Page 52 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS
According to Rittel, pedagogical linguistics and language pedagogy are fundamentally different scopes, because it seems that it is linguistics that emerged in pedagogy, sociology, and psychology, and not pedagogy, sociology, or psychology that emerged in linguistics. Pedagogical linguistics in Rittel's view is general linguistics interpreted for the purposes of language learning (Rittel, 1992, p. 68). This view is based on the fact that linguistics is not characterised by a pedagogical point of view. Therefore, Rittel (1992, p. 69) proposes to separate the two terms and defines language pedagogy as the application of linguistics to pedagogy (learnability) and pedagogical linguistics (grammar learnability), which would form a theory for these applications. The relationship between the two is illustrated in the diagrams below.
linguistics pedagogy
= Pedagogical linguistics (theory)
Educational linguistics (Rittel, 1994, p. 23)
In the diagram above, the research objectives are set by linguistics, which interacts with pedagogy.
pedagogy
Figure based on Rittel (1992)
linguistics
= language pedagogy (application)
teaching of the mother tongue or a foreign
language
The second graph shows that research objectives are set by pedagogy and influenced by linguistics.
Rittel uses the term "learnability" to describe language pedagogy: it is the characteristic that allows learners to easily learn something. The fact that the researcher has given the term in English will make it easier for us to investigate what she meant by using the term. Language learnability is a concept related to theoretical linguistics and language learning. In this view, researchers attempt to understand what a person knows about the languages he or she speaks and to explain how that person achieved that knowledge (Archibald, 1993, p. 54). The vast majority of theories concerning the ability to learn language date back to the earliest proposals of Chomsky (1965), who argued that if the environment is not rich enough, it will not enable a learner to achieve linguistic competence (from the poverty of stimulus (POS) argument). Consequently, language would not be learnable. There is currently no evidence that all aspects of language are innate, and there is no one who claims that all elements of language are learned through experience (Perruchet & Poulin-Charronnat, 2015, p. 139). Language learnability is a functional feature of language for language acquisition. It refers to translatability, cultural transferability, reversibility, transferability, and conjugation of grammatical structures. According to C. Osgood (1980), learnability is the spread of a language within a species (generational and geographical). This occurs through the experience of learning and not through inheritance. C. F. Hockett (1958) stated that this makes it possible for any individual to learn any language. Translatability is defined by Osgood (1980) as the property of language by which any language is translatable into another. Cultural transmissibility is the transmission of language through cultural
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