What is language?

Language is often defined as a set of rule-governed phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules. Language is also defined as a set of communicative symbols. But language is neurobiological in origin and socio-cognitive in acquisition. Therefore, to me, language is a neurobiological and socio-cognitive set of processes that are governed by semantic rules for pragmatic or communicative intent and purposes. Why is the definition of language important to educators? If language consists of rules then educators should be able to teach the rules and improve a student’s language. Many structural methods exist for such teaching of phonemes or sounds, their combinations to form meaningful units called morphemes such as the teaching of plurals and verbs, the grammar of combining free standing morphemes like “dog” into sentence types, and the vocabulary. However, such methods do not help a student organize thoughts, communicate intent, understand critical thinking, plan events, think about others from others’ perspectives, or even problem solve. So, does that mean that language and cognition are two different concepts? Yes! But how do we explain our thinking? With language! How do we request an action? With language! How do we problem solve an event? With language! How do we plan a party? With language! How do we write an authentic paper about our ideas? We use language in a written form! Perhaps we need to examine the interdependency between language and learning to think. See the next blog.