Teaching language post-modern

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

This is the famous passage where Wittgenstein sketches what he means by a language-game; making a comment on what is language:

“The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words “block”, “pillar” “slab”, “beam”. A calls them out; — B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. Conceive this as a complete primitive language.” (PI 2.)
There are at least two points which readily catch my eye: the one is that language serves a power structure, a hierarchy: hence Wittgenstein has it that a “builder” and “his assistant” use language, and not two co-equal builders. Lyotard used Witt’s passage to develop his ideas of authority and legitimization in The Postmodern Condition. It should be evident that English grammar contains the building blocks (pun intended) of the state, patriarch, and naive realism and egoic consciousness.

The second point that catches my eye is just how important CM must be for ELT. Language is something practical; it’s always a doing, a happening, a process. The Nepali philosopher and ELT theorist Jagadish Paudel in his blog Nelta Chautari relates that when asking his B Ed students what is the best approach to language teaching they unanimously responded, the Communicative Method. Paudel relates,

“They do not seem to have postmodern mind. They were guided by the truth; rather than by a truth. They did not strive for potential perspectives and alternatives in ELT. They did not become critical rather became blind supporters. They viewed CM from BANA perspective. Postmodern mind believes that everything considerably varies according to contexts.”
Noam Chomsky once remarked that for no language has the grammar been solved or codified. It is unknown whether syntax is memetic or hard-coded in the brain, but in any case what is known is a thorough understanding of grammar with little CM learning leads to stilted speaking and inability to read or listen effectively; at worst as Chomsky showed, utterances can be entirely grammatical and yet nonsense; see the many nonsense generators online.

What kind of pedagogy is then best suited to language teaching when a structured curriculum is required? Presumably CM has to figure large; the power structures underlying language have almost never been overtly taught and practiced before, it seems grammar would have a minimal but not null place. What other considerations might inform a post-modern ELT pedagogy?

2

Dear Builder. Would you please help an ignorant assistant.

What is CM? What is ELP? What is BANA?

3

LOL. A bit of irony there…

ELT = English Language Teaching
CM = Communicative Method (the main goal is to get students to a point where they are able to communicate rather than be academically perfect)
BANA = Britain, Australasia & North America (this is the current method used in most private EFL (English as a Foreign Language) schools)

Absolutely. This is a fascinating topic but probably goes well beyond teaching people English.

4

I think you are reading into something that isn’t intended here. The exchange between the builder and assistant being representative of a power structure is coincidental. The intent was to examine an exchange of a certain type, this case involving commands made by a builder which have to be understood by the assistant. This exchange is called primitive because its content only involves giving and getting directions, and the use of simple nouns and names for objects. It is complete in this primitive sense because of its simplicity.

It is only because this particular exchange W creates involves the uses of commands, that you attribute it to a display of underlying, power structures, I think.

I don’t see a correlation between the structural form of language (the rules of grammar) and any authoritative and/or paternal, social structures influencing the use of the rules.

The meaning of words is not always the same thing as the way in which words are used. There can certainly be power structures working behind the formation of concepts, but the governance of the use of those concepts is purely logical and transparent. This is to say certain statements would mean the same thing regardless of which sex uttered them, and regardless of the intentions (which cannot be stated). That there is not always subtext behind the uses of language.

Therefore, there are some kinds of exchanges that are meaningful irrespective of social, power structures evolving behind and influencing the use of language. Not just the english language, but all possible languages used by material beings will involve that specific kind of exchange, because it is a critically important form of cooperating. One guy calls the shots, the other guy does what he’s told. This has been a kind of discourse since the dawn of man, and the patriarchal setting in which it might take place is neither here nor there.

Social groups consisting of just one sex would still use, utilize, the same kinds of discourse for basic cooperation.

p.s. I hope I haven’t misunderstood what you’ve said. All this rambling would be for nothing.

5

There may be hidden correlations between power motives and structural considerations of language within the meaning structure it’s self, by the use of degrees of familiarity or similarity within the context of usage. More ‘objective’ uses may be inferred by the use of more familiar, more objective-intended ways within the syntax, and vica versa. The power of the message will be directly proportional to the familiarity on basis of resembling concepts. More objectivity and power may be built this way by the master and conveyed to the assistant.

The more loose or dispersive the thoughts are the less sense they make, de-objectifying the content of the intended concept. Hence there may be a loss of power to get some thing across.

6

Not really. There are no different grammatical forms to be used for a child telling a parent something or a civilian telling a police officer something or a roadsweeper telling a president something. The pronouns and verb inflections are identical, whether you’re arranging the housework roster in a kibbutz or ordering people to stand back from an emergency scene. In fact, English is far less honorific than most languages, having dropped the formal/informal you/thou distinction.

Even builders and assistants aren’t separated by social convention alone, but by technical knowledge, skill, and experience. If I’m having heart surgery, I don’t demand that the nurse do the cutting in order to break down power structures for a fairer world, I let the person who knows best what has to be done direct things.

And if you want to learn a new language, you have to know how the language is lived. This is very much Wittgenstein, and very much not postmodern; first you have to understand, before you can criticise.

7

Judging by the replies it seems that language being a system of violence is what most captivates. Is language a system of hierarchy? If so, should this be explicitly taught in a language classroom? Should this be explicitly taught against and deconstructed? And if so, by what pedagogy and method?

Lyotard seems to have concluded otherwise. In The Post Modern Condition in the chapter on language-games he writes,

“…to speak is to fight…”
and then,

“speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics.”
(It’s not a coincidence that Lyotard did his doctoral thesis on Zen, with it’s special respect for silence, and then came to these conclusions.) Language is a system of threat and intimidation. This idea is for instance explored in Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s Executing Sentences in Lolita and the Law where we encounter the expression “violence of the word”. What kind of violence is this? I take it for granted that the English language contains the whole history of statism, patriarchy, and forms the egoic consciousness and naive realism that the former are built upon. Open a typical language textbook…

pronouns – Pronouns create the system of gender with he and she that patriarchy depends on; pronouns create the us and them of in-groups and out-groups that permits discrimination; it separates the so-called living from the so-called dead matter…

modals – Modals create the illusion of free-will and doership necessary for egoic consciousness with may, shall or will; and likewise, modals create unfreedom and systems of submission to projected authorities via have to or must; should interjects the whole universe of bogus pre-fab morality, obligation and permission…

time tenses – From time tenses comes the notion that there is a past and a future, which there are not, there is only the eternal now, time is necessary for ego…

like – Like is an interpretation; there is no like or don’t like, all that there is are feelings and arising thoughts…

comparatives and superlatives – These adjectives bring judgment into the world… And so on and so on.

Violence and hierarchy are already covertly the true subject of almost every classroom: John Taylor Gatto argued that every class is really obedience training in The Six Lesson School Teacher,

“The first lesson I teach is: “Stay in the class where you belong.”
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch.
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command…
In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer’s measure of your worth.”
Obviously no progressive person would want to teach this either overtly or latently.

Instead we would want to teach in a way that deconstructs the system of bribery and threat and acknowledges humanity. This system was for instance analyzed by Marshall Rosenberg who identified "4 Ds of disconnection::

“Diagnosing: “What is wrong with you is that you are …” “The problem is…” “I know what’s wrong with you.” “I know you need to lose weight…”
Denying responsibility: “I had to.” “Boss’s orders.” " Company policy.” “It’s the law.”“I drink because I am an alcoholic.” “That’s not my responsibility.”
Demanding:“I demand to see your supervisor!” “It is your duty and obligation.”
Deserving: “You owe it to me.”“I deserve this!”
He sought a form of language which avoids these forms of psychological violence. Two relevant works that expound on this method are Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson’s The Compassionate Classroom, and Nancy Sokol Green’s A Giraffe in the Classroon. Rosenberg introduces his linguistic system this way,

“Nonviolent Communication is a giving and receiving of messages that centers on two very important questions:
What’s alive in us?
and
What can we do to make life more wonderful?
Base on the crucial role of language and our use of words, NVC is a specific approach to communicating –speaking and listening- that leads us to give from the heart allowing our natural compassion to flourish.
It requires great honesty and openness, developing a certain literacy of expressions, and overcoming deeply ingrained learning that emphasizes judgment, fear, obligation, duty, punishment and reward, and shame.”
This seems to be a platform, an environment in which subsequent lessons of syntax or function or phonology are taught from or through?

8

Wanting to manipulate society into your imagining of justice through the sway of their language?
… typical, anything for power over the world.

By natural consequence, not by public lecture.

Such detailed analyses concerning how to trick people into thinking “properly” is merely for social architects, engineers, witches, and lords. It isn’t anything that helps the masses and instead, gives them malicious temptations (used to destroy large groups for whatever reason).

Why not just let it be what such architects choose (they are going to be choosing it anyway) and deal with it afterward. If you are not in position to properly adjust it, maybe you shouldn’t stick your figures into it and certainly shouldn’t merely go through the public preaching what you felt was the greatest of wisdoms. That is “what pedagogy” - stop trying to control the masses into your naive paradigm of proper.

9

All that will remain when you change teaching methods, because that is part of the language. If you don’t teach it, then you are not teaching the language - so what are you teaching?

10

Some of that is not bad or worthless. It can be rephrased as teaching : focus, self-discipline, delayed gratification, concentration, adaptation, cooperation, accepting feedback and criticism, etc.

11

Marshall Rosenberg:

nwcompass.org/compassionate … ation.html

I found that last part quite interesting and convenient for Rosenberg: " Child: Yeah… no… I don’t know. I just don’t feel like being bossed around. (The child is becoming vulnerable and starting to open up because she’s feeling heard without judgment.)"

A certain percentage of kids will say “Yes, I want you to do the chores for me.” And then what?

12

:-k Is a language like English, which has no gender attached to nouns, more fair, more progressive, better than German which has masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns? Is German ‘better’ in some sense than French which only has masculine and feminine nouns?

Do those languages have different levels of oppression? Patriarchy? Sexism?

13

Marshal has a few answers for this; one is building empathy. We do this by asking the other to reflect back to us what we’ve said: in particular our feelings and needs:

‘When (O) I see you haven’t done the chores I asked you to do this morning, I (F) feel worried, because I’m worried about our (N) safety if you leave rubbish around the computer cords. Do you understand what I’m saying…? (R) can you tell me what I’m feeling and what universal human need I’m wanting?’

When we understand the feelings and needs, the intentions, behind what people do and say, empathy can happen.

A second is “dogging for needs”. Ask again, and again, and again, and then again.

Thirdly, needs are not person specific. If I’m needing safety, I can clean the rubbish away from the computer cords myself, or ask my daughter. The child might not do the chores. Life is wonderful either way, by contributing to the needs of his parent by his doing the chores he only makes the world more wonderful, if the child does not do his chores there is not and never was a “lack” in the sense that Foucault used the word in Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life; (“Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive…”)

Fourthly, Marshal told us that all needs can be met, and everyone can connect – but that might take a thousand years in some cases. Sura Hart and Marianne Göthlin in Lessons from the Skarpnäcks Free School, a school based on NVC principles, anecdotally observed that it takes three years for a child to come out of the simulacra and wake up into (“the desert of”) the real. This is an important point because very few people appreciate that there are these two levels we can live from, the authentic and compassionate level, or the conditioned level which is based on rewards and punishments. Victor Hogo described it this way in Les Mis,

“So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny …”
In the classroom, NVC shows up a lot in classroom management: “(O) When I see you drawing on the desk, (F) I feel scared, because the principal is going to blame me for not controlling my students, and (N) I need the security of this teaching job, (R) would you be willing to get a wet cloth from the custodian’s locker and wipe the desk clean?” And with the added request for empathetic reflection to be sure the student understands the teacher’s feelings and and needs.

For anarchist education, nothing has really changed between John Taylor Gato today and Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana a century and a half-ago.

Non-violent communication seems to be largely the matter of environment in which the lesson happens. As for content, it might be progressive in the English language classroom to teach they as gender neutral third person singular, to teach the spelling as womyn and not women, and stop referring to infants and children as it.

It’s not clear for me, on-the-one-hand it seems that the end of language is to fold itself up and extinguish itself and return to silence, much as Ramana Maharshi described the stick that stirs the fire as eventually itself being consumed too, a nihilating thesis; on-the-other-hand Marshall Rosenberg, seems to be suggesting there can be a non-violent objective language that doesn’t serve the hierarchy of statism and patriarchy but serves the well being of ourselves and others?

14

Everybody’s responses are excellent. This thread has bloomed nicely. Only Humean; you said what I could not say so eloquently. I love it when this happens. Thank you.

So the issue, you think, is really metalinguistic. If you are correct, you have to think about this: if there is a structural order to the practice of language that is hierarchical, one would not be able to undermine it by the replacement of what is believed to be a modified system of language without such structures. Because, the structures would be working to influence the very modification itself!

Furthermore, because these metalinguistic structures are not identifiable in the form of speech but only in the content of speech, one would never be able to be certain they were gone during any given, particular use of the language that had/used them. You see what I mean?

It’s like anthropomorphizing language; we are giving to the structure that structures our thinking about the structure and how we define and describe it, a human element, an intentional element. We have no choice but to interpret a system of language as a manifestation of the process of possessing and controlling the environment. It is natural for the structure of our language to mirror the structure of our interaction with the world and things in it. We take ‘possession’ of the world when we use language, and this process of apprehension, possession, and interpretation involves the use of a language that falsifies, in many ways, what is perceived to be happening at a merely linguistic level.

You mention the ‘violent’, mechanical nature of our language. Indeed, its violence is expressed directly in interpretation; how we understand the world in terms of forces and things which can be moved about is already a fiction, so we perceive and conceive of the world only in a way that makes it useful… or else this fiction would not have persisted so long. Use, first and foremost, is the purpose of language. We think with words that have boxed up and made manageable things in the world that are not essentially ‘in the way’ we use them. Everything, from calling an object a proper noun to a declaration of how one feels, is a form of owning, controlling and directing what is external to oneself. The structure of our language is ‘violent’ insofar as it takes command of the world by ‘calling it thus’ (see Nietzsche’s example of legislators who make concepts… stamp them into existence) and simplifying everything in it.

The form of interpretation (which for us is linguistic) models and mirrors the form of the will to power in sentient, social, language using life. The metalinguistic hierarchy of power is an allegory for how the WTP is expressed through language.

Note again: if this fact is fundamental, one cannot ‘get around it’ by trying to create a system of language that is free of it.

15

  • Would you teach German to a boy if you knew his reason for wanting to learn was so that he could operate the gas chambers at Auschwitz? It seems that a large portion of language learners are studying so that they may go to London or Paris to study accounting or engineering. More drones for the capitalist machinery. How ethical is it to teach these students language by any pedagogy at all?

  • In terms of meta issues, language education might ask itself certain questions like should there be desks in the class, should they be in rows? Or should they be in a circle, or should language education take place on site: at a restaurant, in the forest, at a bank kiosk? Shouldn’t periods of silence and stillness be included in the class-time? Maybe there shouldn’t be any class-time, the class should happen spontaneously and naturally, without the rigid fascisizing machinery of class-times? Two short videos are linked below that illustrate the mood this kind of language class might grow in.

Compassionate communicaiton with kids
youtu.be/CAyjQoqD8Ao

CALMING KIDS: Creating a Non-Violent World
youtu.be/7O4J8U4QXj8

16

A slightly different take to the same paraphrase:

A structural and a lyrical differentiation, offers a way out, vis. teaching through the latter, by connecting inconsequential ideas, and let the imaginative student try to connect the dots.

17

Some things have changed for the better, some for the worse and some things remain the same. There are some fundamental lessons that need to be taught both for the sake of the student and for the sake of society. Those won’t change.

18

The parent cannot wait a thousand years (or three years) for the child to clean his room. The interaction has to happen on a reasonable timescale.

I think that this can easily lead to nagging. And making the child (or generally other person) feel guilty about his behavior.

If there is no empathy or understanding, then it will fail to get the desired results. It will also fail when there is willful manipulation and resistance.

19

I think classical conditioning via token reward may not be interpreted as manipulation. it is simply working with tools schematising and differentiating usable reality attaining goals. I still think the differentiation between schema (syntax) and lyrical interpretation, originating with Kierkeggaard is fitting here.

20

No. The parents (or teacher) can wait; there is no urgency. And if the parent (or teacher) can’t wait, he or she can clean it theirself, or hire a cleaning company. The significance difference between requests and demands is as follows:

"According to Dr. Marshall Rosenberg in Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life…

The only way to tell if the statement is a request or a demand is to observe what the speaker does if the listener does not comply with the request. If the speaker takes the lack of compliance as a personal reject and then criticizes or judges the listener, the statement will be heard as a demand rather than a request.

However, if we indicate that we only want others to comply if they can do it willingly, showing empathy toward their needs, then our statement will be heard as a request. This is because a request, by definition, can be refused.

Dr. Rosenberg cautions that “If our objective is only to change people and their behavior or to get our way, then NVC is not an appropriate tool. The process is designed for those of us who would like others to change and respond, but only if they choose to do so willingly and compassionately.” NVC is meant to create relationships based on honesty and empathy, not judgment and coercion."

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