ABSTRACT
Measles gives you spots; pregnancy, a baby. Other conditions, e.g. high blood pressure, are symptomless and you only discover the truth about your health by chance. How does one know if one has integrationism? Since reading the foregoing chapters, I have been anxiously anticipating developments, but so far I seem to be much the same as I was before I started it. Does that mean I wasn’t paying attention? I hope to persuade you that I was, and to leave it to you to decide if I have been infected. Here, in no signifi cant order, are some things I still believe in, just as I did before reading the essays in this book:
a. languages such as English, French, Russian, Welsh, Chinese, Malay, Tamil
b. geographical areas such as England, Germany, Wales, China, India, Tamil Nadu
c. linguistic categories such as verbs, nouns and prepositions d. native speakers of languages e. nonnative speakers of languages f. people of whom it is impossible to say that they are native or nonna-
tive speakers of any language g. bilingualism h. grammar i. accents (e.g. ‘she speaks fl uent English but with a noticeable French
accent’ or ‘Roy Harris’s French accent is almost native-like’)
Here are a few things whose ontological status I fi nd perplexing or debatable, but whose existence I am hesitant to deny since they help me write about language, which is what I have been asked to do here:
a. human language as a discrete mode of communication, distinct both from paralanguage and from nonhuman communication
b. words c. Standard English d. language teaching, indeed any kind of teaching
e. any useful relationship between description (analysis-based codifi cation) and language learning (or acquisition, whichever term you prefer)
f. integrationism
Let us begin with Harris, since he is the inventor of integrationism and hops watchfully from one contributor’s shoulder to the next. I am old enough to have been exposed to almost the same Latin and French teaching methods as Harris, but perhaps my English lessons were already tainted by the early stirrings of postwar liberalism. I remember a teacher who insisted on lining us up with our backs to a wall. He would bark words, in no sort of context, and we would have to spell them and say what part of speech they were. If you answered correctly, you stayed where you were. If you answered wrongly, you swapped places with the boy on your left. Several wrong answers would maroon you at the left-hand tail, and one more would see you relegated to your desk as a grammatical failure. The winner was the last man standing, and he would receive a stale chocolate gold moidore. Thus I learned, at the sunset of empire, that coolies, stevedores and moidores were nouns, no less than mensa, puer, cheval or Français with a capital F. Simultaneously I certainly learned many other things-Harris is by no means the fi rst to have observed that there are two (usually more than two) levels of activity in any teaching enterprise. When you answer that stevedore is a noun, you show you know what stevedores are. Actually, the fi rst time you play you don’t know this, but you whisper to the chap on your right: ‘What’s a stevedore?’ and with any luck he tells you, before adding the really important point that a stevedore is a noun. In addition, you submit to the ideology of the teacher, which includes the belief that parts of speech are real categories and, somewhat more contentiously, that knowing them is essential. Yes, the process is highly reductive, but it is surely an error to regard it in isolation. At the age of ten, you may not see the point of it, any more than you see the point of algebra or the feudal system, but that does not mean there is no point. The fact that you can already speak English, and put together a reasonably coherent (for a ten-year-old) written composition, does not of itself prove the uselessness of learning that stevedore is a noun.
