LINGUISTIC CREATIVITY, RULE AND RELEVANCE OF COGNITIVE THEORY TO LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A.       Background of The Problem

Linguistics is competence as being a persons potential to speak a language, and his or her linguistics performance as the realization of that potential.

One of the human activity is study. Learning activities are activities that process, and also the most fundamental element in any implementation types and levels of education or learning. In this case the success or failure of educational achievement that means depends on the learning process experienced by learners, both when he was in school and in the home environment or family (Shah, 1996).

Learning activities are always related to the subject of psychic elements that implement it. Some descriptions of the cognitive theory of which is the acquisition, structuring and use of knowledge of any behavior-related mental understanding, judgment, information processing, problem solving, and confidence gap. In particular, the delivery of content in teaching and learning in the view of cognitive theory is how to create a realm of creativity that a student can develop and function optimally. This copyright realm is dominant in the psychological sphere centered in the brain and controls the realm of sense and the realm of intention.

B.    The formulations of The Problem

Based on the background problems described above, the formulation of issues to be discussed are:

1.      What is the definition of linguistic?

2.      What is linguistic creativity, rule and relevance of cognitive theory?

3.      How are linguistic creativity, rule and relevance of cognitive theory to language teaching and learning?

C.       Aims  of The Paper

The aim of the paper is to know linguistic creativity, rule and relevance of cognitive theory to language teaching and learning.

CHAPTER II

DISCUSSION

A.    Definition of Linguistics

 Linguistics is the science of language, including the sounds, words, and grammar rules. Words in languages are finite, but sentences are not. It is this creative aspect of human language that sets it apart from animal languages, which are essentially responses to stimuli.

The rules of a language, also called grammar, are learned as one acquires a language. These rules include phonology, the sound system, morphology, the structure of words, syntax, the combination of words into sentences, semantics, the ways in which sounds and meanings are related, and the lexicon, or mental dictionary of words. When you know a language, you know words in that language, i.e. sound units that are related to specific meanings. However, the sounds and meanings of words are arbitrary. For the most part, there is no relationship between the way a word is pronounced (or signed) and its meaning.

Linguistics also looks at the broader context in which language is influenced by social, cultural, historical and political factors. This includes the study of evolutionary linguistics, which investigates into questions related to the origins and growth of languages; historical linguistics, which explores language change sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which looks at language processing in the brain language acquisition, on how children or adults acquire language ,and discourse analysis, which involves the structure of texts and conversations

B.      Description of Linguistic Creativity

Linguistic Creativity is an essential and pervasive, but multi-dimensional characteristic of all human beings (irrespective of age, education, intelligence, social status or artistic bent). Linguistic creativity is primarily the activity of making new meaning by a speaker (in thebroadest sense of the user of language in all forms and in all mediums), and the recreation and re-interpretation of meaning  by a receiver. Linguistic creativity is secondarily observable as a feature or product in a language. Linguistic creativity is a graded phenomenon ranging from the more conventional and predictable to the less conventional and unpredictable, and it is manifested in all domains of language (lexis, grammar, text, and discourse), the results of which may or may not become conventionalised and therefore entrenched in a particular language. If linguistic creativity is an essential trait of human beings, it may appear that there is no need to explore the motivation and function of linguistic creativity. However, linguistic creativity is manifested in specific instances by individual speakers, and each one of these instances may be motivated by a variety of reasons to be linguistically creative. Gerrig and Gibbs (1988) describe two types of motivations for speakers to turn to creative language use. The first motivating factor is the speaker’s need to ‘express ideas that are unavailable in the standardised repertory of meanings’ (Gerrig & Gibbs 1988: 3). The second type of motivating factors are social factors, which include both pragmatic and more general social factors. These factors will be elaborated upon in the following sections. It is important to bear in mind that these motivations for linguistic creativity are motivations of the language user.

This is in accordance with Ward et al.’s (1997: 18) statement that creativity may even be better thought of as the entire system by which processes operate on structures to produce outcomes that are novel but nevertheless rooted in existing knowledge. This statement by Ward et al. reflects the distinction between the basis of creativity (‘structures’ and ‘existing knowledge’), the mental or conceptual making of new meaning (‘processes’) involved in creativity, and the products of creativity (‘outcomes’) which are novel, varied and unlimited. There are plenty of approaches how to describe languages. Especially in computational linguistics researchers try to find formal definitions for different kinds of languages. But for psychology other aspects of language than its function as pure system of communication are of central interest. Language is also a tool we use for social interactions starting with the exchange of news up to the identification of social groups by their dialect. We use it for expressing our feelings, thoughts, ideas etc. Although there are plenty ways to communicate (consider Non-Human-Language) humans expect their system of communication - the human language to be unique. Four major criteria have been proposed by Professor Franz Schmalhofer from the University of Osnabrück as explained below, semanticity, displacement, creativity and structure dependency. Creativity is the probable most important feature. Our communication is not restricted to a fixed set of topics or predetermined messages. The combination of a finite set of symbols to an infinite number of sentences and meaning. With the infinite number of sentences the creation of novel messages is possible. How creative the human language is can be illustrated by some simple examples like the process that creates verbs from nouns. New words can be created, which do not exist so far, but we are able to understand them.

C.      Description of Relevance Cognitive Theory on Language Teaching Learning

 Cognitive theory is a learning theory of psychology that attempts to explain human behavior by understanding the thought processes. The assumption is that humans are logical beings that make the choices that make the most sense to them. Information processing is a commonly used description of the mental process, comparing the human mind to a computer.

Pure cognitive theory largely rejects behaviorism on the basis that behaviorism reduces complex human behavior to simple cause and effect. However, the trend in past decades has been towards merging the two into a comprehensive cognitive-behavioral theory. This allows therapists to use techniques from both schools of thought to help clients achieve their goals.

Social cognitive theory is a subset of cognitive theory. Primarily focused on the ways in which we learn to model the behavior of others, social cognitive theory can be seen in advertising campaigns and peer pressure situations. It is also useful in the treatment of psychological disorders including phobias.

Behaviorism led to theories of language teaching and learning which explained how an external event (a stimulus) caused a change in the behavior of an individual (a response) without any kind of mental behavior. Though Behaviorism neglected the mental activity, it stressed the importance of practice and repetition in language learning, which in my opinion is a vital factor in learning a foreign language. Let’s take the audiolingual method as an example. Audiolingual method emphasizes: (1) the teaching of speaking and listening before reading and writing; (2) the use of dialogues and drills; (3) the avoidance of the use of the mother tongue in the classroom.

Audiolingual method regards speaking and listening as the most basic language skills, which is in accordance with our today’s English teaching situation. Nowadays, in China, more and more people begin to learn English as a foreign language in order to have the ability to communicate with foreigners. For them, speaking and listening is much more important than reading and writing because they are not expected to have a high mastery of English and their aim of study is quite simple, that is when they need to communicate with a foreigner they can understand their words and express themselves well. Of course, what we are talking about is based on simple daily conversation, because to express ourselves properly is not always an easy thing, even for English major students sometimes it is problematic. In China, we begin to teach students English when they are in primary school. In the past, we paid more attention on teaching them grammar, and the result was disappointing: a large number of students cannot speak well; some even cannot say a complete sentence. Recently we emphasized the importance of speaking and listening in English teaching and adopted audiolingual method in the classroom. Audiolingual method stressed the practice and repetition of what has been learnt in the classroom; it believes that a language is learnt through forming habits. I agree with it. In order to speak English fluently, without constant practice, it is impossible. So in our English teaching and learning, we must do a lot of work to help our students speak and listen well whenever they need to use it. While the influence of structuralism on language teaching and pedagogy was pervasive and powerful, the influence of TG grammar was of a different kind. In the late sixties, new developments in language pedagogy occurred which can be regarded as resulting from the impact of TG theory. A typical example is the cognitive theory of language learning. This theory emerged in which TG concepts became associated with a ‘cognitive’ view of the psychology of language learning. It opposed to the empiricist theory, that is, pedagogically audiolingualism, psychologically behaviorism, and linguistically structuralism. TG theory stressed mental activity. It proposed that human beings have the ability to learn a language. It is the inborn ability instead of practice that made human beings obtain the rules of a language and understand or produce countless numbers of sentences. Some linguists, like Diller openly declared his preference for the cognitive position; while others, like Chastain  and Rivers held that the two theories were complementary and served different types of learners or teachers or represented different phases of the language learning process.

D.      Linguistic Creativity, Rule And Relevance Of Cognitive Theory To Language Teaching And Learning

Linguistic creativity related with language skills. Competency in itself means the ability to speak, use language, use words effectively and be able to use good grammar and develop a good word or a sentence of the person in their environment. Creativity not only contributes to increasing students’ motivation but also promotes problem solving, a higher order thinking skill. Creativity in language is not only a property of especially skilled and gifted language users, but is pervasive in routine everyday practice. Language users who creatively design meaning are in the focus of attention, with the consequence of interactional functions of creativity being shed light on alongside the textual analysis of poetic form.  

Language has always played a certain role  in the history of psychology. According to Stern (1983: 291) psychology  can be defined as the science of the mental life and behavior of the individual.  Psychology studies the behavior , activities, conduct, and mental processes.  Since speech  is one of the features that distinguishes man most clearly from other species, it becomes an object of psychological enquiry.  From about 1900 the objects of psychological studies paid attention to not only the learning, memory, thinking and intelligence (the higher mental processes), but also to the emotions, personality, psychological growth of the child, and the measurement of individual differences. the cognitive view takes the learner to be an active processor of information (see Ausubel et al., 1978).  Learning and using a rule require learners to think, that is, to apply their mental powers in order to distil a workable generative rule from the mass of data presented, and then to analyze the situations where the application of the rule would be useful or appropriate.  Learning, then, is a process in which the learner actively tries to make sense of data, and learning can be said to have taken place when the learner has managed to impose some sort of meaningful interpretation or pattern on the data.  This may sound complex, but in simple terms what it means is that we learn by thinking about and trying to make sense of what we see, feel and hear. (Hutchinson & Waters, 1987 : 43). 

There are two ways to conceive of how thoughts are communicated from one person to another. The first way is through the use of strict coding and decoding, (such as is used with Morse code). In this approach the speaker/author encodes their thoughts and transmits them to their audience. The audience receives the encoded message and decodes it to arrive at the meaning the speaker/author intended. This can be visualized as follows:      

Speaker'sthought/intention   ⇒   encoded   ⇒   transmitted   ⇒   decoded   ⇒   intention/thought understood.

Uncovering some of the most common misconceptions about the field.  Language as a general phenomenon and took a look at English in particular. The relevance of linguistics to education professionals, specifically primary and secondary school teacher.

CHAPTER III

CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION

A.     Conclusion

 Learning activities is the process of creativity and there is include the rule linguistic creativity can be accounted for by a finite stock of algorithmic rules, some of the which are recursive, using a stock of lexical entries in the mental lexicon. The cognition itself relevance with human psychology that includes any behavior related to mental understanding, judgment, information processing and problem solving. in this case, of course, human psychological relevance can be found on the activities of language teaching and learning process. Although there are plenty ways to communicate (consider Non-Human-Language) humans expect their system of communication - the human language to be unique. Four major criteria have been proposed by Professor Franz Schmalhofer from the University of Osnabrück as explained below, semanticity, displacement, creativity and structure dependency.

B.     Suggestion

It is suggested applying speech act theory in foreign language learning, and the teachers should cultivate a learners' linguistic competence.