How Myths about Language Affect Education: What Every Teacher Should Know

1. Myths about Language in General

10 CHAPTER 1 Myths about Language in General Tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration. —Samuel Johnson, 1755 Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, need, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. —Walt Whitman, 1888 The quotes represent two dichotomous views in a fundamental and longstanding debate regarding language. Samuel Johnson, an eighteenthcentury lexicographer, intimates that language can degenerate.This represents a common and somewhat alarmist opinion about language that was not only prevalent in Johnson’s time but is in fact still prevalent now. The alarm that Johnson sounded—and that some still think is true—is that English will degenerate into an incoherent mess. On the other end of the linguistic spectrum is poet Walt Whitman. Whitman’s opinion, and likely that of most dictionary writers today, is that language usage arises from the people and is “close to the ground.” Degeneration did not enter his estimation of language, and he did not sound an alarm if language changed.Rather,he focused on the language of the people and what the people in the street used. 11 The misconceptions that will be discussed in this chapter are: 1. Some languages and dialects are better than others. 2. Grammar usage reflects a person’s moral character. 3. Languages and dialects are determined by race. 4. Languages have one correct form, and this form should not change. uMisconception: Some languages and dialects are better than others. Truth: From a grammatical, communicative, and aesthetic perspective, all languages are equal. Linguist William Mackey wrote: “Only before God and the linguist are all languages equal” (1978, p. 7). The reality is that no one language is better than another. Languages have several functions: they allow us to communicate, they help us think, and they situate us in speech communities (O’Grady, Archibald, Aronoff, Rees-Miller, 2005, p. 1). (Pullum and Scholz define speech community as “a human group whose members broadly understand each other’s speech and recognize it as being characteristic of the group” [2001, p. 367].) If these are indeed the primary functions of language,then all languages must be equal because all languages allow their speakers to communicate and identify with groups (Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, 2006). Every language has different words to name and describe objects and actions. And, certainly, the world’s languages differ in grammatical structure. Some languages such as English use definite articles (e.g., the, a), while other languages such as Russian rarely use them. Some languages like Spanish use many prepositions, while others, such as Latin, use very few. These lexical and grammatical differences, however, do not imply superiority or inferiority; superior or inferior status is a label that people ascribe to languages. Myths about Language in General 12 HOW MYTHS ABOUT LANGUAGE AFFECT EDUCATION Equality in Grammar Language equality is not universally understood or accepted.Those who report on language topics for the media also do not understand this and so sometimes make inaccurate statements about language in their stories. I am not implying that it is the media’s job to promulgate all linguistic facts.Rather,I simply am drawing attention to the fact that many people (including teachers) find their erroneous notions about language con- firmed by inaccurate or incomplete statements that appear in the press. Consider this report about Latin in schools: Time magazine ran an article about a school district in Fairfax, Virginia, that was using Latin to help middle schoolers grasp the grammatical structure of English (Eskenazi, 2000). Test scores improved as did students’ grasp of English grammar, but there is one troubling line in the article: Ô =Media Spotlight And once kids master the grammatical structure of Latin— which is simple,logical,and consistent—they will more easily grasp the many grammatical exceptions in English (Eskenazi, 2000, p. 61). The truth is that Latin is not more “simple, logical, and consistent”than English. If you have ever tried to memorize all those inflections (word endings) in Latin, you know the grammar is not simple. English is not simple either. It does not have as many inflections as Latin does, but it does depend on a strict set of rules for syntax (word order). There is a balance in the world...