Monday, September 7, 2009
Language, Society, Culture and Critical Thinking
Our Linguistics 115 class may not predominantly focus on critical thinking and uncertainty, but it sure does incorporate these ideas. Thus far, our teacher has mainly thrown at us hundreds of facts about languages, dialects, and varieties, and how these have evolved. However, I do think that there is some degree of critical thinking that goes on when our teacher talks about how new languages come into existence and why people have their own, unique ways of talking. Because languages do not come into being overnight, there is a long process that it must go through in order to be properly established. Because of the uncertainty that this language may not become as widespread as wanted, government leaders and public figures must thoroughly critically think about the social and political pros and cons of that language. Furthermore, after learning about these processes and languages, I find myself thinking critically about the languages that we've learned about. For instance, when learning about the dialect continuum, I thought about how there are so many different dialects, but yet, if you go from one to the other, you can easily learn and understand either one. This made me think why they even call it different dialects, or even different languages. I realized that there is not a "right" answer to this dilemma, and policy makers just had to make the best decision they could, while knowing that other people might disagree.
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i enjoyed how you related how critical thinking in ling 115 applies to you. i think using 1st person was appropriate in this case. good usage of terms that we learned in class.
ReplyDeleteThere are some grammatical and stylistic errors here. However, I do not feel as if they significantly detract from the message of your commentary. I think your personal anecdote is appropriate and tasteful. I agree with most of your points, and I think this blog does a good job of responding to the prompt.
ReplyDeleteYou display a good voice in this entry compared to the last one. Ling 115 does provide a good source of facts and information but it requires the student to analyze those facts and information. Good points in this entry.
ReplyDeleteReading this post after taking the class, I am beginning to think: did Professor Simpson effectively teach us critical thinking? I'm sure the information he presented had facets of uncertainty and were the result of critical thinking. But, I did not think he really encouraged critical thinking because he rarely posed the question to the class and allowed the class to think about the issue. He would just browse right through the answers and go on and on for the whole class period. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the class very much, but, as a future note, Professor Simpson should think about varying his teaching style a little bit.
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