Citation: Language and Learning by James Britton (1970)
Summary: Britton describes our ability to speak and reason as the distinguishing characteristic between man and animals. Speech turns man's habitat into an environment in that language creates representations of experience that add recreate the habitat according to our reason. Representation and symbol use is important in that we create representations of our experience in order to understand the experience (12-13). Speech creates reason: "The primary task for speech is to symbolize reality: We symbolize reality in order to handle it" (20). Britton's theory of language and learning is based on his observations as teacher and father, and he follows the observable behaviors of children in order to determine how language constructs the speaker's reality.
Response:
I like Britton's description as language as a means of putting a "face" on an experience through representation. Britton's purpose is not to understand how language functions from a phenomenological perspective, but how it functions in a social/cultural reality. Therefore, Britton's argument strays from Platonic conceptions of truth or epistemological systems and leads toward a system of social relativism. Language is a process of re-representation instead of simply representation. For example, recall is a re-performance of a memory, not a piece of data statically stored away. This definition of language naturally leads Britton to describe learning as being about the process of producing and re-producing knowledge rather than receiving knowledge as a product statically handed from one individual to another.
Questions/Connections:
-This reading shows post modernist movement moving away from undisputed truth to social relativism.
--- Britton describes seems to desbribe language as a process of personifying reality -- understanding experience as having a face -- Could this mean that personification (some form of identification with our surroundings) is our means of connecting/ handling/ coping with the homogeneity of reality? --- Page 26 "Until we can group items according to similarity we can set up no expectations and no predictions." and "We select and arrange our material first to please ourselves: and secondly, not to please other people but to enable others to share our pleasure -- which is not the same thing" (124).
- When Britton says "Language" he means discursive language though he recognizes non discursive language as a form of language.
- What are the assumptions that Britton is making behind the use of some of his language? -- for example, representation. What is or isn't addressed here that isn't in other texts?
-How does language get things done through classification? -- tensions between experience introduced and used in dialectic
-Ties to expressiveism -- being and becoming vs acting and doing
