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Language as human ecology: A new agenda for linguistic education
New Ideas in Psychology xxx (2015) 1e7
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Language as human ecology: A new agenda for linguistic education Alexander V. Kravchenko Department of Foreign Languages, Baikal National University of Economics & Law, 11 Lenin St., Irkutsk, 664003, Russia
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 26 February 2015 Received in revised form 27 May 2015 Accepted 30 May 2015 Available online xxx
The efficiency of linguistic education based on the code model of language is questioned. The view of written language as a representation of speech ignores the important difference between the experientially different cognitive domains of speech and writing which affect human cognitive development by establishing an extended ecology of languaging. As a consequence, functional illiteracy in societies with established literate cultures becomes a real threat. It can be avoided when it is understood that language is a kind of socially driven behavior which contributes, in a quite definitive way, to the rich context of the human ecological niche, including texts, without which it cannot be understood. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Speech Writing Functional literacy Niche-construction Ecology
1. Introduction: the puzzled parent When, in Russia, children go to school for the first time at the age of 7, they are full of great expectations and eager with anticipation, because they are entering a new world e the world of learning. They know, even if only intuitively, that becoming part of this world is a necessary condition for becoming an adult person in contemporary society, which thrives in mind-boggling technologies. In the Russian culture, a child's educational enterprise is referred to as a ‘quest for knowledge’, and the 1st of September, which is the official beginning of a new school year, is called the Day of Knowledge. However, soon enough, after the first or second year of elementary school, many children begin to show signs of boredom often intertwined with confusion and even bewilderment. It turns out that learning is not always fun, nor something a child's mind is ready to comprehend. They often cannot find a use for their ‘new knowledge’, and children are very pragmatic when it comes to doing something. Characteristically, as a third-grader, my own son clearly showed this alarming change of attitude; as a matter of fact, his big sisters before him, and millions of kids worldwide have gone through the same stage of grim revelation that schooling was not quite what they had thought it to be. As a result, by the end of elementary school a lot of children undergo a metamorphosis; a big-eyed quizzical little creature enthralled by the exciting wonders
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of the adult human world and ready to work miracles with the newly “acquired” knowledge, by and by turns into a dull, average, disaffected individual struggling to survive in what has, paradoxically, become a not-so-friendly world of hard work and emotional strain often devoid of meaning e at least, to the child's eye. Many parents of young children are all too familiar with this inexplicable loss of motivation on the part of their offspring, and the question, of course, is: “What goes on in the world of school education?” To answer this question, one must take a closer look at the ideology and methodology of education as institutionalized practices and techniques accepted and approved in most literate cultures. 2. Linguistic education as institutionalization of the language myth 2.1. Reification of knowledge and its consequences According to Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (1996), education is “the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life”. The key words in this definition are impart (1. to make known; tell; relate. 2. to give; bestow; communicate) and acquire (1. to come into possession of; get as one's own. 2. to gain for oneself through one's actions or efforts), which give a very clear idea of how knowledge is conceptualized and what education is really about. In our world view knowledge is a thing, a commodity which may be traded by ‘giving’ and ‘taking’,
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or a prize for one's efforts, and education is the actual process of such trade taking place at special commodity exchanges e educational institutions, such as schools and colleges. But where are these articles of trade (that is, pieces of knowledge) stored, and what do they look like? The layman's answer is, of course: “In books (textbooks)”, which are depositories of the vast knowledge accumulated by humans. We read books to learn something, and it is simply impossible to imagine a school without texts and teachers whose job is to provide some of the knowledge they have and make sure that the students take it and add to it by reading more on a given topic, thus expanding their knowledge. In other words, education, as a process, is, for the most part, ‘extraction’ of knowledge from texts; this knowledge becomes something we ‘possess’ and may ‘pass on’, should we choose to do so, to someone else. How do we pass it on? Verbally, by telling someone something, or by writing another text for a targeted readership. Basically, the orthodox view of the function of language seen as a tool for expressing and conveying meanings, thoughts, information, or what have you, stems from our reification of knowledge as something potentially external to us as human organisms, something ‘out there’. It possesses value because it helps (or so we believe) to better understand the world around us, and is a reliable guide in our daily life. It is always to a person's credit to be known as highly educated or well-read, that is, knowledgeable. However, the ugly truth is that the amount of education a person has does not necessarily relate to his cognitive ability to meaningfully interact with the world which, to humans, is, first and foremost, the world of social interactions. The so-called knowledge imparted to a student very often continues to remain something external to him, not unlike a collection of potentially useful things stored in the attic for some later day e which, as we all know, may never come. On a social scale, this situation has dire consequences, often affecting the very quality of our life for the simple reason, very well expressed by Maturana and Varela (1987) in their seminal book The Tree of Knowledge: “All doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing”. To know something is not to ‘possess knowledge’ as a kind of acquired commodity; it is to be in a state that allows an organism to meaningfully interact with the environment. And every actual state of an organism is determined by the organism's structure as a result of a history of fine structural coupling of the organism with the environment.1 That is, as emphasized by Maturana (1970: 1), “knowledge as an experience is something personal and private that cannot be transferred”. Language is something material inasmuch as it involves various observables accompanying linguistic behavior (vocalizations, gestures, cultural artifacts, etc). However, as a kind of adaptive behavior language does not convey information; it establishes a relational domain of coordinated interactions which both determine, and are determined by, the states of interacting organisms. An observer interprets the activity of languaging using his experience of interactions with the observed in their consensual domain,2 and this interpretation triggers changes in the observer's state as a structure determined living system which the observer describes as “understanding”. For example, when a father introduces his son to the components of a car engine so that he can learn to do some car repairs, he might say, pointing: “This is a carburetor”. The son, as an
1 “A structure determined system is a system such that all that happens in it or with it arises as a consequence of its structural dynamics, and in which nothing external to it can specify what happens in it, but only triggers a change in its structure determined by its structure” (Maturana, 2000: 461). 2 A consensual domain is the domain of interactions that appears to the observer as a network of sequences of mutually triggering interlocked conducts (Maturana, 1978).
observer, may understand that there is a relationship between the component pointed at and the vocalization that accompanies the pointing; he may also understand that a carburetor is somehow important and that his dad ‘knows’ something about it from relevant experience. However, even though the child now knows the name of something he did not know before, it is not the kind of knowledge that helps him to meaningfully interact with the perceived components of the world (‘all doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing’). What the father ‘knows’ about carburetors does not automatically become part of his son's ‘knowledge’, because it is not something grounded in his personal experience; in this sense, there is no knowledge transfer. Knowledge is constructed by a living system “on the go”; it is an emergent phenomenon. But if this is so, and knowledge, indeed, cannot be transferred (specifically, via language as a tool for such transfer), then what is the process of education about? Looking for an answer, we must turn to the established view of language as a means of communication. 2.2. The ‘fixed code’ fallacy The spread of Saussure's views on language and semiotics in the 20th c., institutionalized in linguistics as the ‘scientific study of language’, was, perhaps, the final touch in creating the language myth (Harris, 1981) e a belief that language is a finite set of rules generating an infinite set of pairs, in which material forms are combined with meanings; it is used to exchange thoughts in accordance with a prearranged plan determined by those rules. This view is very well illustrated by the scheme a second-grader finds on the inside of the back cover of his textbook in Russian (shown in Fig. 1): words-as-blocks (in the top-left box) are arranged into sentences (the bottom-left box) which become rings of various sizes and color of which the pyramid of text is built around the core of the ‘main thought’ (the right-side box). The language myth is the product of two interconnected fallacies which are at the basis of construing language as a fixed code (Harris, 1981): the telementational fallacy (the belief that language is used to exchange thought) and the determinacy fallacy (the belief that such exchanges take place in accordance with a prearranged plan determined by a finite set of rules). The fixed-code fallacy accounts for the publicly shared illusion that language is a tool for the transfer of thought. In this case, both language and thought become ontologically independent. Yet, this seeming independence is nothing more than the result of an ‘epistemic cut’ between what is observed (language as a kind of human social behavior, or languaging) and the observer (a languaging human describing language). Cognition is a biological phenomenon, and to understand it as such an observer and his role in cognition must be taken into account and explained. As argued by Maturana (1978: 29), science is a closed cognitive domain in which all statements are, of necessity, subject dependent, valid only in the domain of interactions in which the standard observer exists and operates. As observers we generally take the observer for granted and, by accepting his universality by implication, ascribe many of the invariant features of our descriptions that depend on the standard observer to a reality that is ontologically objective and independent of us. This is exactly what happens in linguistics. The language we speak plays a bad joke on us, setting a trap few can escape. Because we as humans “happen in language” as our immediate interactional environment, and because what we know of the world comes through the agency of the body in action e particularly, through linguistic interactions with others as we take what Cowley (2011)
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Fig. 1. Words, sentences, and texts as things (adopted from (Soloveichik & Kuzmenko, 2008)).
calls the language stance3 e we as observers are in a perpetual epistemic trap of language. To us, language literally creates the world we attempt to describe and understand as if language were, indeed, no part of it. However, “[L]anguage is the house of Being. In its home man dwells” (Heidegger, 1978: 217). As pointed out by Damasio (1994), while there is an external reality, and while our experiences of it are real, this reality happens to be our reality; one could add that “our reality” as a meaningful concept, which others are capable of sharing, is the reality of languaging. However, in the philosophy of external realism (cf. Alston, 1996; Devitt & Sterelny, 1999; Searle, 1998, inter alia) and counter to Vygotsky's (1987) profound insights, language and thought become manipulable things independent of each other. Because language is viewed as a code for ‘transmitting’ thought, the existence of a special language of thought, or mentalese (Fodor, 1975), is often taken for granted. Its ontological independence from language does not make, for example, Chinese mentalese any different from English mentalese. This results in the ultimate translatability principle e the idea that exact translation from one language to another is possible and desirable. However, this is an illusion (cf. Quine, 1969; Sampson, 2009), even though for a single obvious reason: we cannot coherently identify a realm of non-linguistic thoughts or ideas that language, according to the orthodox view, encodes (Love, 2004). Vygotsky argued that thinking and language cannot be separated; the biology of cognition makes a stronger claim e that the human brain thinks in language understood as a manner of living it creates: “As our existence as human beings takes place in our operation in language, the features of our existence that constitute our humanness, pertain to our relational domain and occur in our “languaging”, not in our bodyhood” (Maturana, Mpodozis, & Letelier, 1995: 23; original emphasis).
3 “Stance taking makes agents into observers who construe and shape the lived environment as they integrate perception with action” (p. 5); part of this environment is words observers learn to “hear” e just like they learn to see “things” in pictures. Later, “what we hear” is used as ways of constraining our actions.
Failing to realize this, educational linguistics continues to stagnate. Methods and techniques used by language teachers are based on the fallacious code model sustained by the language myth and the translatability principle. Here is just one personal example of how far language educators may go in making the lives of young children miserable.
2.3. What do they study in the Russian language class? When he became a second-grader, my son suddenly took to coming to his dad for help with his home assignments in Russian. He knew that his dad was a linguist who ought to understand what an eight-year-old boy couldn't. Well, the funny part is that I couldn't understand those assignments either. First, they rarely had anything to do with language as speech, that is, natural spoken language used, according to linguists, for live communication; students were given tasks which involved doing various things with texts that had been prepared in a specific way to elicit from the student some metalinguistic knowledge previously given to him both by the teacher in the classroom and in a relevant paragraph in the textbook itself. Second, even if some tasks did bear on speech to a certain extent, it was only because reference to specific acoustic phenomena, such as sounds and syllables, was necessary to explicate the meanings encoded in special symbols used in the textbook to schematize certain inscriptions as fragments of written words. As a matter of fact, the student was asked to engage in bona fide cryptography by using a number of little geometric shapes (that is, a special code) to ‘translate’ the actual characteristics of a particular vocalization into a string of abstract symbols in order to avoid spelling mistakes when writing (Fig. 2). Characteristically, the abovementioned Russian Language textbooks for grades 2 through 4 all have the subtitle “K tainam nashego jazyka” which roughly translates as ‘Uncovering the secrets of our tongue’, and to emphasize the idea that to study Russian is to break a certain code, the front cover of the book for second-graders features a kind of encryption of the word zagadka ‘riddle’ (Fig. 3). Later on, in middle and high school students continue to study the Russian language, a real heavy-weight on the curriculum in terms of scheduled workload. Even though educators are not
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Fig. 2. “The Writing Hazards” diagram.
emphasis on spelling. Being skilled in such analysis helps the students e or so the teachers believe e produce their own texts which are expected to meet certain requirements in terms of readability and expressiveness. And if a student can produce a good text, he is often believed to have acquired good communication skills. However, those with relevant pedagogical experience will, I believe, agree that this is hardly the case: very often school graduates not only lack adequate skills in producing what counts as a good text, but their communication skills in live dialogical interactions often do not differ in sophistication from the skills they had when they first came to school. The reason for that is simple: speech and writing are experientially different cognitive domains (Kravchenko, 2009a), and viewing them as two versions of a code which stand in one-to-one correspondence (a commonly accepted practice in education) has serious consequences for cognition, both on individual and social levels. While natural linguistic behavior is intrinsically dialogical, being both embodied and other oriented, writing and its products (texts) are not. Speech and writing belong to experiential domains of different cognitive dynamics (cf. Kravchenko, 2012): developmentally, these dynamics impact differently on the linguistic/behavioral strategies of individuals and communities e something that school educators don't seem to realize. 2.4. Defeated expectations
explicit on the point, it may be clearly seen from the figures above that the real object of study is not language as human interactive behavior (communication). Rather than learning efficient ways of interacting dialogically, students are taught to analyze texts using knowledge ‘imparted’ to them by the teachers, with a special
Fig. 3. The Russian Language textbook cover.
Our cognition of the world is rooted in interactions with the environment which is psychologically structured as follows: (i) personal space, (ii) home territory, (iii) public territory (Lyman & Scott, 1966; Sommer, 1969). As a socially structured domain of interactions, public territory is subdivided into three sub-domains: educational, intra-cultural, and cross-cultural. The first and most important stage in taking a language stance by a young human organism is set within its personal space and home territory as primary domains of linguistic interactions; phenomenological experience in these domains moulds a person's initial standards of linguistic behavior whose adequacy is continuously tested through direct or indirect appeal to authority (parents and family members). The adequacy of a child's linguistic behavior is assessed by relating it to the caretakers' personal values, priorities and idiosyncrasies. Importantly, words and utterances do not become abstract symbols; they form a network of perceptually grounded signals (indices) which cue the child's behavior in his adaptive interactions with the social environment. As a young individual grows up, his domain of interactions expands into the domain of public relations, and before he functionally integrates into society and its culture as a relatively autonomous agent, a long period in his developmental history falls on educational interactions. In an educational environment, with the already established standards of linguistic behavior grounded in his consensual domain of family/home interactions, an individual directs his adaptive efforts at eliciting encouragement and approval on the part of educators guided by their own values and priorities. The child is under permanent pressure to get approval for his interactional behavior in a classroom by the ultimate authority, the teacher. And what the teacher approves is not the cognitivepragmatic efficiency of the student's dialogical interactions with others, but ‘correct’ manipulations of inscriptions (morphemes, words, phrases, sentences and, ultimately, texts) as a result of applying the rules that govern the use of writing; therefore, writing rules become of paramount importance, a kind of the pivoting point of linguistic education: if the student knows the rules, he will produce good texts and get good grades. However, texts do not represent speech. Writing, as a kind of socially sanctioned code, allows humans, after special training, to
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relate concatenations of graphic images (inscriptions) to components of possible speech events such as separate words and word sequences (utterances). To read aloud a text is to reconstruct the sound matter of a possible speech event; it is not a reconstruction of a natural linguistic event as such. By the same token, to write a text is not to enter a communicative interaction with others; at best, the writer interacts with his own cognizing self by drawing on the available experience of a history of linguistic interactions, which may vary considerably in terms of exposure both to dialogical interactions and texts, and creating, as a result of interpretation, a possible (that is, not grounded in personal phenomenological experience) world for the reader. Just because texts do not represent speech and because the cognitive dynamics of speech and writing are essentially different, there is no direct correlation between relevant skills in these two domains: an excellent writer may be an awful speaker, and an eloquent speaker may find it hard to write a coherent text. Dialogical interactions occur in space-time as communicating parties monitor, and respond to, what happens (Linell, 2009). By contrast, texts are typically not read by others as they are produced. Since the production process itself is inaccessible, analysis of written language necessarily focuses on texts and their component parts. Letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. resemble objects that can be manipulateddespecially when typesetting and editing a text on a computer, for example. Given the interactional nature of speech, this sets up an ontologically distinct semiotic system (Kravchenko, 2012). While, in Maturana's (1978) terms, languaging is orientational, the primary cognitive function of writing is analogous to internal, or biological, memory. Unlike languaging, which extends the human sensorium (Morris, 1938), writing is a kind of storage and retrieval system that allows humans to ‘accumulate’ experience and knowledge. However, inscriptions by themselves, taken outside of interactional contextdwhen human cognizers gain and extend their experience of graphic symbolizations of natural language vocalizations through learning to read and writeddo not contain knowledge. They are a kind of scaffolding that prompts how to use our phenomenological experience in solving cognitive tasks at hand, thus changing our current state as cognitive systems. Once we are skilled in writing, we can ‘dump’ the cognitive load on material artifacts and, later, use them to interact with our cognizing selves. While languaging is embodied and distributed, writing establishes cultural artifacts. Unlike speech, these impact on individuals and communities across historical and evolutionary scales. As separate cognitive domains, they set up contrasting bodyeworld relations through contrasting cognitive dynamics (Kravchenko, 2009a). Metaphorically, the domain of texts is a kind of Petri dish for culturing individual humans. There is, however, a difference: by thriving in the cognitively nourishing medium of texts, humans, far from depleting it, grow and cultivate it by adding new texts. Yet, we pay a price. Individuals who cannot thrive in the culture or even eschew it, put their potential for social adaptation in jeopardy; failure to interact effectively with texts may lead to cognitive dysfunction (Kravchenko, 2009b). However, effective interaction does not depend on literacy as such; literacy does not produce cognitive development, it is just a prerequisite for a new kind of experience substantially different from dialogical interactions. In literate societies, ‘the world on paper’ (Olson, 1994) becomes a crucial part of the human cognitive niche which we actively construct, and in which we must show our adaptive fitness e just as we show our adaptive fitness in natural dialogical interactions. The written language bias in linguistics (Linell, 2005) is responsible for the peculiar situation the conventional linguist seems unwilling to admit: so-called “linguistic facts” gleaned from “linguistic data” (such as written words, sentences, and texts) are
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nothing more than educated interpretations. The entire issue of native speakers' ‘competence’ in defining what may be considered as ‘grammatical’ is an issue of educationally predetermined preferences. And in linguistics, education has been usually understood and implemented as indoctrination. To quote Harris (1981: 12): “An educational system based upon grammar books and dictionaries has already succeeded in institutionalizing the fixed code fallacy”. This has grave ideological and methodological implications for linguistic education: (1) the profound difference between speech and writing as cognitive activities which belong to different experiential domains is overlooked; (2) educators instill in students a thoroughly dualistic world view in which mind and language are ontologically independent entities, (3) the role of language (both spoken and written) in shaping human cognitive abilities and sustaining a unique speciesspecific ecology is not recognized. As a consequence, modern societies with established literate cultures show signs of growing functional illiteracy (Romano, 2005) e inability to meaningfully modify one's behavior as a social agent while interacting with texts as cultural artifacts which play an important role in human cognitive development (Сunningham & Stanovich, 2001). 3. Language as human ecology 3.1. Languaging and niche construction Language is inseparable from our biology and the praxis of the living (Maturana, 1970). As cognitive (living) systems, social systems are not just biological; as units of interactions with the environment operating in the relational domain of interactions, they establish an ecological niche which cannot be characterized in terms of physical space. For humans, their relational domain is constituted by languaging as species-specific socially and historically determined behavior; this behavior contributes to the rich context of the human ecological niche without which it cannot be understood (Steffensen, 2011). However, because of the epistemic trap of language, we have created a profoundly physicalist picture of language, conceptualizing its ‘units’ and what they ‘stand for’ as discrete manipulable objects. Expressions such as “I gave him a few ideas to play with”, or “I can't find the right words to express my meaning” and the like, are often taken at face value, and words (just as ideas that words “stand for”) are hypostatized into special “things” that are in the head. This propensity to misinterpret reality may be seen in many traditional linguistic concepts, as, to quote Pennycook (2008: 22), “linguistics has profoundly misconstrued language through its myths about autonomy, systematicity and the rule-bound nature of language”. As an object of inquiry, language is defined by the method chosen for its study. Choosing to analyze texts as material objects which consist of words and sentences as things, we can't help concluding that any text is the result of combining and recombining words into sentences which are organized according to a set of rules. This leads to an established view of language as an inventory of words (lexicon) and rules for their combination (grammar). Correspondingly, linguistics as a science is the study of “words” as autonomous entities that possess meanings and are combined to produce “sentences” as expressions of thoughts. Thus, the goal of educators is seen in helping the students to expand their vocabulary and master the rules of grammar necessary to produce
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coherent texts. Upon accomplishing this, a young individual is believed to have become linguistically competent, capable of not only reading and understanding texts, but producing his own inscriptions as meaningful cultural artifacts. However, in terms of functional literacy, reading and writing are not about being able to vocalize inscriptions or inscribe vocalizations e the standard meaning of the word “literate”; in this sense, being ‘literate’ does not make one socially mature. As cognitive processes, reading and writing differ in their dynamics from natural dialogical interactions. Because manipulation of written vehicles is part of our cognitive processing, writing transforms our cognitive abilities, becoming a way of thinking (Menary, 2007); it provides a new medium for the active construction of thoughts (Clark, 2007), and print culture “affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insights possible” (Bradshaw and Nichols, 2004: 7). In other words, writing and its products become, along with natural linguistic interactions, part of our ‘biocultural niche’ (Sinha, 2014). Both writing and reading are largely introspective processes that take place on a time scale different from the time scale of languaging; however, in dialogical contextesensitive interactions, when we make extensive use of dynamical features that include vocalizations, gestures, facial expressions, particular ways of orienting to others and the world, we don't have the luxury of ruminating. To use a metaphor, we are carried by the language flow along a trajectory we often cannot reverse even if we don't like it. We may choose to swim with it, if we can, to get us to a desirable destination, or we may just float, but in any case we must be able to sustain our buoyancy if we don't want to drown. This is what learning to language is about: it is about survival in the human world. The fittest survives. For children learning to take a language stance (that is, learning to stay buoyant in the language flow) linguistic structures function, first and foremost, as indices, thus ensuring perceptual groundedness of language as orientational activity in a consensual domain, or adaptive behavior in an organism's cognitive niche. To a child learning to language in a natural way, the process consists mostly in making sense (cf. Cuffari, Di Paolo, & De Jaegher, 2014), through interaction with the components of the consensual domain, of what is observed as happening in the child's cognitive niche. Vocalizations the child hears do not have any intrinsic meaning; being components of the first-order consensual domain, they are perceived as playing a certain part in the network of causal relationships between the components of the consensual domain, thus acquiring meaning. In other words, understanding (interpreting the observed linguistic behavior of others and self) is valuerealizing activity (Hodges, 2014). To a child, linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena are not two worlds independent of one another; they are facets of a network of causal relationships between words and things (or an interworld), which function as indices with respect to one another (Kravchenko, 2003). What is known as “natural language acquisition” is spontaneous semiosis grounded in the physical context of interlocked conducts (a consensual domain of interactions), and as such it predetermines intrinsic indexicality of each and every component of the consensual domain (words and non-words alike) e that is, their orientational function. That is why to a child disembodied inscriptions (texts) make sense only if the words of which they consist, as well as the relationships between them, relate to the child's experience of identifying them as orientational devices in the child's world. New words or novel uses are a cognitive handicap, and a child needs time and effort to negotiate them by construing a possible world in which new words or novel uses make sense. With time, this newly acquired skill unleashes in a child a cognitive power far superior to that of an illiterate mind.
Basically, this is what makes humans so different and so special compared to all other species. Human agents are endowed with high-level cognitive abilities of a different kind; they have a predisposition for languaging which constitutes their cognitive domain. Languaging is the constitutive activity of individual humans as components of higher-order living systems (groups and populations), and human cognitive abilities emerge in the process of the development of the system components (infants) into fully functional agents. While the whole systemic behavior of the human society depends on the cognitive properties of the components themselves, these emerge in the domain of languaging as specific behavior of the living system. Neglect of the biological groundedness of human social systems results in overlooking the obvious e that human society is an ecological phenomenon. Language provides an extended ecology within which human cognizers orient themselves and others to values as “multiple, heterarchical, dynamic, and legitimating constraints on actions” (Hodges, 2007: 590). This ‘constraining’ function of language is something that needs to be recognized as fundamental for the ideology of linguistic education: its agenda must be redefined, forsaking the code model for a more sensible and comprehensive view of language as a flux of experience which makes us ‘ecologically special’ (Ross, 2007). So, what are the possible steps to take toward this goal? 3.2. A new agenda for linguistic education Educators must realize that we are what we do, and most of what we do is mediated by language. While both speech and writing are at the core of the human biocultural niche, as semiotic phenomena of different dynamics they impact differently on the cognitive development of individuals. The indexical nature of linguistic interactions grounded in the here-and-now of the speaker makes them an orientational mechanism that helps establish a system of values as a result of the continuous process of sensemaking in the relational domain of languaging. This system of values sets guidelines for socially adaptive behavior, and in the formative years of schooling children learn to orient (among other things) to the values held by their teachers, acquiring patterns of linguistic behavior that would accompany them throughout their future life. Teaching to read and write is not about ‘imparting’ to students enhanced communication skills. The role of writing in literate cultures is fundamental in sustaining their historical continuity, but it is also much more than that. Because texts are disembodied and atemporal, literate minds function differently, allowing for abstract thinking, thus augmenting an individual's cognitive powers. The goal of education as a social institution is to facilitate cognitive development of young individuals to be functionally integrated in society. Such effective integration is impossible without individuals being able to use writing as ‘a particular mode of operation of the human mind’ (Harris 2000: xi) which enhances their adaptability in the relational domain of social interactions. Guided by the code model of language, educators fail to see how lack of relevant experience in the domain of written texts over the developmental history of an individual leads to functional illiteracy and d not surprisingly d lack of participation in cultural life. Written culture is an ecological medium; reading and writing are cognitive activities critical for the development of a child's mind, because they allow him to reach far beyond the here-and now of his lived experience, constructing multiple possible worlds in which fantasies often may and do become reality. Construction and interpretation of such possible worldsdrather than inscription rules per sedshould be the focal point of teaching higher level literacy skills. Because the human mind is a linguistic mind in that it emerges
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and develops in language as a manner of living it creates, the instrumental view of language should be abandoned as inadequate and even harmful, because it leads to grossly underestimating the role of language in a child's developmental history of becoming a socially mature human. As Mead (1934: 222) argued, “no individual has a mind which operates simply in itself, in isolation from the social life-process in which it has arisen or out of which it has emerged”. And for humans these social life-processes take place in the relational domain of language as a biocultural niche constructed in the course of such processes. As children grow, they strive to fit into this niche by developing adaptive behavior. The adaptive adequacy of behavior depends on individual cognitive development which is crucially affected by the flux of languaging experience; meaning, sense-making, and value-realization all emerge from our experience of languaging together and with ourselves. Linguistic behavior is characterized by a large number of situational variables affecting the actual outcome of communication; therefore, meanings are not contained in words, they are products of interpretation as an experientially determined adaptive effort to make sense of the world around us. Realizing this may help release a child's creative powers constrained by the current educational practice of teaching language as a code. References Alston, W. (1996). A realist conception of truth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bradshaw, T., & Nichols, B. (2004). Reading at risk: A survey of literary reading in America. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts. Research Division Report 46. Clark, A. (2007). A sense of presence. Pragmatics & Cognition, 15(3), 413e433. Cowley, S. J. (2011). Taking a language stance. Ecological Psychology, 23(3), 185e209. Cuffari, E. C., Di Paolo, E., & De Jaegher, H. (2014). From participatory sense-making to language: there and back again. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1e37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9404-9. Сunningham, A. E., & Stanovich, K. E. (2001). What reading does for the mind. Journal of Direct Instruction, 1(2), 137e149. Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Devitt, M., & Sterelny, K. (1999). Language and reality: An introduction to the philosophy of language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Fodor, J. A. (1975). The language of thought. New York: Crowell. Harris, R. (1981). The language myth. London: Duckworth. Harris, R. (2000). Rethinking Writing. London: Athlone Press. Heidegger, M. (1978). Letter on humanism. In D. F. Krell (Ed.), Basic writings (Martin Heidegger) (pp. 213e265). London: Routledge. Hodges, B. H. (2007). Good prospects: ecological and social perspectives on conforming, creating, and caring in conversation. Language Sciences, 29(5), 584e604. Hodges, B. H. (2014). Righting language: a view from ecological psychology. Language Sciences, 41, 93e103. Kravchenko, A. V. (2003). The ontology of signs as linguistic and non-linguistic entities: A cognitive perspective. In Annual review of cognitive linguistics, 1 pp. 179e191). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kravchenko, A. V. (2009a). The experiential basis of speech and writing as different cognitive domains. Pragmatics & Cognition, 17(3), 527e548. Kravchenko, A. V. (2009b). Speech, writing, and cognition: the rise of communicative dysfunction. In W. Oleksy, & P. Stalmaszczyk (Eds.), Cognitive approaches
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to language and linguistic data. Studies in honor of Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (pp. 225e240). Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. Kravchenko, A. V. (2012). Grammar as semiosis and cognitive dynamics. In A. V. Kravchenko (Ed.), Cognitive dynamics in linguistic interactions (pp. 125e153). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Linell, P. (2005). The written language bias in Linguistics: Its nature, origins and transformations. London: Routledge. Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking language, mind, and world dialogically: Interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Love, N. (2004). Cognition and the language myth. Language Sciences, 26(6), 525e544. Lyman, S. M., & Scott, M. B. (1966). Territoriality: a neglected social dimension. Social Problems, 15, 236e249. Maturana, H. (1970). Biology of cognition. BCL Report # 9.0. Urbana: University of Illinois. Maturana, H. (1978). Biology of language: the epistemology of reality. In G. Miller, & E. Lenneberg (Eds.), Psychology and biology of language and thought (pp. 28e62). New York: Academic Press. Maturana, H. R. (2000). The nature of the laws of nature. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 17(5), 459e468. Maturana, H., Mpodozis, J., & Letelier, J. C. (1995). Brain, language, and the origin of human mental functions. Biological Research, 28, 15e26. Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1987). The tree of Knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding. Boston: Shambhala. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Menary, R. (2007). Writing as thinking. Language Sciences, 29(5), 621e632. Morris, C. W. (1938). Foundations of the theory of signs. In O. Neurath, R. Carnap, & C. W. Morris (Eds.), International encyclopedia of unified science (Vol. 1, No 2). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (Reprinted in one cloth-bound volume containing the 10 numbers of Volume 1; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1955, 771d37). Olson, D. R. (1994). The World on paper: The conceptual and cognitive implications of writing and reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pennycook, A. (2008). Language-free linguistics and linguistics-free languages. In A. Mahboob, & N. Knight (Eds.), Questioning linguistics (pp. 18e31). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Quine, W. V. O. (1969). Ontological relativity and other essays. New York: Columbia University Press. Romano, L. (2005). Literacy of college graduates is on decline: Survey's finding of a drop in reading proficiency is inexplicable, experts say (p. A12). Washington Post. December 25. Ross, D. (2007). H. sapiens as ecologically special: what does language contribute? Language Sciences, 29(5), 710e731. Sampson, G. (2009). An interview with Dan Everett. In G. Sampson, D. Gill, & P. Trudgill (Eds.), Language complexity as an evolving variable (pp. 213e229). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Searle, J. (1998). Mind, language and society: Philosophy in the real world. New York: Basic Books. Sinha, C. (2014). Niche construction and semiosis: biocultural and social dynamics. In D. Dor, C. Knight, & J. Lewis (Eds.), The social origins of language (pp. 31e46). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Soloveichik, M. S., & Kuzmenko, N. S. (2008). Russkij jazyk: K tainam nashego jazyka. Uchebnik dlia 2 klassa obshcheobrazovatelnykh uchrezhdenij. V dvukh chastiakh. Chast 1 (6th revised ed.). Smolensk: Assotsiatsija XXI vek. Sommer, R. (1969). Personal space: The behavioral basis of design. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall. Steffensen, S. V. (2011). Beyond mind: an extended ecology of languaging. In S. J. Cowley (Ed.), Distributed language (pp. 185e210). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In R. W. Rieber, & A. S. Carton (Eds.), Problems of general psychology: Vol. 1. The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (pp. 39e285). New York: Plenum.
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New Ideas in Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/newideapsych
Language as human ecology: A new agenda for linguistic education Alexander V. Kravchenko Department of Foreign Languages, Baikal National University of Economics & Law, 11 Lenin St., Irkutsk, 664003, Russia
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 26 February 2015 Received in revised form 27 May 2015 Accepted 30 May 2015 Available online xxx
The efficiency of linguistic education based on the code model of language is questioned. The view of written language as a representation of speech ignores the important difference between the experientially different cognitive domains of speech and writing which affect human cognitive development by establishing an extended ecology of languaging. As a consequence, functional illiteracy in societies with established literate cultures becomes a real threat. It can be avoided when it is understood that language is a kind of socially driven behavior which contributes, in a quite definitive way, to the rich context of the human ecological niche, including texts, without which it cannot be understood. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Speech Writing Functional literacy Niche-construction Ecology
1. Introduction: the puzzled parent When, in Russia, children go to school for the first time at the age of 7, they are full of great expectations and eager with anticipation, because they are entering a new world e the world of learning. They know, even if only intuitively, that becoming part of this world is a necessary condition for becoming an adult person in contemporary society, which thrives in mind-boggling technologies. In the Russian culture, a child's educational enterprise is referred to as a ‘quest for knowledge’, and the 1st of September, which is the official beginning of a new school year, is called the Day of Knowledge. However, soon enough, after the first or second year of elementary school, many children begin to show signs of boredom often intertwined with confusion and even bewilderment. It turns out that learning is not always fun, nor something a child's mind is ready to comprehend. They often cannot find a use for their ‘new knowledge’, and children are very pragmatic when it comes to doing something. Characteristically, as a third-grader, my own son clearly showed this alarming change of attitude; as a matter of fact, his big sisters before him, and millions of kids worldwide have gone through the same stage of grim revelation that schooling was not quite what they had thought it to be. As a result, by the end of elementary school a lot of children undergo a metamorphosis; a big-eyed quizzical little creature enthralled by the exciting wonders
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of the adult human world and ready to work miracles with the newly “acquired” knowledge, by and by turns into a dull, average, disaffected individual struggling to survive in what has, paradoxically, become a not-so-friendly world of hard work and emotional strain often devoid of meaning e at least, to the child's eye. Many parents of young children are all too familiar with this inexplicable loss of motivation on the part of their offspring, and the question, of course, is: “What goes on in the world of school education?” To answer this question, one must take a closer look at the ideology and methodology of education as institutionalized practices and techniques accepted and approved in most literate cultures. 2. Linguistic education as institutionalization of the language myth 2.1. Reification of knowledge and its consequences According to Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (1996), education is “the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life”. The key words in this definition are impart (1. to make known; tell; relate. 2. to give; bestow; communicate) and acquire (1. to come into possession of; get as one's own. 2. to gain for oneself through one's actions or efforts), which give a very clear idea of how knowledge is conceptualized and what education is really about. In our world view knowledge is a thing, a commodity which may be traded by ‘giving’ and ‘taking’,
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or a prize for one's efforts, and education is the actual process of such trade taking place at special commodity exchanges e educational institutions, such as schools and colleges. But where are these articles of trade (that is, pieces of knowledge) stored, and what do they look like? The layman's answer is, of course: “In books (textbooks)”, which are depositories of the vast knowledge accumulated by humans. We read books to learn something, and it is simply impossible to imagine a school without texts and teachers whose job is to provide some of the knowledge they have and make sure that the students take it and add to it by reading more on a given topic, thus expanding their knowledge. In other words, education, as a process, is, for the most part, ‘extraction’ of knowledge from texts; this knowledge becomes something we ‘possess’ and may ‘pass on’, should we choose to do so, to someone else. How do we pass it on? Verbally, by telling someone something, or by writing another text for a targeted readership. Basically, the orthodox view of the function of language seen as a tool for expressing and conveying meanings, thoughts, information, or what have you, stems from our reification of knowledge as something potentially external to us as human organisms, something ‘out there’. It possesses value because it helps (or so we believe) to better understand the world around us, and is a reliable guide in our daily life. It is always to a person's credit to be known as highly educated or well-read, that is, knowledgeable. However, the ugly truth is that the amount of education a person has does not necessarily relate to his cognitive ability to meaningfully interact with the world which, to humans, is, first and foremost, the world of social interactions. The so-called knowledge imparted to a student very often continues to remain something external to him, not unlike a collection of potentially useful things stored in the attic for some later day e which, as we all know, may never come. On a social scale, this situation has dire consequences, often affecting the very quality of our life for the simple reason, very well expressed by Maturana and Varela (1987) in their seminal book The Tree of Knowledge: “All doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing”. To know something is not to ‘possess knowledge’ as a kind of acquired commodity; it is to be in a state that allows an organism to meaningfully interact with the environment. And every actual state of an organism is determined by the organism's structure as a result of a history of fine structural coupling of the organism with the environment.1 That is, as emphasized by Maturana (1970: 1), “knowledge as an experience is something personal and private that cannot be transferred”. Language is something material inasmuch as it involves various observables accompanying linguistic behavior (vocalizations, gestures, cultural artifacts, etc). However, as a kind of adaptive behavior language does not convey information; it establishes a relational domain of coordinated interactions which both determine, and are determined by, the states of interacting organisms. An observer interprets the activity of languaging using his experience of interactions with the observed in their consensual domain,2 and this interpretation triggers changes in the observer's state as a structure determined living system which the observer describes as “understanding”. For example, when a father introduces his son to the components of a car engine so that he can learn to do some car repairs, he might say, pointing: “This is a carburetor”. The son, as an
1 “A structure determined system is a system such that all that happens in it or with it arises as a consequence of its structural dynamics, and in which nothing external to it can specify what happens in it, but only triggers a change in its structure determined by its structure” (Maturana, 2000: 461). 2 A consensual domain is the domain of interactions that appears to the observer as a network of sequences of mutually triggering interlocked conducts (Maturana, 1978).
observer, may understand that there is a relationship between the component pointed at and the vocalization that accompanies the pointing; he may also understand that a carburetor is somehow important and that his dad ‘knows’ something about it from relevant experience. However, even though the child now knows the name of something he did not know before, it is not the kind of knowledge that helps him to meaningfully interact with the perceived components of the world (‘all doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing’). What the father ‘knows’ about carburetors does not automatically become part of his son's ‘knowledge’, because it is not something grounded in his personal experience; in this sense, there is no knowledge transfer. Knowledge is constructed by a living system “on the go”; it is an emergent phenomenon. But if this is so, and knowledge, indeed, cannot be transferred (specifically, via language as a tool for such transfer), then what is the process of education about? Looking for an answer, we must turn to the established view of language as a means of communication. 2.2. The ‘fixed code’ fallacy The spread of Saussure's views on language and semiotics in the 20th c., institutionalized in linguistics as the ‘scientific study of language’, was, perhaps, the final touch in creating the language myth (Harris, 1981) e a belief that language is a finite set of rules generating an infinite set of pairs, in which material forms are combined with meanings; it is used to exchange thoughts in accordance with a prearranged plan determined by those rules. This view is very well illustrated by the scheme a second-grader finds on the inside of the back cover of his textbook in Russian (shown in Fig. 1): words-as-blocks (in the top-left box) are arranged into sentences (the bottom-left box) which become rings of various sizes and color of which the pyramid of text is built around the core of the ‘main thought’ (the right-side box). The language myth is the product of two interconnected fallacies which are at the basis of construing language as a fixed code (Harris, 1981): the telementational fallacy (the belief that language is used to exchange thought) and the determinacy fallacy (the belief that such exchanges take place in accordance with a prearranged plan determined by a finite set of rules). The fixed-code fallacy accounts for the publicly shared illusion that language is a tool for the transfer of thought. In this case, both language and thought become ontologically independent. Yet, this seeming independence is nothing more than the result of an ‘epistemic cut’ between what is observed (language as a kind of human social behavior, or languaging) and the observer (a languaging human describing language). Cognition is a biological phenomenon, and to understand it as such an observer and his role in cognition must be taken into account and explained. As argued by Maturana (1978: 29), science is a closed cognitive domain in which all statements are, of necessity, subject dependent, valid only in the domain of interactions in which the standard observer exists and operates. As observers we generally take the observer for granted and, by accepting his universality by implication, ascribe many of the invariant features of our descriptions that depend on the standard observer to a reality that is ontologically objective and independent of us. This is exactly what happens in linguistics. The language we speak plays a bad joke on us, setting a trap few can escape. Because we as humans “happen in language” as our immediate interactional environment, and because what we know of the world comes through the agency of the body in action e particularly, through linguistic interactions with others as we take what Cowley (2011)
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Fig. 1. Words, sentences, and texts as things (adopted from (Soloveichik & Kuzmenko, 2008)).
calls the language stance3 e we as observers are in a perpetual epistemic trap of language. To us, language literally creates the world we attempt to describe and understand as if language were, indeed, no part of it. However, “[L]anguage is the house of Being. In its home man dwells” (Heidegger, 1978: 217). As pointed out by Damasio (1994), while there is an external reality, and while our experiences of it are real, this reality happens to be our reality; one could add that “our reality” as a meaningful concept, which others are capable of sharing, is the reality of languaging. However, in the philosophy of external realism (cf. Alston, 1996; Devitt & Sterelny, 1999; Searle, 1998, inter alia) and counter to Vygotsky's (1987) profound insights, language and thought become manipulable things independent of each other. Because language is viewed as a code for ‘transmitting’ thought, the existence of a special language of thought, or mentalese (Fodor, 1975), is often taken for granted. Its ontological independence from language does not make, for example, Chinese mentalese any different from English mentalese. This results in the ultimate translatability principle e the idea that exact translation from one language to another is possible and desirable. However, this is an illusion (cf. Quine, 1969; Sampson, 2009), even though for a single obvious reason: we cannot coherently identify a realm of non-linguistic thoughts or ideas that language, according to the orthodox view, encodes (Love, 2004). Vygotsky argued that thinking and language cannot be separated; the biology of cognition makes a stronger claim e that the human brain thinks in language understood as a manner of living it creates: “As our existence as human beings takes place in our operation in language, the features of our existence that constitute our humanness, pertain to our relational domain and occur in our “languaging”, not in our bodyhood” (Maturana, Mpodozis, & Letelier, 1995: 23; original emphasis).
3 “Stance taking makes agents into observers who construe and shape the lived environment as they integrate perception with action” (p. 5); part of this environment is words observers learn to “hear” e just like they learn to see “things” in pictures. Later, “what we hear” is used as ways of constraining our actions.
Failing to realize this, educational linguistics continues to stagnate. Methods and techniques used by language teachers are based on the fallacious code model sustained by the language myth and the translatability principle. Here is just one personal example of how far language educators may go in making the lives of young children miserable.
2.3. What do they study in the Russian language class? When he became a second-grader, my son suddenly took to coming to his dad for help with his home assignments in Russian. He knew that his dad was a linguist who ought to understand what an eight-year-old boy couldn't. Well, the funny part is that I couldn't understand those assignments either. First, they rarely had anything to do with language as speech, that is, natural spoken language used, according to linguists, for live communication; students were given tasks which involved doing various things with texts that had been prepared in a specific way to elicit from the student some metalinguistic knowledge previously given to him both by the teacher in the classroom and in a relevant paragraph in the textbook itself. Second, even if some tasks did bear on speech to a certain extent, it was only because reference to specific acoustic phenomena, such as sounds and syllables, was necessary to explicate the meanings encoded in special symbols used in the textbook to schematize certain inscriptions as fragments of written words. As a matter of fact, the student was asked to engage in bona fide cryptography by using a number of little geometric shapes (that is, a special code) to ‘translate’ the actual characteristics of a particular vocalization into a string of abstract symbols in order to avoid spelling mistakes when writing (Fig. 2). Characteristically, the abovementioned Russian Language textbooks for grades 2 through 4 all have the subtitle “K tainam nashego jazyka” which roughly translates as ‘Uncovering the secrets of our tongue’, and to emphasize the idea that to study Russian is to break a certain code, the front cover of the book for second-graders features a kind of encryption of the word zagadka ‘riddle’ (Fig. 3). Later on, in middle and high school students continue to study the Russian language, a real heavy-weight on the curriculum in terms of scheduled workload. Even though educators are not
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Fig. 2. “The Writing Hazards” diagram.
emphasis on spelling. Being skilled in such analysis helps the students e or so the teachers believe e produce their own texts which are expected to meet certain requirements in terms of readability and expressiveness. And if a student can produce a good text, he is often believed to have acquired good communication skills. However, those with relevant pedagogical experience will, I believe, agree that this is hardly the case: very often school graduates not only lack adequate skills in producing what counts as a good text, but their communication skills in live dialogical interactions often do not differ in sophistication from the skills they had when they first came to school. The reason for that is simple: speech and writing are experientially different cognitive domains (Kravchenko, 2009a), and viewing them as two versions of a code which stand in one-to-one correspondence (a commonly accepted practice in education) has serious consequences for cognition, both on individual and social levels. While natural linguistic behavior is intrinsically dialogical, being both embodied and other oriented, writing and its products (texts) are not. Speech and writing belong to experiential domains of different cognitive dynamics (cf. Kravchenko, 2012): developmentally, these dynamics impact differently on the linguistic/behavioral strategies of individuals and communities e something that school educators don't seem to realize. 2.4. Defeated expectations
explicit on the point, it may be clearly seen from the figures above that the real object of study is not language as human interactive behavior (communication). Rather than learning efficient ways of interacting dialogically, students are taught to analyze texts using knowledge ‘imparted’ to them by the teachers, with a special
Fig. 3. The Russian Language textbook cover.
Our cognition of the world is rooted in interactions with the environment which is psychologically structured as follows: (i) personal space, (ii) home territory, (iii) public territory (Lyman & Scott, 1966; Sommer, 1969). As a socially structured domain of interactions, public territory is subdivided into three sub-domains: educational, intra-cultural, and cross-cultural. The first and most important stage in taking a language stance by a young human organism is set within its personal space and home territory as primary domains of linguistic interactions; phenomenological experience in these domains moulds a person's initial standards of linguistic behavior whose adequacy is continuously tested through direct or indirect appeal to authority (parents and family members). The adequacy of a child's linguistic behavior is assessed by relating it to the caretakers' personal values, priorities and idiosyncrasies. Importantly, words and utterances do not become abstract symbols; they form a network of perceptually grounded signals (indices) which cue the child's behavior in his adaptive interactions with the social environment. As a young individual grows up, his domain of interactions expands into the domain of public relations, and before he functionally integrates into society and its culture as a relatively autonomous agent, a long period in his developmental history falls on educational interactions. In an educational environment, with the already established standards of linguistic behavior grounded in his consensual domain of family/home interactions, an individual directs his adaptive efforts at eliciting encouragement and approval on the part of educators guided by their own values and priorities. The child is under permanent pressure to get approval for his interactional behavior in a classroom by the ultimate authority, the teacher. And what the teacher approves is not the cognitivepragmatic efficiency of the student's dialogical interactions with others, but ‘correct’ manipulations of inscriptions (morphemes, words, phrases, sentences and, ultimately, texts) as a result of applying the rules that govern the use of writing; therefore, writing rules become of paramount importance, a kind of the pivoting point of linguistic education: if the student knows the rules, he will produce good texts and get good grades. However, texts do not represent speech. Writing, as a kind of socially sanctioned code, allows humans, after special training, to
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relate concatenations of graphic images (inscriptions) to components of possible speech events such as separate words and word sequences (utterances). To read aloud a text is to reconstruct the sound matter of a possible speech event; it is not a reconstruction of a natural linguistic event as such. By the same token, to write a text is not to enter a communicative interaction with others; at best, the writer interacts with his own cognizing self by drawing on the available experience of a history of linguistic interactions, which may vary considerably in terms of exposure both to dialogical interactions and texts, and creating, as a result of interpretation, a possible (that is, not grounded in personal phenomenological experience) world for the reader. Just because texts do not represent speech and because the cognitive dynamics of speech and writing are essentially different, there is no direct correlation between relevant skills in these two domains: an excellent writer may be an awful speaker, and an eloquent speaker may find it hard to write a coherent text. Dialogical interactions occur in space-time as communicating parties monitor, and respond to, what happens (Linell, 2009). By contrast, texts are typically not read by others as they are produced. Since the production process itself is inaccessible, analysis of written language necessarily focuses on texts and their component parts. Letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. resemble objects that can be manipulateddespecially when typesetting and editing a text on a computer, for example. Given the interactional nature of speech, this sets up an ontologically distinct semiotic system (Kravchenko, 2012). While, in Maturana's (1978) terms, languaging is orientational, the primary cognitive function of writing is analogous to internal, or biological, memory. Unlike languaging, which extends the human sensorium (Morris, 1938), writing is a kind of storage and retrieval system that allows humans to ‘accumulate’ experience and knowledge. However, inscriptions by themselves, taken outside of interactional contextdwhen human cognizers gain and extend their experience of graphic symbolizations of natural language vocalizations through learning to read and writeddo not contain knowledge. They are a kind of scaffolding that prompts how to use our phenomenological experience in solving cognitive tasks at hand, thus changing our current state as cognitive systems. Once we are skilled in writing, we can ‘dump’ the cognitive load on material artifacts and, later, use them to interact with our cognizing selves. While languaging is embodied and distributed, writing establishes cultural artifacts. Unlike speech, these impact on individuals and communities across historical and evolutionary scales. As separate cognitive domains, they set up contrasting bodyeworld relations through contrasting cognitive dynamics (Kravchenko, 2009a). Metaphorically, the domain of texts is a kind of Petri dish for culturing individual humans. There is, however, a difference: by thriving in the cognitively nourishing medium of texts, humans, far from depleting it, grow and cultivate it by adding new texts. Yet, we pay a price. Individuals who cannot thrive in the culture or even eschew it, put their potential for social adaptation in jeopardy; failure to interact effectively with texts may lead to cognitive dysfunction (Kravchenko, 2009b). However, effective interaction does not depend on literacy as such; literacy does not produce cognitive development, it is just a prerequisite for a new kind of experience substantially different from dialogical interactions. In literate societies, ‘the world on paper’ (Olson, 1994) becomes a crucial part of the human cognitive niche which we actively construct, and in which we must show our adaptive fitness e just as we show our adaptive fitness in natural dialogical interactions. The written language bias in linguistics (Linell, 2005) is responsible for the peculiar situation the conventional linguist seems unwilling to admit: so-called “linguistic facts” gleaned from “linguistic data” (such as written words, sentences, and texts) are
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nothing more than educated interpretations. The entire issue of native speakers' ‘competence’ in defining what may be considered as ‘grammatical’ is an issue of educationally predetermined preferences. And in linguistics, education has been usually understood and implemented as indoctrination. To quote Harris (1981: 12): “An educational system based upon grammar books and dictionaries has already succeeded in institutionalizing the fixed code fallacy”. This has grave ideological and methodological implications for linguistic education: (1) the profound difference between speech and writing as cognitive activities which belong to different experiential domains is overlooked; (2) educators instill in students a thoroughly dualistic world view in which mind and language are ontologically independent entities, (3) the role of language (both spoken and written) in shaping human cognitive abilities and sustaining a unique speciesspecific ecology is not recognized. As a consequence, modern societies with established literate cultures show signs of growing functional illiteracy (Romano, 2005) e inability to meaningfully modify one's behavior as a social agent while interacting with texts as cultural artifacts which play an important role in human cognitive development (Сunningham & Stanovich, 2001). 3. Language as human ecology 3.1. Languaging and niche construction Language is inseparable from our biology and the praxis of the living (Maturana, 1970). As cognitive (living) systems, social systems are not just biological; as units of interactions with the environment operating in the relational domain of interactions, they establish an ecological niche which cannot be characterized in terms of physical space. For humans, their relational domain is constituted by languaging as species-specific socially and historically determined behavior; this behavior contributes to the rich context of the human ecological niche without which it cannot be understood (Steffensen, 2011). However, because of the epistemic trap of language, we have created a profoundly physicalist picture of language, conceptualizing its ‘units’ and what they ‘stand for’ as discrete manipulable objects. Expressions such as “I gave him a few ideas to play with”, or “I can't find the right words to express my meaning” and the like, are often taken at face value, and words (just as ideas that words “stand for”) are hypostatized into special “things” that are in the head. This propensity to misinterpret reality may be seen in many traditional linguistic concepts, as, to quote Pennycook (2008: 22), “linguistics has profoundly misconstrued language through its myths about autonomy, systematicity and the rule-bound nature of language”. As an object of inquiry, language is defined by the method chosen for its study. Choosing to analyze texts as material objects which consist of words and sentences as things, we can't help concluding that any text is the result of combining and recombining words into sentences which are organized according to a set of rules. This leads to an established view of language as an inventory of words (lexicon) and rules for their combination (grammar). Correspondingly, linguistics as a science is the study of “words” as autonomous entities that possess meanings and are combined to produce “sentences” as expressions of thoughts. Thus, the goal of educators is seen in helping the students to expand their vocabulary and master the rules of grammar necessary to produce
Please cite this article in press as: Kravchenko, A. V., Language as human ecology: A new agenda for linguistic education, New Ideas in Psychology (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.05.002
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coherent texts. Upon accomplishing this, a young individual is believed to have become linguistically competent, capable of not only reading and understanding texts, but producing his own inscriptions as meaningful cultural artifacts. However, in terms of functional literacy, reading and writing are not about being able to vocalize inscriptions or inscribe vocalizations e the standard meaning of the word “literate”; in this sense, being ‘literate’ does not make one socially mature. As cognitive processes, reading and writing differ in their dynamics from natural dialogical interactions. Because manipulation of written vehicles is part of our cognitive processing, writing transforms our cognitive abilities, becoming a way of thinking (Menary, 2007); it provides a new medium for the active construction of thoughts (Clark, 2007), and print culture “affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insights possible” (Bradshaw and Nichols, 2004: 7). In other words, writing and its products become, along with natural linguistic interactions, part of our ‘biocultural niche’ (Sinha, 2014). Both writing and reading are largely introspective processes that take place on a time scale different from the time scale of languaging; however, in dialogical contextesensitive interactions, when we make extensive use of dynamical features that include vocalizations, gestures, facial expressions, particular ways of orienting to others and the world, we don't have the luxury of ruminating. To use a metaphor, we are carried by the language flow along a trajectory we often cannot reverse even if we don't like it. We may choose to swim with it, if we can, to get us to a desirable destination, or we may just float, but in any case we must be able to sustain our buoyancy if we don't want to drown. This is what learning to language is about: it is about survival in the human world. The fittest survives. For children learning to take a language stance (that is, learning to stay buoyant in the language flow) linguistic structures function, first and foremost, as indices, thus ensuring perceptual groundedness of language as orientational activity in a consensual domain, or adaptive behavior in an organism's cognitive niche. To a child learning to language in a natural way, the process consists mostly in making sense (cf. Cuffari, Di Paolo, & De Jaegher, 2014), through interaction with the components of the consensual domain, of what is observed as happening in the child's cognitive niche. Vocalizations the child hears do not have any intrinsic meaning; being components of the first-order consensual domain, they are perceived as playing a certain part in the network of causal relationships between the components of the consensual domain, thus acquiring meaning. In other words, understanding (interpreting the observed linguistic behavior of others and self) is valuerealizing activity (Hodges, 2014). To a child, linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena are not two worlds independent of one another; they are facets of a network of causal relationships between words and things (or an interworld), which function as indices with respect to one another (Kravchenko, 2003). What is known as “natural language acquisition” is spontaneous semiosis grounded in the physical context of interlocked conducts (a consensual domain of interactions), and as such it predetermines intrinsic indexicality of each and every component of the consensual domain (words and non-words alike) e that is, their orientational function. That is why to a child disembodied inscriptions (texts) make sense only if the words of which they consist, as well as the relationships between them, relate to the child's experience of identifying them as orientational devices in the child's world. New words or novel uses are a cognitive handicap, and a child needs time and effort to negotiate them by construing a possible world in which new words or novel uses make sense. With time, this newly acquired skill unleashes in a child a cognitive power far superior to that of an illiterate mind.
Basically, this is what makes humans so different and so special compared to all other species. Human agents are endowed with high-level cognitive abilities of a different kind; they have a predisposition for languaging which constitutes their cognitive domain. Languaging is the constitutive activity of individual humans as components of higher-order living systems (groups and populations), and human cognitive abilities emerge in the process of the development of the system components (infants) into fully functional agents. While the whole systemic behavior of the human society depends on the cognitive properties of the components themselves, these emerge in the domain of languaging as specific behavior of the living system. Neglect of the biological groundedness of human social systems results in overlooking the obvious e that human society is an ecological phenomenon. Language provides an extended ecology within which human cognizers orient themselves and others to values as “multiple, heterarchical, dynamic, and legitimating constraints on actions” (Hodges, 2007: 590). This ‘constraining’ function of language is something that needs to be recognized as fundamental for the ideology of linguistic education: its agenda must be redefined, forsaking the code model for a more sensible and comprehensive view of language as a flux of experience which makes us ‘ecologically special’ (Ross, 2007). So, what are the possible steps to take toward this goal? 3.2. A new agenda for linguistic education Educators must realize that we are what we do, and most of what we do is mediated by language. While both speech and writing are at the core of the human biocultural niche, as semiotic phenomena of different dynamics they impact differently on the cognitive development of individuals. The indexical nature of linguistic interactions grounded in the here-and-now of the speaker makes them an orientational mechanism that helps establish a system of values as a result of the continuous process of sensemaking in the relational domain of languaging. This system of values sets guidelines for socially adaptive behavior, and in the formative years of schooling children learn to orient (among other things) to the values held by their teachers, acquiring patterns of linguistic behavior that would accompany them throughout their future life. Teaching to read and write is not about ‘imparting’ to students enhanced communication skills. The role of writing in literate cultures is fundamental in sustaining their historical continuity, but it is also much more than that. Because texts are disembodied and atemporal, literate minds function differently, allowing for abstract thinking, thus augmenting an individual's cognitive powers. The goal of education as a social institution is to facilitate cognitive development of young individuals to be functionally integrated in society. Such effective integration is impossible without individuals being able to use writing as ‘a particular mode of operation of the human mind’ (Harris 2000: xi) which enhances their adaptability in the relational domain of social interactions. Guided by the code model of language, educators fail to see how lack of relevant experience in the domain of written texts over the developmental history of an individual leads to functional illiteracy and d not surprisingly d lack of participation in cultural life. Written culture is an ecological medium; reading and writing are cognitive activities critical for the development of a child's mind, because they allow him to reach far beyond the here-and now of his lived experience, constructing multiple possible worlds in which fantasies often may and do become reality. Construction and interpretation of such possible worldsdrather than inscription rules per sedshould be the focal point of teaching higher level literacy skills. Because the human mind is a linguistic mind in that it emerges
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and develops in language as a manner of living it creates, the instrumental view of language should be abandoned as inadequate and even harmful, because it leads to grossly underestimating the role of language in a child's developmental history of becoming a socially mature human. As Mead (1934: 222) argued, “no individual has a mind which operates simply in itself, in isolation from the social life-process in which it has arisen or out of which it has emerged”. And for humans these social life-processes take place in the relational domain of language as a biocultural niche constructed in the course of such processes. As children grow, they strive to fit into this niche by developing adaptive behavior. The adaptive adequacy of behavior depends on individual cognitive development which is crucially affected by the flux of languaging experience; meaning, sense-making, and value-realization all emerge from our experience of languaging together and with ourselves. Linguistic behavior is characterized by a large number of situational variables affecting the actual outcome of communication; therefore, meanings are not contained in words, they are products of interpretation as an experientially determined adaptive effort to make sense of the world around us. Realizing this may help release a child's creative powers constrained by the current educational practice of teaching language as a code. References Alston, W. (1996). A realist conception of truth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bradshaw, T., & Nichols, B. (2004). Reading at risk: A survey of literary reading in America. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts. Research Division Report 46. Clark, A. (2007). A sense of presence. Pragmatics & Cognition, 15(3), 413e433. Cowley, S. J. (2011). Taking a language stance. Ecological Psychology, 23(3), 185e209. Cuffari, E. C., Di Paolo, E., & De Jaegher, H. (2014). From participatory sense-making to language: there and back again. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1e37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9404-9. Сunningham, A. E., & Stanovich, K. E. (2001). What reading does for the mind. Journal of Direct Instruction, 1(2), 137e149. Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Devitt, M., & Sterelny, K. (1999). Language and reality: An introduction to the philosophy of language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Fodor, J. A. (1975). The language of thought. New York: Crowell. Harris, R. (1981). The language myth. London: Duckworth. Harris, R. (2000). Rethinking Writing. London: Athlone Press. Heidegger, M. (1978). Letter on humanism. In D. F. Krell (Ed.), Basic writings (Martin Heidegger) (pp. 213e265). London: Routledge. Hodges, B. H. (2007). Good prospects: ecological and social perspectives on conforming, creating, and caring in conversation. Language Sciences, 29(5), 584e604. Hodges, B. H. (2014). Righting language: a view from ecological psychology. Language Sciences, 41, 93e103. Kravchenko, A. V. (2003). The ontology of signs as linguistic and non-linguistic entities: A cognitive perspective. In Annual review of cognitive linguistics, 1 pp. 179e191). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kravchenko, A. V. (2009a). The experiential basis of speech and writing as different cognitive domains. Pragmatics & Cognition, 17(3), 527e548. Kravchenko, A. V. (2009b). Speech, writing, and cognition: the rise of communicative dysfunction. In W. Oleksy, & P. Stalmaszczyk (Eds.), Cognitive approaches
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Please cite this article in press as: Kravchenko, A. V., Language as human ecology: A new agenda for linguistic education, New Ideas in Psychology (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.05.002