Colorless green ideas sleep furiously...

I just finished reading the lecture notes on Doug's webpage and once again Chomsky's ideas are excitedly running through my head.

As much as I love Chomsky and appreciated sentences like "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," I can't help but hope for some linguist to make a bridge between the innate and the socialist camps. It seems so clear to me that we cannot possibly learn language without some sort of existing “wiring” – and that natural ability to acquire language cannot be attained without the facilitation of a social environment. But then I guess I am a product of my environment, since the UBC English department is in favour of Chomsky and the LLED group in favour of Skinner.

In regards to the brain lecture, I find it a bit surprising at the last implication: “this implies that physical correction of speech production has little effect.”

I have sat through many classes learning about what parts of the mouth make what sound, I memorized the IPA and all that stuff in my TESL classes and in my English classes. But I never understood how that would help me teaching. I started to get it when I was doing individual tutoring. I could actually tell my students to move their tongue around, and it seemed to be one of the better ways to improve the children’s pronunciation. I think it definitely helped them to hear me say words as well, but they also understood it from a physical perspective. Although I would never sit down and teach them about the alveolar (etc) I have found use for physical correction.

I’m sure we’ll talk about it more tomorrow!

Thanks, Marin.