tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31830497.post1142870990146241676..comments2024-02-28T05:25:12.859-05:00Comments on English, Jack: Losing our lexicons?Bretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870575277556244419noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31830497.post-86668324395463802132007-06-20T11:13:00.000-05:002007-06-20T11:13:00.000-05:00Yes, teaching is many things, including motivating...Yes, teaching is many things, including motivating, setting an example, providing opportunities to learn etc. I was using a fairly narrow sense in reaction to Brown's comments about vocabulary quizzes, word-of-the-day type schemes, and schools in Paris deciding to "teach more grammar and vocabulary".Bretthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02870575277556244419noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31830497.post-43676911348681752902007-06-20T09:41:00.000-05:002007-06-20T09:41:00.000-05:00I suppose it depends on how you define teaching. C...I suppose it depends on how you define teaching. Can one teach oneself something? Can one learn something without someone, somewhere teaching (even if only by example)?<BR/><BR/>My presumption would be that if, between teen-age and adult-hood, someone's vocabulary increases significantly, it is because they learned new words. (Though, I suppose, they could just invent words, which begs the question if only one person knows what a word means is it really a word, or does wordness require meaning?) I know I can read something without learning the jargon it includes -- there's a whole Foucaultian logosphere out there that I've seen over and over again and have never bothered to attach to meaning. I can also read a new word and decide to learn it, adding it to my own internal vocabulary. When I make that choice, IMHO, "teaching" is happening. Whether it's me teaching myself, or the author of the book (or the dictionary I had to look the word up in) teaching me, I am being taught.<BR/><BR/>Perhaps, from a pedagogical (or parenting) point of view the important bit is teaching people to <B>want</B> to learn the meanings of words. The magic of human language aquisition will guarantee we learn words that are necessary (feed me!), and words that are interesting (the #%&*! words come to mind), after that, continuing to add to our own vocabularies seems to be a function of logovoracity -- not so much an aquired taste as a learned appetite.Annehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06853322176938045513noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31830497.post-56030972391595401072007-06-19T19:21:00.000-05:002007-06-19T19:21:00.000-05:00Anne, we may be saying the same thing in different...Anne, we may be saying the same thing in different ways. I agree that a large part of teaching subject matter involves teaching vocabulary. Often, as you learn about statistics, for instance, you learn what distributions are and how they can be skewed because somebody explains it directly to you. But for huge numbers of words, like <I>pedantic</I> and <I>obliterate</I>, you just work them out as you go along. Consider that the gap between an average teenage vocabulary of, say 15,000 word families and that of a Conrad Black, or even a fairly average adult is in the order of tens of thousand of words, far too much to be "taught".Bretthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02870575277556244419noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31830497.post-76007311843598455072007-06-19T19:20:00.000-05:002007-06-19T19:20:00.000-05:00This comment has been removed by the author.Bretthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02870575277556244419noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31830497.post-36460522181649008972007-06-19T15:39:00.000-05:002007-06-19T15:39:00.000-05:00It seems a trifle overbroad to state that it is im...It seems a trifle overbroad to state that it is impractical to teach others to have a large vocabulary. I'll happily grant you that it's impractical within the confines of trying to teach a second language, but a substantial amount of my English vocabulary comes from teachers who chose to expand our vocabularies along with our knowledge of the subject matter at hand.<BR/><BR/>There is a lot to quibble with in Brown's article -- much of which is probably attributable to the difference between op-ed and scholarly writing. As a scholarly piece, it would never have been published (or, at least, not without much editing, fact checking, and adding of footnotes). The function of op-ed, though, is as much about the opinion as the education, and -- in the case of the weekend newspaper -- about giving readers (at least those of us who are not those of us who are not immersed in the scholarly study of -- in this case -- matters lexical, syntactical or rhetorical) something interesting to discuss over brunch. Given the breadth of comment on the Globe & Mail site, I'd say he succeeded.Annehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06853322176938045513noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31830497.post-26565186869824530322007-06-18T13:12:00.000-05:002007-06-18T13:12:00.000-05:00According to the OISE site, Clive Beck is not a li...According to the OISE site, Clive Beck is not a linguist, not even a militant one.alienvoordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15185665427021380867noreply@blogger.com