Page 188 - Beyond Methods

CHAPTER 8
Activating Intuitive Heuristics
. . . give free play to those creative principles that humans bring to the process of language learning . . . (and) create a rich linguistic environment for the intu- itive heuristics that the normal human being automati- cally possesses.
—NOAM CHOMSKY, 1970, p. 108
In educational contexts, heuristics refers to the process of self- discovery on the part of the learner. It also refers to a particular method of teaching—“a method of teaching allowing the students to learn by discovering things by themselves and learning from their own experiences rather than by telling them things” (Cam- bridge International Dictionary of English, 1995, p. 666). When ap- plying it to language learning and teaching it means that an impor- tant task facing the language teacher is to create a rich linguistic environment in the classroom so that learners can activate their in- tuitive heuristics and discover the linguistic system by themselves. The concept of language awareness we discussed in the previous chapter is closely linked to intuitive heuristics. That is to say, one can increase one’s language awareness by attempting to discover the rules and patterns of the linguistic system, and, conversely, one can enhance one’s capacity to discover the linguistic system by in- creasing one’s language awareness.
It is common knowledge that language is systematic and rule- governed. There are phonological rules that deal with the nature of sound systems in a language. There are syntactic rules that deal with the grammatical construction of morphemes and words into larger units of phrases, clauses, and sentences. There are semantic rules that deal with the way in which meaning in a language is structured. While all the systems and subsystems of a language are rule-governed, the one that teachers and learners readily associate