Stress Is a Belly Button

3. Sounds, Words, Wordings, and Meanings. Get a sample of data or use THIS one. How does the teacher teach SOUNDS? How does she teach WORDS and WORDINGS? Finally, how does she teach pragmatic and semantic MEANINGS? How could she do it in a more INTEGRATED manner, and why does it matter? T: Ok, let's talk about your daily life. 노애란, What time do you get up? 애란 :I get up at 7 T : at 7. Excellent! very good! In here, we can find that the T wants to teach THE preposition 'at' to students. T stressed 'at' at the response. Ss can understand that T want to let them know how to use 'at'. From the words 'at 7', they can understand the wording. Good. But the point you need to make here is that wording and sounding are NOT really separate. The reason why children DON'T easily learn words like "a" and "the" and "at" is NOT that they are rare or infrequent. In fact, they are very frequent. The reason why children DON'T easily learn words like "a" and "the" and "at" is NOT that they are meaningless. In fact, they are quite meaningful, and a lot of the things we THINK are meaningful are not so meaningful. The reason why children DON'T easily learn words like "a" and "the" and "at" is that they are NOT STRESSED. That's why teachers stress them. But what does this suggest? To me, it suggests that STRESS is STILL a big part of wording and meaning. A very big part. Particularly for children. For children, it can be more important than frequency of wording. It can even be more important than having a lot of "content", or semantic and pragmatic meaning. Why should this be? I don't really know, Saeromi. But I think it is because language is gestated in GESTURE and GESTICULATION just as babies are gestated in their mothers' bodies. And just as babies still bear the "belly button" that shows that they were gestated in their mothers' bodies, language still bears a "belly button" that shows that it comes from gesture and gesticulation. The "pointing" gesture that indicates the important THING in a sentence is called STRESS. The "excitement" gesticulation that indicates the emotional TONE of a sentence is called INTONATION. Both are signs of an earlier period when words, wordings, and meanings were better integrated than they are today (but language was not as flexible or specialized). T : 우리 규동군, Stand up. What time do you do your homework? 규동 : .... T : What time do you do your homework usually? Um? 규동 : .... T : 규동아, 선생님 질문 못 알아들었니? 선생님이 뭐라고 물어 봤어요? 규동 :.. Maybe 규동 can understand the question because 'what time' or 'homework' is familiar words to him, but he dose not know how to answer-answer about real life or just answer like 'in the text book'. T asked again to help him. But it made situation more complex because of adverb 'usually'. 규동 couldn't answer and still hesitated. Good. I agree with this. The problem is the word "usually". It's interesting that the teacher believes that this word makes it EASIER. T :몰라요? 얘들아, do homework, 무슨 뜻이예요? Ss :숙제하다 T : 규동이, What time do you do your homework? 규동 : 아, 제가요? 아! I.. night (pragmatic meaning) T started to explain again. She explained the 'meaning' of 'do homework' by student's help. Finally, 규동 decided to answer about real life. He said the word 'night' as an answer for the T's question. It's a pragmatic use. But it didn't satisfy the teacher. She was focused on the word 'at' as we saw before. T : I night? I do~ 규동 : I do.. T : I do what?? I do~ 규동 :homework T :right! I do my 규동 : I do my homework night T : right! I do my homework AT night. 규동 is trying to building up words by T's help. T used a repetition and a variation to show him how to say grammatically right sentence. 규동 contributes words and the teacher transforms them into wordings. Through this, 규동 could answer at the sentence level (wording), 'I do my homework night'. When she repeated 규동's answer, she added 'at' which 규동 had missed. She probably stressed 'at' to let student recognize the right place and the right usage of the preposition. Yes, and this means that "at" is integrated at the level of RECEPTION but not at the level of PRODUCTION--it's part of the learners' UNDERSTANDING but not part of their EXPRESSION‎, part of their LISTENING but not part of their SPEAKING. Right?