ESL and the mind
Stereotypes are funny things. You may think that you resist them, but in the end, when the opportunity arises for you to make snap decisions based on stereotypes, we do so. Like today (and remember, I’m black, so I’m allowed to say this), when I saw a guy with those big, pink, African (so goes the stereotype) lips. I was tempted to ask him, “Are you black?”, in a dubious tone of voice. If I had the guts to speak as it comes to me… the trouble I’d get myself into.
In a related note, I’ve been thinking lately about the way lots of people who learned English as a second language– probably just because I heard Noam Chomsky will be speaking @ UH some time soon, so I’ve become unnaturally attuned to anything relating to linguistics (strangely, he isn’t going to be speaking about language). Basically, I’m wondering if the errors they make are genuinely predicated on a misunderstanding of English sentence structure (”No Food or Drinks in here or account will be disabled”– to borrow an example from a sign in the room, which I think (and maybe a little, hope) was written by an ESLler), or if they might be just be betraying the influence of the way their first language structured their thoughts. I think it could possibly be the second case because I think, if I took the time to finish learning Spanish, I would be able to speak grammatically correctly, albeit very slowly. Not because I’m good with languages, but because I think English has more and subtler grammatical rules than Spanish. It seems that my main problem would be forgetting English sentence structure, rather than learning Spanish itself. So I think that translates over to other people learning English; except, in their case, they are almost always learning a language that is more subtle and diagonal (as compared to Spanish, which always seemed rather orthogonal to me). To make a programming analogy, the hardest thing for a C programmer to do when adjusting to the world of Perl is not learning the syntax, but forgetting the thought patterns of C, and learning to use Perlish idioms. Of course, that’s a very truncated and oversimplified analogy, but I think it conveys the point.
All of this points to what I’ve heard many times before: children should learn more than one language in their early childhood. I think that would accustom them to switching between the thought patterns of different languages, which would help them later to learn any other language they would like to, with more ease. For best results, probably, the languages should be as ‘far apart’ as possible, i.e. from different major language groups. English and Spanish would be acceptable, English and Sanskrit better, and English and Chinese even better. In the end, I think learning this ability to switch thought patterns would also help people in dealing with technical subjects: math, the science, etc. which require a kind of mental domain transformation.
Possibly relevant posts:
- R6RS ratified (9/16/2007)
- all ’bout TeX (7/26/2001)
- Finnegan’s Wake (7/3/2002)