H. Douglas Brown: Principles of Language Learning and Teaching

I usually don't write about textbooks here, and not only because it's rare that I read them cover to cover.  In general this blog is intended to examine the way we look at literature and media in all forms, and I just don't know that textbooks often qualify as such.  Furthermore, by the time I "finish" with a textbook, I feel like I've already been called to write about in the most sterile ways possible, and wouldn't have a lot left to say that would feel at home in this context.

But this book is an exception, and not only because I did read it cover to cover.  When I say that this blog is about "media", and even go so far as to express that in the title, I mean that it is about the way in which words and images are used to convey a message, about the signs of which the things that we watch, read, and listen to are signifiers, as Saussure would put it.  In that sense, isn't language the ultimate medium?  The signifier that begets and predicates all others?

If that's the case, how does it work?  Before asking what High Noon means or conveys, suppose we asked how in the hell humans have come to agree what "High" or "Noon" are in the first place.  It's amazing, really, that humans even try to communicate, let alone that we've tried to establish some procedure for doing so.  The fact that it seems to work, that we are on occassion able to send some thought into the mind of another, is veritable science fiction.  In this textbook, which is admittedly a mere scraping of the question's surface, Brown makes the well-advised choice of simply presenting some ideas, not all of which are supportable, and encouraging the reader/student to come up with some sort of framework that works for her or him.  In this arena, after all, a framework is all that can be really hoped for. 

As for me, the idea of how we acquire language has gone through some evolutions.  Chomsky works from the theory that in our brain is a sophisticated circuit devoted for the acquisition and employment of lanugage, but it sure doesn't seem that way sometimes.  It feels more like there's a pachinko machine in our brains that we shoot words into, and sometimes one of them goes into the right hole and becomes "acquired".  I've also at times thought of it as a Klondike game, although they call them different things elsewhere.  You know, the game that you can see at arcades or county fairs that has a stack of quarters or tokens  constantly getting pushed forward by some bulldozer-like blade, into which you shoot still more tokens or quarters, hoping to push some off the ledge and reap your reward?  You just keep putting words into the top until you get lucky and something comes out of the bottom.  Woohoo!

Lately though, language seems more like one of those giant funnels you can see at malls or science museums that purports to reproduce the behavior of bodies in orbit.  You slip a coin into the rim of the funnel and watch it gradually make its way to the center.  Depending on the angle at which it enters the vortex, it could take a long time, or plop right into the middle.  That's what language feels like to me lately.  A vortex, a whirpool that pulls things into its center.  There are principles at work, to be sure, gravity, centrifugal force, the weight of the coin, the slope of the funnel, and lots and lots of mathy things.  But just because there are principles at work does not mean that you can plop something at the proper angle and watch it drop straight into the middle.  It does that sometimes! And it's weird! But good luck doing it twice in a row.  Like why did the relatively useless and obscure word 개강 go right into my sweet spot and become acquired after only one exposure?  While the far more useful and lexically simple word 이발 took me forever? Why did I still have to look it up in the dictionary even the fourth and fifth time I tried to use it to tell somebody I wanted a haircut? 

The fact that it's a mystery does not mean that it's random, as Brown clearly, and occassionally wittily presents in this textbook.  I can't say that I recommend it for pleasure, but if you are curious about how those quarters get in your slot, it's a good start.