TEACHING STUDENTS TALKINGS : MASTER GLOBAL ESSAY

 

A pioneering linguist, Lila Gleitman illuminated the way children/future students learn to talk. So, '' What do they know, and when?''

AN early piece of Lila Geitman's research, for example, investigated small children's '' telegraphic''  speech, in which many words are left out : a toddler might say '' throw ball '' rather than '' throw me the ball''.

This seems to imply that the child's knowledge is primitive. But she found that children nonetheless comply with instructions better when their parents use adult-style English than when they mimic their offspring. 

She and her colleagues concluded that youngsters know more than they can say.

Parents prefer to think that they can teach their children most of what they learn. But Gleitman's work supported the idea that youngsters are somehow programmed to learn, even if what they hear from those around them is sparse and unstructured.

So parents do need to use ''motherese'' - her husband Henry's term with their children. She found that their progressive mastery of language rules had little to do with how much [ or little ] motherese their caregivers resorted to.

As the learning process goes on, children deploy some remarkable strategies. They often seem to correctly guess what a word means after hearing it just once. 

The physical environment is an obvious spur [ as when they hear ''dog'' and see one at the same time].

But how would a child guess the meaning of the verb in '' I believed that he lost his keys ''? Gleitman noticed that the sentence structure is identical to those with other verbs that mean similar things [ ie, refer to states of mind] : saw, remembered, imagined, forgot, worried and doubted.

More broadly, it turned out that verbs which are similar in meaning tend to turn up in similar sentence structures.

This intuitive aid helps children astonishingly quickly, a process she called '' syntactic bootstrapping ''.

Gleitman was also a prodigious mentor to other scholars. Many of them were women, for whom she was a pioneer, beginning her own research in the early 1960s while bringing up her own family.

When her husband observed that '' most great scientists are not great men'', she had a ready answer : ''Yeah. For instance I'm not a great man.'' 

The World Students Society thanks Johnson  [The Economist ].