A tiny squeak of protest

[LarryLatham]

You don't believe Pinker?

Larry Latham

[revel]

Good morning all!

Maybe I need that teacher training after all: I don't have any idea who Pinker is (nor, evidently, need to know, since without knowing him/her I still managage to use his/her ideas) and didn't know my exercise was called a "wug-test" (won't be calling it that in class, sounds a little silly and students, my students, don't need to know that stuff!)

My little exercise comes directly from vocabulary interference in focused strctural manipulation work. It is a test-taking revelation: despite the fact that the exercise in question might simply require taking "be" out of the center of the sentence and sticking it at the beginning to change a statement to a question, students get stuck on one word and forget what they are doing because they don't know what that word means. This causes a flow and time loss. In a class that word should be defined, either by the informer (the teacher) or a resource (the dictionary). However, in a test, no one will tell the student what the word means and oftimes it doesn't matter, since the question in question is to make a question. My little exercise is to reveal to the students that they need to keep their minds on the instructions and not get distracted by unknown vocabulary. If they don't know the word, they don't know it and that's that!

Juan, have you tried telling your students that "don't" and "doesn't" (for example) are simply our vocalizations of the symbol "¿", with which they are familiar? The French do grunt out something before their questions (est-ce que), that might be a useful example. Just some ideas I use with my Spanish students, though, as you say, getting them to use the question auxiliary is a challenge. Even though the Spanish "continuous" construction is exactly the same as the English one, they so often become Running Bears as they happily say "I studying English", though they would never say "yo estudiando inglés" in their own language. Go figure. It's their fault, not mine!

peace,
revel.

[LarryLatham]

Maybe I need that teacher training after all: I don't have any idea who Pinker is (nor, evidently, need to know, since without knowing him/her I still managage to use his/her ideas) and didn't know my exercise was called a "wug-test"...

Teacher training wouldn't get you anywhere near Steven Pinker, revel. He is a Psycholinguist (what is that?...a linguist who is psycho?) who specializes in how children acquire language. He has written several popular books (which may be why our friend JuanTwoThree looks askance at him, but he is an acknowledged first-rate scientist) on a variety of related subjects, including language and how the brain works. He also is an active participant in the "nature/nurture" debate, taking neither side exclusively, but delighting in debunking bogus arguments, sometimes from famous scientists.

At any rate, your exercise is not what Pinker calls a "wug test." The wug test is something Pinker points to which was invented by the psychologist, Jean Berko Gleason, who worked with children in the late 1950's to show one example of how they intuitively grasp the grammatical concepts of (English, in this example, but any native language, according to Pinker) without being told or trained in any way.

Nouns, in English, have two forms: singular and plural; and verbs have two tenses: present and past. Many nouns have an irregular plural just as we have irregular verbs: tooth teeth, child children, and so on. Pinker explained in his book, Words and Rules, that our brains apparently first check an internal list, when the necessity arises for us to produce a plural form, to see if the word in question has an irregular form. The rule is: "If the word is on the list, use the irregular form from the list. If not, add -s (or its equivalent)." Children, of course, are not taught this rule, but they know it anyway, apparently from observation of how the language works. If you ask a child (and Berko Gleason did ask many) to complete the following:

This is a wug. Here is another one. Now there are two ___.

...they invariably complete the sentence with "wugs". This may seem simple to you and me, but it shows quite a lot. The children (4-7 year olds) might have refused to answer on the grounds that they've never heard of a wug, and so didn't know how to talk about more than one of them. Instead, they confidently, and insistently gave the answer "wugs". Similarly, they also knew how to make a past tense of verbs they had never heard of because the rule is the same (check the list for irregulars, otherwise add -ed). So, for children, if you bling something today, and you did it yesterday too, then you blinged it. This is not something they could have heard from their parents or other people, but they were confident their answers were right. Somehow, they figured out how to make plurals and past tenses and internalized a rule to guide them. It also explains why children, when they are learning English, so often overapply the rule and come up with, "Johnny builded a tower from blocks", or "My daddy flied home from New York last night."

Anyway, that is what a "wug test" is about.

Larry Latham

[JuanTwoThree]

Revel. Yes, I have. But I've found electrodes attached to their chairs and a discrete button to be a most effective way of overcoming that little problem in 9 out of 10 cases. Every 10th student is a gibbering wreck but it's a small price to pay.

You certainly don't need to know who or what Pinker is or does. If such a thing as Applied Linguistics* exists, then his stuff is inapplicable.

Pinker is delightful and convincing but I find myself asking at intervals "Are you sure?" . He goes to great lengths to document and reference minutiae but sometimes leaves the most jaw-dropping assertions as self-evident truths. He says that verbs from nouns from verbs lose the irregularity of the first verb because we "hear" the noun, hence "he grandstanded to the crowd" "We've costed the project" "she threw out her runned nylons". It's quite a pivotal moment in "Words and Rules" but you don't get much in the way of chapter and verse.

You're right Larry, that's a wug-test. WhatRevel describes is what I call "mental tippexing" : training students to worry less about unfamiliar words. I think I've heard it called coffeepotting , from the guessing game.

Let's leave it as a squeak. None of these gripes upset me unduly.

* I discover that I'm not a teacher, I'm a language facilitator, forsooth.

[revel]

Good evening all.

Thanks, Larry, for your little essay on Pinker and wugs. I feel as enlightened as I need to be on the subject and these days don't have time to do a web-search and inform myself more since I presently don't see the necessity for my current class planning activity. I had heard of it all, after all, but hadn't associated it with either "Pinker" or "wugs".

And yes, Juan, the electrodes are sometimes the only answer! Poor things. And calling my exercise "coffeepotting" based on the word substitute game is pretty accurate as well.

Going to play some mindless internet games now, see you all tomorrow!

peace,
revel.

[woodcutter]

I sought out Pinker's masterwork because of Larry's previous enthusing, and I recommend anyone to do the same. Ever heard of Grice's co-operative principle, which says that a writer of English is obliged to be clear, relevant, truthful, informative, interesting and memorable? Well, blow me, this professor actually obeys these dictums, rather than quoting Grice as one more name-drop in a piece of turgid social-science prose.

[coffeedecafe]

Ever heard of Grice's co-operative principle, which says that a writer of English is obliged to be clear, relevant, truthful, informative, interesting and memorable? Well,

did he borrow this concept from the boy scout motto, or did he come up with it on his own? oh well, always be prepared.

[woodcutter]

Apparently Grice did create a version of his principle for the boy scouts, where he also included the advice that capitalization can be useful too!

[coffeedecafe]

EXCELLENT!
however, by staying in the lower case, sometimes i can fly below the radar.
and, dealing with grice with my present knowledge, was to be in the past imperfect tense, when i feel more at ease in the present simple case.
so i use the mental discipline neccessary to put my capitals in the right place into checking the logic of my statements and quelling my typing dyslexia.