linguistic analysis - Professor Binkert's Webpage - Oakland University

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Initially, many students find an inductive approach frustrating; they would prefer that teachers tell
them what to memorize and then test them on their recall. Rather than trying to understand why one
proposal is better than another, they just want to know which one will be on the next test. But
memorization is not learning, and knowledge is not constant. Further, people do not succeed in a
career just by knowing a lot of existing facts. We discover and uncover new phenomena every day
which require changes in existing explanations, theories, practices, and methods. Education must
emphasize the fact that there often are no right answers, only what we know at any given moment.
The purpose of education is to bring students to the point where they can continue to learn on their
own without teachers to guide them.
In short, good teachers strive to make themselves unnecessary by making their students self-reliant.
If a few courses that students take during their education attain that outcome, then students have a
lasting model for life-long learning and for greater adaptability in the workplace. For that to happen,
students need to be given exercises and problems that are new and different from what they have
practiced before. It is useful to remember that the average workers will have ten different jobs
during their working careers. Memorization of a lot of facts is not going to help students cope with
a fluid and variable job market, one that is evolving so fast that it is difficult to keep up with the
changes. The more practice students have with the greater varieties of problems, the broader their
perspectives become. In turn, this broader experience will help them be more adaptable, more
flexible, and more mobile. Although a diploma by itself will give students an edge in securing
employment, they will fare much better over time if that diploma includes courses that give them the
skills and perspectives they need to be responsive to the dynamic nature of today’s job market.
Another Linguistic Example: English Phonology
Let us consider next another linguistic example, this time from phonology, the study of the sounds
of language. Verbs in English come in a variety of tenses such as present tense (walks), past tense
(walked), and future tense (will walk). When people are asked how to form the past tense of regular
English verbs, they generally respond with a reference to written English and say something like,
“Add an ed to the end.” Such a rule cannot be part of the natural grammar of any language.
Children know how to correctly produce the past tense of regular verbs long before they learn to read
and write, let alone spell correctly. Indeed, some adults are illiterate; still, they know how to form
the past tense of regular verbs. Writing is based on convention, and learning to write is optional.
There are hundreds of languages which have never been written down; conversely, there is no natural
human language that exists only in written form. These are facts; they form part of our corpus of data
that must be accounted for. They indicate that no language has any natural grammatical rule based
on writing. Our discussion of English syntax above lead to a hypothesis that the rules of natural
grammar are based on human biology. Language is a product of the human language apparatus,
which includes the brain and the organs of speech and hearing. It is important to investigate whether
this hypothesis can be sustained in other aspects of language like phonology.