On Pragmatic and Semantic Meaning

[kellogg]

Prof. Kellogg

I'm sorry to give in my homework late. ^^:

It's a very cute picture. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with the experiment! So as we will see, it's going to lead the children quite far away from scientific concepts.

The teacher's task is not to teach the semantic meanings of the words, but to teach their PRAGMATIC meanings.

What is the difference? Consider the following exchange;

T: Hello, everybody!

Ss: Hello, teacher.

T: Well, and how are you all today?

Ss: Fine, thanks, and you?

T: Very well.

This exchange contains (roughly speaking) three different communicative functions: greeting, asking about health/기분, and answering about health/기분.

Each communicative function, however, has TWO DIFFERENT realizations.

GREETING:

a) Hello, everybody.

b) Hello, teacher.

ASKING ABOUT HEALTH:

a) How are you all today?

b) And you?

ANSWERING aBOUT HEALTH:

a) Fine, thanks.

b) Very well.

Now, I'd like to argue that this is a normal feature of communicative functions, and that it is one of the things that clearly differentiates a communicative function from the grammatical form in which that function is realized. In real life, we have a situation where very different people realize the same communicative functions in different ways. But in our textbook, we have exactly the opposite, namely different situations in which the same communicative function is realized in exactly the same way. (e.g. "How are you?" or "Where are you from?" or "What's this?")

I want to call the meaning that we realize in a communicative function PRAGMATIC meaning, meaning that is concrete and real and realized in a specific situation. It's interpersonal meaning, and that is why it varies in a single situation: teachers realize it differently from the way that students do, and the first speaker has to realize it differently from the way a second speaker does (because the second speaker can draw on the realization that the first speaker uses, eliding and varying it in various ways).

But the meaning we find in our textbook is really not like this. The meaning we find in our tetbook does not vary in a single situation; it is constant and fixed. We don't find  a wide variety of interdependent communicative functions in our dialogues and we don't find the same communicative function realized in polite and less polite and more polite ways. We find a single structure (e.g. "how are you") used in exactly the same way in many different situations. Let's call this fixed, "dictionary" meaning SEMANTIC meaning,

Of course, BOTH are important. Microgenetically, we build our pragmatic meanings out of our understanding of semantic meaning; that is, we make utterances (in part) out of words that we know from other situations. But phylogenetically, semantic meaning is nothing but the collection and abstraction of thousands and millions and even billions and trillions and quadrillions of instances of pragmatic meaning.

But they are not equally important in IMMERSION teaching. In immersion teaching, one is decisively subordinated to the other. Which is it? Is semantic meaning subordinated to pragmatic meaning? Or is pragmatic meaning subordinated to semantic meaning?

<from  Pizza written by Saturnino Romay, Illustrated by Annie Mitra>

Remember that the test question gave us ONE context--a scientific experiment. But Yukyeong is introducing a completely DIFFERENT context: a kitchen. Why?

One explanation is that she is going to use everyday concepts (from cooking) to bootstrap science concepts (the experiment on cold-blooded animals). But remember we saw THREE possible traps, three possible disadvantages, three possible dangers with this:

a) It takes a lot of TIME and ENERGY--it turns the teacher into a rickshaw puller, using pictures and new contexts in order to create everyday meanings in the child's terms of experience (cooking) which than have to recontextualized yet again, in order to be used in a science concept (the experiment). Because the explanation takes so long (a context is not built in a day!) there will be less time for developing the key science concepts of the experiment (e.g. "cold blooded animal").

b) The everyday concept (e.g. a measuring cup) becomes a substitute for the science concept (a beaker). We never actually get to the science concept (which in this case is NOT a measuring cup--remember?).

c) On the curricular level, the children and the teacher will drag the science concept down to the level of the everyday concept (e.g. "solution" simply becomes "mixture"). But the truth is that science concepts represent a higher level, more powerful way of thinking in a classroom (though they are not necessarily more powerful in other contexts). They are also more SUITED to working in classroom environments, because classroom environments are not so rich in concrete artefacts but they are evolved to suit the presentation and systematization of abstract ideas instead.

So we might expect that Yukyeong's method is going to take a lot of time, and leave her with less time for developing the idea of putting the goldfish in the beaker with the ice. We can also expect that she will never get to the concept of "cold blooded animal" and that she will present the beaker as a measuring cup and not as a receptacle for fish (exactly as Jeongyi did last week!). Finally, we can predict that she will NOT be able to show how the beaker, the thermometer, and the test tube work together in the experiment.

T: Look at the picture. Tell me about it.  Good example of the closed-open strategy in a turn. Bravo!

Ss: Measure? / It's a cook./  주방장이 컵을 들고 있어요./

You can see that Yukyeong is working THREE TIMES too hard; she has to write THREE answers for each initiate. But this DOES give her a good chance to UPTAKE.

The question is, what shall the teacher uptake? She has three options:

a) THE VERB:  Measure?

b)  THE NOUN: It's a cook.

c) THE WHOLE SENTENCE: 주방장이 컵을 들고 있어요./

The problem is that if she uptakes a) then she IGNORES b) and c). Similarly, if she uptakes b) then she ignores a) and c). So it looks like she really HAS to uptake c). But that's not what she does at all.

T: What is the cook doing?

S1 : Measure.

T: Right. "Measure" (pointing to the picture.).

You can see that the child's answer is NOT right grammatically. But the teacher decides that it is right. Why?

 He measures water. With what? (Make a shape of a cup with fingers.)

How do we know that he is measuring water? Actually, the picture says flour and not water.

Notice that this is pretty much what one of the students said. But the teacher ignored me! ㅠ.ㅠ

(I know how the student feels. I feel ignored sometimes TOO!)

S2: Cup! /Beaker?

T: Yes, he measures water with a beaker. We measure the amount of water with a beaker.

Remember that we said that the teacher has to give the function of the instruments IN THE EXPERIMENT. But we also said that the function of the beaker in the experiment was NOT to measure water.

T: Good. How about a pencil? (Show them a pencil.)

What does the teacher mean? We measure the amount of water with a pencil?

Ss: No!

Mysteriously, the children understand. But I thought the teacher was asking if we measure the amount of water with a pencil. Of course, we CAN measure water with a pencil, by dipping the pencil in the water or by marking the water level on the side of a beaker (which as you can see in another posting on this subject does NOT always have markings for measurement). And when we measure water with a beaker, we have to write down the result with a pencil.

T: Okay. When you measure the pencil, what can you use?

S3 : Ruler.

T: Right. We measure the length of a pencil with a ruler.

Notice that S3 does not use an article, and the teacher ignores it. We can see exactly how classroom dialects take shape here, and why Kowal and Swain complain about the lack of attention to form.

Remember our exam question. Look:

1.     Look at the last data. Imagine that you are the teacher. You want to make sure that the children acquire more than just the names of things (test tube, beaker, thermometer). You want to make sure they acquire the conceptual structure. In particular:

a)     You want to draw attention to the conceptual structure of English (that is, plurals for general concepts, and articles for examples and specific objects).

Is the teacher REALLY doing this? How?

The answer is that the teacher is RECASTING. Like this:

S3 : Ruler.

T: Right. We measure the length of a pencil with a ruler.

Michael Long would say that the teacher's recast, "we meaure the length of a pencil with a ruler" provides TWO instances of negative evidence. By noticing the teacher's correct utterance about "a pencil" and "a ruler" and comparing it with S3's incorrect utterance "Ruler", the children will NOTICE THE GAP (Krashen, 1982; Schmidt and Frota, 1984; Merrill Swain, 2000) and this will enable them to acquire the article.

b)    You want to use the words they use in sentences such as “We can measure the temperature with a thermometer.”

But as Merrill Swain points out, this kind of recasting doesn't seem to work very well. In Kowal and Swain, we saw that even dictogloss was too implicit, too subtle, too understated for the kids to notice. The kids were actually better off with cloze exercises. Can you think of a "verbal cloze" exercise which the teacher can use here, as feedback,w hihc will enable her to draw attention to the conceptual structure of "a ruler"?

c)     You want to check comprehension by asking a GENERAL question and then a narrower one to focus on the FUNCTION of the instrument.

We've got a REALLY big problem here. The teacher has decided to forget ENTIRELY about the tools of the experiment and instead concentrate on the word "measure". Now, of course, measure IS a good word, and a very useful one, although in this experiment it's actually NOT very useful, because what we really want to do is not to measure the temperature of the water but rather to COUNT the beatings of the fish gills.

Now, When you measure the temperature of this room, what can you use?

S4: temperature가 뭐에요?

It's interesting that S4 can understand a complex grammatical construction with a subordinate clause (with thirteen words) but cannot understand the word "temperature". Is this realistic?

Why does the teacher begin with VISUAL CONCRETE understanding in the case of the word "measure" but although she has a thermometer at the ready, she does NOT do this with the thermometer?

We said a few weeks ago that a lot of teaching has become GRAPHICS driven; that is, it is focused on the neat things that PPT allows us to do with graphics. This has the curious effect of making it very easy to present different contexts for the same word (e.g. "measure") instead of presenting different words (e.g. "beaker", "thermometer", "test tube") in the same context.

T: Temperature is '온도.'

   You measure the temperature with what?'

S5: 온도계요.

T: Good. We measure the temperature with this. (Show them a thermometer.)

Ss: 온도계다!

T: Yes. What's the name of this? In English.

Ss: ...

T: It is a thermometer.

   Everyone, repeat after me. "ther-mo-me-ter"

Ss: Ther-mo-me-ter.

T: We can measure the temperature with a thermometer.

    Look. Let's fill in the blanks.

<written on the board>

   We can measure the amount of water  with a beaker. (pointing the picture)

   We can measure the t              of the room with a t             .

A good use of a written cloze. But what about using SPOKEN cloze exercises?

S6 : We can measure the temperature of the room with a thermometer.

T: Very good. We can measure the temperature with a thermometer.

You can see that this will make a LOT of work for poor Eunsook:

a) She will have to prepare pretty pictures and PPTs about vocabulary for every lesson, and every tool in the experiment will become the topic of a guessing game, or a game of 수무거개.

b) When she teaches the lesson about solutions in the second semester, she has to start all over again teaching the kids what the tools are, because she hasn't taught the children about test tubes and they will have to learn that beakers are often used for mixing and not for measuring.