21 Jan 98 Ernie Franklin - Instructional Technology Forum ...

1 Feb 98.a
Heather MacLean
RE: Steve Draper's long, interesting, and worried disquisition on vocabulary.
I'm currently teaching a course for teachers on how to teach culture and literature in a language class.
My first two lectures, and there will probably be at least a third one, is on the question of how much
culture is indissolubly tied up in language. We've talked about schemata, we've talked about politics
(whose language are we teaching when we say "native?"), we've talked about differences in L1 lexicon-one
of the teachers "replicated" Collins and Quillian's (1969) experiment in her classes, and asked them
"What do you mean when you hear, 'bird'?", using the widely varying responses to point out how
difficult it is to ensure a (ideal poetic) direct line of communication. There is enough evidence it seems,
at times, to point to the really extreme versions of constructivism that hold cognitive relativism to its
most unusable zenith (or nadir, depending on your point of view--heh): e.g., that our "worlds" are
virtually without intersections, and that "reality" is purely individual.
The students are going to make up their own definitions in some sort of blend between their beginning
world-views, what you teach them, and their own cognitive processes that are being pushed during the
college experience where they are receiving and trying to ingest and make mesh so much information at
once. I think probably the best you can hope for is for all of you to land in some agreed-upon zone of
intersection. ("If you can explain it to where I can understand and perceive your logic, and it's not
completely wrong according to my god-like capacities as Prof. [tchyeah, right], you get an A.")
Note, I've never said this quite so blatantly--but it does seem to be what it comes down to.
Heather MacLean
E-mail: hmaclean@kent.edu