Language on youtube Dec 07
This post was supposed to be quick seasonal sum up of videos of interest to those stuck in teaching, stuck in Japan and/ or stuck in the house, but the first video I found on searching “language” was so interesting that I didn’t get past reading up about that:
Unless I’m missing kindergarten classes more than I realised, this video of a cute baby doing sign language is fascinating because of the consequences of this method of using sign language to communicate with hearing children really working or not could have for linguistics, language teaching and child development. Having just read one slightly out of date popular science book on the origins of human language, I’ll also be giving my expert opinion on what this could say about that and what that could say about this.
The basic claims of the proponents of Baby Sign (using either a variation of deaf sign language or an individual sign language developed by the mother to communicate with a baby that has normal hearing but that can’t yet make the sounds to speak due to its age) are that it helps a baby communicate long before it can speak and therefore reduces the frustration of not being able to tell people exactly what it needs. The fact that these claims are sufficiently limited and common sense is reflected in the fact that no one has been sufficiently enraged at this suggestion to put a disenting view on the Baby sign wikipedia page.
In fact, although the whole idea screamed “over ambitious mothers with flashcards” to me when I first heard it, it was quite hard to track down a dissenting view on the internet at all. Although the review of different views on the Literacy Trust website does mention one example of a child whose speech was retarded by an overemphasis on sign language, it seems clear that can be simply dealt with just by speaking all the time as you sign. This leaves the objection that while it might not hurt it really isn’t necessary, and so isn’t worth the money- but as that describes almost everything modern man spends money on from wide screen TVs to fake fur shawls, I have a feeling that won’t turn out to be a crushing critique.
The question for me is that if signing to your baby (or in fact, signing more to your baby, as everybody uses some gestures) is so useful, why did it take until now for humans to start using something they have been capable of since the stone age? This is tied to the question, if gestures like sign language for the deaf can express everything that speech can, why did humans develop speech at all?
One theory on the original development of language in humans was that it was a replacement for grooming, used as human groups grew in size due to pressures like changes in lifestyle and could no longer interact with all the allies they needed one to one (see Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language by Robin Dunbar- recommended- for more details). With sign language instead of spoken language it would not have been as easy to bring the number of people in a conversation up to six (the limit at which a cocktail party conversation almost always splits off into several smaller groups, and the level of multiplication of interactions needed to go from the maximum ape group sizes of 30 to 50 to the human groups of 150). Sign language would also have had the problems of being difficult to use at night (half of the day near the equator where modern humans evolved), at a distance and when holding children or tools.
For me, what is interesting about all the reasons why humans did not until now use lots of sign language to communicate with their babies and everyone else is that all of them no longer apply. We have electric lights, are rarely in a situation where we cannot free up at least one hand, it is considered rude to hold a conversation by shouting at someone out of sight, families and other conversational groups tend to be smaller etc. etc.
In summary, I surprise myself with being unable to find any objection to Baby Sign at all (I can hear the sigh of relief from Baby Sign trainers all over the world who were just waiting for my conclusion). Even if it turns out to be almost entirely useless in the long term, the fact that it makes the mother and/ or father take more of an interest in their baby than in the TV or the bottle of sherry under the sink has to be a good thing.
For a fascinating and very accessible guide to sign language, see “Seeing Voices” by Oliver Sacks.
After all that, a little youtube light relief:
Berlitz advertisement that makes the th/ s pronunciation problem funny
and the Berlitz ad that relaunched the career of MC Hammer
Thanks to the Developingteachers.com newsletter for these three. And there’s more…
Victor Borge on Inflationary Language (the fact that we can understand this probably means something, but until I work that out it’s purely for entertainment…)
Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie “We’re talking about language”
“The Queen’s Language”- A Nigerian corrects Jamaican English, from The Real McCoy
and no survey of English teaching on the web would be complete without another mention of Mind Your Language, both a TV comedy starring English teachers and possibly the least racist programme on 1970s British TV.