"A RICH AND ADAPTABLE INSTRUMENT"

“A RICH AND ADAPTABLE INSTRUMENT”

M. A. K. HALLIDAY

In an educational context the problem for linguistics is to elaborate some account of language that is relevant to the work of English teacher.

It is not necessary, to sacrifice a generation of children, or event one class roomful, in order to demonstrate that particular preconceptions of language are inadequate or irrelevant. In place of a negative and somewhat hit and miss approach, a more fruitful procedure is to seek to establish certain general positive criteria of relevance. These will relate, ultimately, to the demand that we make of language in the course of our lives.

We tend to underestimate both the total extended and the functional diversity of the part played by language in the life of the child.

Perhaps the simplest of the child’s models of language, and one of the first to be involved, is what we may call the instrumental model. The child becomes aware that languages are used as a mean of getting things done.

Language as an instrument of control has another side to it, since the child is well aware that language is also means whereby other exercise controls over him. Closely related to the instrumental mode, therefore is the regularity model of language. This refers to the use of language to regulatory behavior of others.

Language is used to define and consolidate the group, to include and to exclude, showing who the one of us is and who is nor, no impose status, and to contest status that is imposed and humor, ridicule, deception, persuasion, all the forensic and theatrical arts of language are bought into play.

Language in its imaginative functions is not necessary about anything at all; the child’s linguistically created environment does not have to be a make believe copy of the world of experience, occupied by people, things and events.

The dominant model it is very easily for the adult, when he attempts to formulate his ideas about the nature of language, to be simple unaware of most of what language means to the child; this is not because he no longer uses language in the same variety of different functions, but because only one of these functions in general, is the subject of conscious attentions, so that the corresponding models is the only to be externalized.