Hello again! Today's post discusses linguistic theories!This time I have done shorter... (ah, writting about oneself's life is always extremely exciting...).
When I
think of linguistic theories regarding my compulsory schooling years, I cannot
help to sum it up in this sentence by Lec: ““Ich hätte viele Dinge begriffen, hätte man sie mir nicht erklärt” (‘I
would have understood a lot of things if they wouldn’t have been explained to
me’). Why? I feel I have spent far too much time learning languages in a
traditional-grammar way, mixed with some generativism and structuralism (parsing
activities, some morphology exercises…) and then, later on, in a pragmatic way.
Primary school was still all right: we learned to read (it is hard for me to
think of another way of learning to read other than reading…), to write and to
say something else than: “tinc gana, tinc set, vull anar a casa; la mama, el
papa; sí, no.” However, at some point, something happened: we sat just in front
of our tiny books which should be helping us, and in this order, to learn about
the linguistic unit, the word (names, types of names), the sentence, the
paragraph, the text and finally the communicative situation. The same was for
all the language courses I took at compulsory school, from primary to
high-school (until 4t d’ESO). One year after another: “el nom, l’adjectiu, el
verb”…bla, bla, bla… B-O-R-I-N-G! 
How are we supposed to learn a language if we basically focus on sentence
structure and morphology, out of a real text? I only remember having a special hour
for reading (this was, all the class going to the school library) during
primary school. After that, excursions to “the temple” were something one didn’t
even think about, unless there was a habit at home, with parents or someone at
home who encouraged us to go to the library and read, and read, and read again
to experience what a name looks like in a real sentence. And then, you are
supposed to write a coherent text, with lots and lots of nice new words. How?
In addition, I think that classroom architecture is quite traditional. Few
times was there a reorganization of the furniture disposition, in order to
bring it all to a more “dialectic” space. Yet, and again I have to reward my
primary school, this happened Fridays, when we had the famous “tutories”. All
of us sat in front of each other and everybody had to discuss about what
happened at school during the week. Still, this was the only hour we got to
create a proper oral expression activity.
As far as I have read, my classmates also have been condemning the fact
that language teaching (especially in compulsory years) still focuses too much
on traditional grammar and structuralism. Actually, pragmatics has been
introduced lately, at university (although not really…) and in foreign language
courses offered in language academies or at least, this is where I have had the
“best” cocktail of linguistic theories. My French and Italian text books
include lots of pragmatics (for instance, they focused on how to book a room? How
to write an email? and so on), but also grammar, vocabulary, and interesting
activities, both for oral and written expression.
The correction of all these activities was in most cases grammatical rather
than communicative, and sometimes presentation was quite important (it has to,
in some way, but crossing off happens…). The best correction I have ever
experienced, and the only one I still keep doing on my own, was during
high-school (batxillerat). We wrote a text, once a week, and then the teacher
just circled out the mistakes (using a pencil, not a red pen!) so that we had
to correct them on our own. Each one of us had their own notebook of “errors i
horrors” (‘errors and horrors’).
In the end, to construct a complete overview of the language being learned (and
language itself) you need to merge all of the theories mentioned, but I find it
quite difficult to merge then in the appropriate way.
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