, for such feedback to occur, the receiver must behave in some visible or audible way. In our everyday conversations we get this sort of feedback; if we ask someone to fetch a pin, and he arrives carrying a bin, we know he has misperceived; or if we ask him to give us a ring and he sends us a piece of jewellery, we know he has misunderstood (perhaps). In both cases we can change and expand the message to ensure correct perception and understanding.

In the case of teaching, there must, similarly, be evidence of understanding. Otherwise the teacher cannot adapt his instruction to the needs of the child. It is fortunate that the current emphasis is on learning by active behaviour. There are many psychological grounds for supporting this emphasis. But from the point of view of communication, the importance of activity is that it provides evidence of understanding. Many programmes employed in programmed instruction employ feedback in a similar way; if the learner makes the desired response he goes on to the next step; if he makes a mistake, he goes back to a previous step, depending on the nature of his mistake. It is precisely the same with active methods of learning: the teacher should be able to tell from thejchild’s behaviour as he tries to solve some problem whether he understands the principles involved or not. Of course, this means that activity methods must be very carefully planned so that the teacher can infer with confidence from the child’s behaviour whether or not he does understand.

The need to adapt instruction to accord with feedback is ignored by those teachers who speak of ‘giving them the stuff*. What is implied by this rather ugly metaphor is a passive feeding process of pre-digested material. Great emphasis is laid on the production side of the communication process but little attention given to the reception side. The ‘stuff’ may be very carefully pre-digested; it may be arranged in extremely neat and tidy packages. But the assumption is that the receiver structures the message in the same way as the producer. All that we know about children argues against this; they actively structure what they see and hear, rather than passively receive it. And the way they structure depends on the stage of development they have reached in their language and their thinking. For example, the five- to six-year-old is likely to be affected by the most noticeable feature of the situation. He will say that there are more items in a longer row than in a shorter row of objects, even though the shorter row in fact contains more. Children, in other words, will structure incoming information in a different way from an adult. Of course, the teacher may be skilled enough to pre-package the material in the same way as the child structures it. Even so, children need to actively impose a structure rather than passively receive it; so if too much structure, even of the appropriate kind, is presented, the aim of the process is frustrated.

In brief, then, communication in teaching, as any other situation, is a process. It involves activity in producing messages, whether verbal or non-verbal, by the teacher; it involves activity in perceiving and understanding those messages, by the children; and, most important, it involves activity by the teacher in understanding the children’s activity and adapting her own to accord with the feedback the children provide.

3 FACTORS AFFECTING THE SUCCESS OF COMMUNICATION

Successful communication, then, occurs when children understand the messages the teacher produces. What factors determine whether communication is going to be successful or not? The amount of feedback obtained is one such factor within the situation itself. But there are many other factors, some of them external to the situation. They will be outlined now, and described in more detail later in the book.

Firstly, there are the communicants themselves. We have already noted that the tasks of producing and understanding messages demand extremely complex skills. They demand both specifically linguistic skills and often, general cognitive (thinking) skills. The obvious difficulty in teaching is that the producer and the receiver are usually at different stages of development in these skills. We shall see from (thinking) and to a lesser extent from (language) that these differences are not merely differences of degree but differences of kind; that is, adults are not merely more skilful than children, but they have different ways of doing things. These differences are not only due to the different levels of development reached by children and teachers; they are also due to cultural background. Most teachers are middle-class and most children working-class (leaving these terms undefined for the moment), and this too, has important effects on communication (see ).

The second factor which affects efficiency of communication is its context. There is often a fairly well-defined social context for communication. For example, the lecturer soon shows that he is not asking questions to find out, but rather stating his own position on the subject. The social context of that particular communication thus prevents meaningful feedback from the audience. On the other hand modern marriage in Western societies is an institution which often involves joint decisionmaking, so the social context of our other example encourages feedback. In the classroom (see ), the social context depends largely on the teacher and the role she assumes (see ); on the nature and size of the groups of her pupils; and on their age. This latter point is worth expanding; in a class of adolescents, the social contexts of communication may be in conflict. The adolescent, in communicating with the teacher, may break the communication rules of his group of friends. The discussion of a poem is the sort of situation which might give rise to this conflict.

There is also an environmental context to communication. Very often, language is used to refer to features of the environment. We point at objects or events and say things about them. This is particularly true of instruction, where the teacher frequently makes reference. It is worth noting that you can not only make statements about things you refer to – ‘That’s a kettle, and you boil water in it’; you can also ask questions – ‘That’s a kettle. What do you use it for?’ In order for a reference to be understood, the speaker must refer unambiguously to the item referred to (the referent). For example, if the kettle is right next to a saucepan on the shelf, the speaker might have to say ‘The one with the spout is the kettle’, or ‘The bigger one is the kettle’. In other words, the more possible alternative referents, the more the reader has verbally to distinguish between them. This possibility of confusion is extremely important in education. When visual aids are used, or actual material, accidental properties of the items must not interfere with the feature being referred to. If a child is being taught number, then the accidental fact that some of the items are red and others green should not obscure the essential feature of number. This caution is particularly necessary in the case of subnormal children, who find it especially difficult to ‘screen out’ irrelevant features of the situation. Is the profusion of pictures and objects in the modern infant and primary classroom always desirable?

A final factor affecting the success of communication is the nature of the change in the receiver which it causes. If we suppose that children have ways of structuring what they see and hear, then the message must be of such a kind that they can apply their structures to it. This is known as assimilating what one sees and hears to one’s own modes of language and thinking. However, one of the teacher’s aims is to assist the development of the child’s modes of language and of thinking. He will therefore present messages which make the child change these modes to accord with the evidence. This is known as accommodating them to deal with the discrepancy between what the child expects and what the evidence actually shows.

An example: one expects water to fall out of a beaker turned upside-down; but this expectation is not fulfilled when cardboard is placed over the beaker when it is upright, and then turned over. As a result, the ways of thinking to which one had assimilated the situation had to be accommodated to account for the discrepant evidence. Perhaps the most important point to note is that accommodation does not seem to occur, for children in particular, if the new evidence is excessively divergent from the expectations based on existing modes of language or thinking. (Most of a sect who believed that the end of the world would occur on a certain day were unwilling to change their beliefs when prophecy failed.) This is why it is necessary to gear communication to the development level of the child; for if the message is markedly in advance of his own modes of language or thinking, no accommodation will occur. This is a particular danger when language alone is the means of communication. The connection between language and thinking is very complex (see Chapters 2 and 5); clearly, however, it is very easy to use language which is apparently understood as language, but to which the child’s ways of thinking do not match up.

In summary, it is evident that communication is a situation in which all sorts of factors are important. For communication is between people, and therefore the skills those people employ, the way they think, the relations between them, and the environment in which communication occurs, are all vital. However, the emphasis in the remainder of this book will be on language; for firstly language is the distinctly human mode of communication; and secondly, its relation with thinking and therefore with education is of primary importance.

2 Some Definitions

1 THE PSYCHOLOGIST

This is going to be a rather piecemeal chapter. It starts by saying what psychologists do and what use they think they are. It continues by looking from a psychologist’s point of view at the words language and thinking. And it concludes by giving some reasons why language and thinking and their relation to each other are important for teachers. Such a chapter is necessary because we plunged straight away in the previous chapter into an analysis of communication. It seemed reasonable to do this, however, for communication is the process teachers are actually involved in; and to communicate is one of the two main functions of language.

Many readers, particularly physical scientists, will already have concluded that all social scientists employ woolly and ill-defined terms because they are trying to deal in a so-called scientific way with matters which are not amenable to scientific analysis. And they will not have excluded the present writer from their criticisms. So allow me to define some of the terms which were used so freely in the previous chapter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Communication
• 2. 2 Some Definitions
• 3. Language Behaviour as a Skill
• 4. Language Acquisition
• 5. Language Deficit and Remediation
• 6. Language and Thinking
• 7. Language and Personal Development
• 8. Language and Social Development
• 9. Language Behaviour in the Classroom
• 10. Psychological Background
• Bibliography
• Glossary
• Index