Language Diversity
Crawford begins the article by highlighting problems associated with second language instruction in American classrooms. According to the statistics cited most approaches used in these classrooms are inadequate to provide students with the necessary skills to communicate in the target language outside of the classroom. The reason for this is a lack of focus on communication skills, combined with an inflated focus on form rather than function. Despite efforts to improve upon this by methods such as the total immersion approach and the audiolingual method, results are still shown to be poor. Chomsky, Krashen and Cummins's theories are shown to have revolutionized language acquisition theories, and thus also language teaching methods. Furthermore Crawford shows that a child's inherent feelings about his or her own culture, and consequently about the culture represented by the target language, have a significant impact upon second language learning. It is then suggested that children be taught to honor and respect their own culture, so that the native language can be used as a successful basis for second language acquisition.
It is specifically interesting to me how the adamant criticism received by the above theorists have not been specifically addressed. It appears that the language acquisition community of academics are more interested in promoting their own pioneering ideals than in addressing the needs of language learners. Addressing such needs would mean not only criticizing the newest of theories, but also debating these until improvements or confirmations are arrived at that would benefit learners.
The situation explained in the article appears to be counter-productive in terms of effective language teaching in schools. Instead of merely criticizing, evidence should be taken into account and testing should be done to either confirm or negate the effectiveness of existing theories. Also, the theorists criticized should address the specific issues raised. Only then can true progress be expected in this very important area.
Language and language diversity play an important role in the critical thinking process because these components help the individual determine and identify under what category or perspective information should be assigned to. This means that given a set of concepts and perspectives that an individual has, through language, one can easily identify the kind of information given and determine whether this information is best understood and analyzed using a particular
Language Diversity and Education by Carlos J. Ovando, the author makes the point that the language diversity present in the United States has significant implications for all teachers and all students. He emphasizes the importance of both a person's first language and the dominant language in a culture. He notes the complexity of learning a second language: in addition to the cognitive mastery of vocabulary and grammar involved, fluency in
Language and Critical Thinking Language and language diversity has a significant effect in influencing critical thinking because it shapes the individual's worldview or his/her perceptions of the realities that s/he experiences everyday. One of the most often used comparisons in order to illustrate the influence of language diversity in critical thinking is the differences in worldviews of the Eastern and Western cultures. Looking into the basic differences in their language, Eastern societies
Language and Thinking Language is the one aspect, which distinguishes human beings from lower species of life (Faccone et al. 2000). Sternberg (1999 as qtd in Faccone et al.) lists its properties as including communication, arbitrary symbolism, regular structure, structure at multiple levels, generation and production and dynamism. Sternberg assumes that language is most likely acquired naturally from the environment where a person is raised as an infant. The stages seem
Language As Gloria Anzaldua states in "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, "Chicano Spanish sprang out of Chicanos' need to identify ourselves as a distinct people," (447). Chicano Spanish is a "secret language" of cultural bonding and binding. This is true for the many "forked tongues" that have sprung up in communities of opposition: patios tongues that become crucial to identity formation and preservation (Anzaldua
In today's global society, such understanding has become vital to communicating effectively in both the social and business worlds. Critical thinking and language can therefore not exist without each other. Critical thinking helps the participants in a conversation to understand the possible meanings in language, while language helps participants to gain clarity regarding these meanings. Language serves both an empowering and limiting function in expressing thought. The expression "there are no
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