McWhinney

Use this page to discuss the McWhinney reading.

I thought the text presentation theory by Chomsky was interesting, "In the case of text presentation, the learner only receives information on acceptable sentences and no information regarding ungrammaticality is available. Without negative evidence, children are unable to retreat from an overly general grammar to the correct limited grammar."

When thinking about the above idea, I was wondering at what age are the kids he refers to? Because as an adult, I know the rules of grammar, not because I completely understand them, but because they have been pounded into my unconscious through schooling. I cannot explain some sentence structures that I know how to use, or even how I know to use them, just plain and simple I do it. I noticed this a lot more while working with Spanish and realizing there is so much to think about when learning a new language because everything you know about communicating is ingrained into you from the earliest repetition in childhood. The hard part of learning a new language, is learning to ignore what you know, and learn a new pattern and script of thinking. For example, in the reading it is talking about knowing when to add ed and when is proper, for example you can't say goed, you would say went. In other languages you don't need multiple words for the tense, your simply change the tense of the overall sentence by adding a marker. I find this to be...interesting, don't know if I'm going off on a crazy tangent, just thought I'd post and see what you peeps think. --Cory