The more I know about metalanguage, the more I realize how
much more there is to know. Metalanguage is the term for ‘words that help us
talk about words.’ The obvious irony here is that one cannot discuss the
structures of English without speaking in the very form, with the very rules
they are analyzing. Is that a limitation? I’m not really sure.
The most fascinating aspect of this study so far is
realizing how many things a native speaker just ‘knows,’ without any rhyme or
reason for knowing (at least when asked). For example, which one of these
sounds better to you (assuming ‘you’ is a native English speaker): “I looked up
it in the dictionary” or “I looked it up in the dictionary”? Obviously the second
one sounds better. ‘Looked up’ is a phrasal verb, and this has a very literal
meaning. Looked up literally has to do with your eyes lifting from their
previous position to something higher. But, to ‘look it up’ has to do with
research. When someone says ‘look it up,’ we know not to lift our heads to the
sky, but to look for a dictionary or some other informational book.
And now the question arises, “How do we teach these kind of
word chunks to non-native English speakers?” Not only is teaching these chunks
presents a challenge, but just as challenging is how to teach these things
inductively?
Corpus based teaching techniques seem like just the way to
go! We’ve been learning about these in class these first few weeks and I am
fascinated with its pedagogical potential! A corpus is a group of writings in a
large database. The idea is a person can look up a word in this database and
the database will then generate all the instances of that particular word in an
actual context. WOW! This, if used properly can stimulate tons of inductive
grammar teaching and collocation advancement.
Here is an example from the Michigan Corpus of Academic
Spoken English. I looked up the word “ball.” Here are some of the results:
1.
What you do is you create a ball of energy, I want you to understand it
that way, you have a ball of energy. yeah?
2.
Now, uh what you see because I'm moving as I throw the ball in the air,
and it comes down and I catch it.
3.
but reading is just is just such a different ball game that it doesn't yeah
have a lot to do with, your speaking ability
If more fleshed through and given to students, this could
prove such a useful expansion of their ability to understand and use the word
‘ball’ in English. As students study these results, they will have new
contexts, word groups and forms by which they can use this word. Not only is it
just an item they can identify; they now have new ways to use this word. A
student would realize that ‘a ball of energy’ is a chunk of language used to
describe something with a lot of activity (and even the teacher could let them
know you can use this to describe something a person is also). He/she would
also learn that the verb ‘throw’ is preferred when speaking about playing
sports with balls. We don’t say ‘give the ball’ or ‘launch the ball’. Native
speakers always say throw the ball. Lastly (and most interestingly) ‘a
different ball game’ is such a great phrase for them to know. It’s here used as
a metaphor to speak about something new and unknown. But also it has value in
the literal sense also. Perhaps a non-native speaker doesn’t know that a
baseball, basketball or football game could be shortened to ‘ball game’. Also,
they may not know that usually a ‘ball game’ implies that a baseball game (at
least in my mind it is). So much understanding and breadth of knowledge can come from
just three sentences in context using the word ball. How inspiring!
Lastly, I have finally found some respite after a long,
looming question within concerning something that happens to me often when I
read aloud with others. Frequently in the middle of a sentence I say the word ‘a’
and ‘the’ differently than others. I say ‘a’ as the letter ‘A’ and ‘the’ like ‘thee.’
I couldn’t understand why everyone was pronouncing their words differently than
I was, and how come they weren’t doing it correctly like I obviously was! This quandary
was laid to rest this week when my Linguistics professor said that in the
middle of the sentence, most people pronounce ‘A’ like ‘uh’ and ‘The’ like ‘th-uh.’
Hm. Obviously for some reason I think my determiners, even in the midst of a
sentence are ‘A’ and ‘thee’ worthy.
