There are a few moments I stopped while I was reading Halliday's article. They were the moments that made me stop to do some search, take some notes, have conversations with my colleagues and reflect on myself.
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| Professor M.A.K Halliday |
(i) A language that is 'developed', being used in all the functions that languages serves in the society, tends to have a higher status... (p. 194)
Because I am not an expert in language, I can't tell the characters or evidence of a 'developed' language. If this quote's opposite is true as well, do I have the conclusion that if a language tends to have a higher status, that can be said that language is 'developed'? On the basis of my living and studying experience, I have the sense that there is a class system when it comes to languages. Some languages are given higher social status, than others, deliberately or otherwise. Montaner (2018) argues that "No language in history has dominated the world quite like English does today". And English is by far the world's most studied language in the world. Some of my parents' friends moved from China to Canada in the past ten to twenty years, and their children were born in Canada. They all reflected a fact that their kids were reluctant to speak Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese) at home because they thought they would feel marginalized when they said Chinese but not English at school. However, the 2016 Census in Canada provides data on more than 140 immigrant languages and 21.1% of the Canadian population in Canada spoke an immigrant language at home, which is an increase of 14.7% from 2011 to 2016. Is the situation getting better when more and more people admit and speak their immigrant languages? Is sustainable if a language is given a higher social status that has dominated the world for a while?
(ii) We should not think of a mathematical register as consisting solely of terminology... (p. 195) AND ...whereas in earlier days, mathematics tended to remain quite separate from the rest of a child's experience (p. 202).
I had a lecture on Art, Education and Cultural Diversity by Dr. Berard the last term. We had a lot of discussions about my final paper "Art Infusion in Elementary Mathematics Teaching". When I talked about the phrase "mathematical beauty" people misunderstand it as an oxymoron. Where is the beauty in a subject that makes so many people feel disconnected, un-human, and incapable? Dr. Berard can't help nodding her head and agreeing that students today have a belief that mathematics is a collection of isolated rules and facts unrelated to the real world, it is difficult for them to make sense of mathematics. I think one of the reasons why mathematics was treated as the product of pure logic without recourse to the world of things and other people is that tons of arcane mathematical terminologies exist in this discipline. For instance, in Chinese, we have never used a character like "幂" (mì) in daily life which means "power" in English mathematical terminology. The unusual and irrelevant terms make it students hard to understand the meanings.
(iii) Some notes:
I appreciate that Prof. Halliday gave so many examples when delivering his ideas and notions. For example, when he introduced the development of a register of mathematics and various ways in which a new register of mathematics can be done (p.195), he would immediately give examples of different rules of "making" new words, it made me have a better understanding of what he would like to express.
Prof. Halliday mentioned that "Developments that took centuries in English and French are expected to happen in ten years, or one year, or sometimes one month" (p.197). I am wondering why the developments of languages speed up in this era, because of the development of the Internet and technology?
Thanks for this interesting reflection on the article!
回复删除The questions of language and status/power are important ones, and something we'll talk about quite a lot during the course. Kids certainly feel the status of their languages in social settings like school, and there's a horrible history (which I hope very much is over now!) of teachers forcing kids to speak only the dominant language in school. Often the teachers' intentions are well-meaning, but this potentially does a lot of harm.
I feel very strongly about this separation of math from everything else in life, as I'm sure you'll see during our course! I am so much against separating math from art, from literature, from the social and natural world. But there is a very entrenched prejudice about this, certainly in Canada and the US!