Professional Documents
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FL 663
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Language is an instinct; without reading Pinkers (2007) novel, The language instinct, I
already agreed with his opinion that language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we
learn to tell time (p. 4). Unlike when learning other academic subjects, one does not have to be
coerced through engaging themes and extrinsic rewards to develop, as a child, the ability to
speak. Honestly, I was surprised that Pinker (2007) was able to write 450 plus pages on such a
straight forward, seemingly logical concept. However, amidst the plethora of sentence diagrams
and witty examples several key concepts stuck out to me as an individual and as a teacher.
Like many others, I am not a fanatic of reading about grammar. Pinker (2007) claims
however, that grasping grammatical theory provides an intellectual pleasure that is rare in the
social sciences (p. 96). This claim struck me as curious because I have rarely thought to
question or analyze the grammar of my first language, English. It holds absolutely true however
when I think about my second language skills; grasping and accurately producing a new
grammatical concept in Spanish is exciting and fulfilling. Even though, in previous years,
students, when learning new grammatical structures, have often failed to ever experience the
intellectual pleasure mentioned by Pinker (2007) through the use of the same or similar witty
examples of ambiguous sentences and analogies of grammar as computer software used in his
chapter on how language works I, hopefully, can inspire deeper interest in the complexity of
much higher number of strategies and resources for teaching and learning vocabulary than any
other language related concept. Although Pinker (2007) does not offer any vocabulary teaching
techniques I enjoyed reading his emphatic appreciation of the simple act of learning a word. I
was also intrigued by the similarities of vocabulary acquisition between hearing and non-hearing
children (Pinker, 2007, p. 147). The idea that gestures and images, due to the fact they can be
interpreted in a multitude of ways, are simply linguistic symbols that may be of little use in
learning is new to me. I often tell students to use visual representations of vocabulary to aid in
memorization but it may be more difficult than I previously realized for students to correctly
It is only through the combination of grammar and vocabulary however that we become
animals (Pinker, 2007, p. 230) called human communication. Now, with a few years of
teaching experience, I frequently find myself noticing how difficult it could be for a non-native
speaker of English to sort out the covert layers of meaning behind seemingly simple sentences.
(Pinker 2007) I am not certain that it can be entirely separated from the culture in which it is
acquired. Many instructional techniques focus on the benefits of learning language through
culture and while Pinker (2007) doesnt explicitly touch on the idea, his reoccurring comparison
of human and computer linguistic capabilities throughout The language instinct confirms the
reoccurring theme in The language instinct (Pinker 2007). The example, found on page 208,
shows how a computer found five different possible interpretations of the sentence Time flies like
an arrow. Obviously the different interpretations were all possible they were not a sensible
analysis of the sentence. Pinker (2007) surmises then that the human brain is capable of two
different processes that allows us to quickly and accurately arrive at a single, logical
interpretation: breadth-first and depth-first searches. Knowing that students will use the former
when looking at individual words while relying on depth-first when dealing with longer phrases
and sentences can aide in teaching strategy. I can even see myself using these as titles for
Better understanding language, its complexity and its instinctual nature, has potential to
influence my teaching techniques. Unfortunately, other than the few interesting insights
mentioned above I found it difficult to find many second language acquisition applications for in
the information found in The language instinct (Pinker, 2007). The concepts of instinctual and
universality are not of much help when explaining the pluscuamperfecto del subjuntivo to your
level three high school Spanish students. Nor do I see many students engaged in sentence tree
diagrams that articulate the possible interpretations of ambiguous sentences. And, despite the
curiosity it sparked (how does a researcher electrically stimulate different sites in a conscious,
exposed brain? (Pinker, 2007, p. 322)) identifying the part(s) of the brain that produces language
or the gene responsible for grammar production is another topic of this novel that is doubtful to
show up in the World Language curriculum any time in the foreseeable future.
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