If We Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics...
Kuro5hin,
Apr 11, 2007
The author ponders, "Imagine that your only contact with "English" as a subject was through classes in school. Suppose that those classes, from elementary school right through to high school, amounted to nothing more than reading dictionaries, getting drilled in spelling and formal grammatical construction... You would probably hate the subject."
I have been toying with half an idea recently, nothing fully formed, that we ought to be teaching language rather than a language. Instead of, for example, teaching 'I', 'me', 'you', 'he' we would teach the concept of pronouns generally and how they are handled in a dozen or so languages. And students would see the relation between 'I' and 'Je' and 'Yo' and the rest, see how the same concept yields what is more or less the same word in these languages.
Why do it this way? Well because it's not clear to me that people have a good understanding of basic and fundamental concepts - not merely the concepts of self and other, but things like the attribution of properties to things, expressing relations between entities, the idea of (non-mathematical) set and membership, and the whole host of logical categories that are simply absent from a word-based, rather than concept based, treatment of language.
I have been toying with half an idea recently, nothing fully formed, that we ought to be teaching language rather than a language. Instead of, for example, teaching 'I', 'me', 'you', 'he' we would teach the concept of pronouns generally and how they are handled in a dozen or so languages. And students would see the relation between 'I' and 'Je' and 'Yo' and the rest, see how the same concept yields what is more or less the same word in these languages.
Why do it this way? Well because it's not clear to me that people have a good understanding of basic and fundamental concepts - not merely the concepts of self and other, but things like the attribution of properties to things, expressing relations between entities, the idea of (non-mathematical) set and membership, and the whole host of logical categories that are simply absent from a word-based, rather than concept based, treatment of language.
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