Linguistics- It tastes good and it’s good for you!
If there are any regular readers out there, you might have worked out that I spend a good amount of my time and effort searching for things to produce and consume that satisfy both the pure pleasure parts of my brain and the “I’m such a good boy” smugness pleasure parts of the brain. Hence the emailing games (!?), trying to be amusing about lesson planning (??),
offering both free massages and to scrap CELTA interview fees etc. etc. etc.
Other habits of mine that manage to fool my unconscious that I am having my cake and eating it include:
- Scandalous books about coke-snorting bond dealers and other “exciting” parts of the business world (improving my knowledge of the business world for my Business English classes)
- Reading Dilbert (ditto)
- Sniggering on the train while reading the manga Urayasutekkin kazoku (kind of a Japanese South Park, but more innocent??) and Chutai Afro Tanaka (Beavis and Butthead without the music??), but always with a dictionary in my hand (studying real spoken Japanese)
- Rewatching Blackadder on youtube (studying history)
- Reading New Scientist in the Physics department library when I should have been studying for my exams
etc. etc. etc.
You might have noticed that I have not actually got round to mentioning linguistics yet (any dissatisfied customers can reclaim their lost 5 minutes reading the above from reception when they leave). That’ll be because the Blackadder of Linguistics hasn’t been written yet, although though there is the so-bad-it’s-good pleasure of the 70s British sitcom Mind Your Language about an English class (15 national stereotypes for the price of one!). Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson manages to pack in a few giggles and a fair amount of hard fact. And Steven Pinker wrote the only good popular science book about language learning I managed to find in ten years of trying, The Language Instinct. His subsequent books get more and more dull though, and according to this video on TED (a good site, a bad speech) he seems to have completely lost it now and be claiming that he has personally discovered that language is a social construct!
Finally, though, I have found one more very readable very inspiring book about language that can fit in my bag and I can open in the limited space I have on the train- Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks. The problem is now I will certainly never manage to finish reading 400 pages of “English as Lingua Frrrrr zzzzzzz“, and I’m going to need more of this easily readable stuff if I am ever to put some intellectual stimulation back into my teaching life. I was thinking of locking up James Gleick Misery-style until he write me a good popular science book on the subject, but can’t track him down. Any recommendations for books that gives you the linguistic in dumbed-down bite size pieces anyone?
October 13th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Stretching the definition of “Linguistics”, but have since thought that “Eats, shoots and leaves” and that body language book by the people that wrote “Women can’t write maps” or somesuch qualify for the “learn something about language teaching even though your brain isn’t working right now” section of the bookshop. Maybe “Watching the English” as well. And at a real stretch, “The Naked Ape” and anything else that explains humans as a type of wildlife. Oh, and there’s that book about the lunatic who contributed to the original Oxford English dictionary.
October 14th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
atcually i found that learning lingustics and have a deep look at it ,something very important for any learnr of language,since lingusticthe scientific study of language. Such study may focus on the sounds, words, and grammar of specific languages; the relationships between languages; or the universal characteristics of all languages. It may also analyse the sociological, psychological, and ethnological aspects of communication.
October 15th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Hi Monira
My point is that all those things should be interesting enough that somewhere could make a page turning best seller out of them, but it just happens to be rarely if ever the case. As ever, though, once I start complaining of something not existing it turns up everywhere. Latest one is an episode of Science in Action that I haven’t got round to listening to yet but looks interesting:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/scia/