1. Healthy Body To Support Healthy Cognition To Learn and Invent
Two things are predominantly noticeable in the progress of the humans down the centuries. One is the development of the art of learning (1) and the other is the development of the consequential art of inventing. (2) Both are connected to a single area of human resource, cognition, among many, and this cognitive resource continues to develop (3) right from birth. There have been fossils of earlier homos discovered and their brains were much smaller in comparison with those of the Homo sapiens. The upkeep and the specific regular functioning of this resource, cognition, is subject to the development of the human body system (4) which is yet another resource, probably the first area of human resource. While considering the body system, one may have to notice that women mostly are concerned about attributes (5) and men are concerned about strength (6) whereas what matters most is the health (7) of the body system. A healthy body system supports healthy cognitive resource (8) which can essentially learn and invent, apart from doing several things like thinking and feeling.
2. Different Stages of Learning
Learning per se is largely loosely used without taking into consideration its actual meaning. Any course of study, observing, listening, reading or any similar process need not lead to learning. Learning is a product that demands several precursors. Reading, listening or being instructed need not guarantee learning even when the traditional examinations may award hundred percent score for learning. The first stage of any of the intellectual exercises is to understand which is considered to be a very simple activity. (1) Understanding happens more because of the skills involved in the use of a language, especially when the words used are very well known. This simple process is taken by many as learning which is not accurate. Understanding is the simplest work of cognitive resource. Fairly intelligent people generally are not satisfied by mere understanding, and therefore, they go one step further to comprehend (2) which demands connecting the newly acquired information or knowledge or even a simple matter to what was already in the mind or what was anticipated as a possible connection. Comprehension helps a person to give greater value to the matter that has come in. The third stage is actually reflections on whatever has been understood or comprehended. (3) This is a stage where an ordinarily intelligent person and an intellectual go in different ways. For the latter, reflections are a stage to move forward to learning. Unless there are reflections, there cannot be any learning (4) though the understood or comprehended matter may remain a part of the contents of the mind. Therefore, learning may happen only when an intelligent person moves from understanding to comprehension and to reflections. An intelligent person becomes an intellectual when reflections take the person to learning. (5)
3. Internalising Learning To Develop To Be An Intellectual
An intellectual’s movement to learning need not stop there. The internalising process, (6) which could even be very simple, enables the thinking person discover strategies, methods and techniques for making use of the new learning in everyday living. It is at this stage that the development of the individual takes place (7) allowing the person to be a greater or more effective intellectual. So, just learning is not enough. It should lead to internalisation and development and the consequential functioning as an intellectual, not being satisfied just as an intelligent person. Indeed, the intellectual’s primary nature of asking the question ‘why’ for anything that one comes across is a part of the systems of reflections and the consequential learning.
4. Developed Skills For The Use of Available Tools
Thinking and feeling are also parts of the cognitive resource. A person who wants to communicate, especially in a new language, needs to take the art of learning and the art of inventing together to make use of the contents of the mind through the known language. As Nicholas Rescher said in his book Ignorance, there is no need to convert ignorance of the rules and usage of the language into its knowledge for a new speaker. However, when it comes to the use of a new language, this desire to communicate needs a base of the attitude which is a product that arises from definite needs. It is the developed skills that assure a person to communicate using the available tools. The art of inventing allows such people to experiment communicating through the new language acquired, however feeble it be. What matters here is the procedure and their practice of skilling the speaker or writer, or even a listener. The art of learning and the art of inventing move together to bring out a proper format to assist a speaker to express in words what is in the mind.
5. Making Situations Conducive And Self-assuring
Yet another aspect that has to be considered for helping a person communicate any language is the prevalence of advantages according to situations. Fred Fiedler, as expressed in his new approaches to effective leadership where he provided Contingency Model Theory (1) which is accepted easily by the corporate world and taught in the business management classrooms have to be discarded in its essential format because it makes all humans victims of situations. (2) Therefore, creating situations for people to speak in a new language will depend on promotion of the authentic interest, (3) yet another area of resource, of a person who desires to speak and the type of systematising that is done (4) to initiate the possible speaking. There is a need for a naturalising system to mitigate the influence of any situation (5) to make it conducive to begin speaking with the necessary self-assurance (6) that one is capable of communicating, though there may be a possibility of not being hundred percent successful in the beginning.
6. Protecting Self-esteem By Associates, Guides, Mentors Or Leaders
While getting ready to help people learn to speak a new language, there is a need to use all strategies and methods and techniques which will not destroy the self-esteem of the person who is going through an apprenticeship. This is where a teacher has to convert oneself as an associate, a guide, a mentor or a leader, leading systems of learning and development. While helping a person to speak in a new language, the number of opportunities provided would matter. Orhan Pamuk whose famous character Kemal in his equally famous Museum of Innocence tells others that Kemal’s greatest desire is to meet people and speak to them. It seems to be a very simple desire created in the mind of a character by the author but that creates the personality of the hero of the novel. So the desire matters.
7. Group And Social Resistance
Social resistance is one of the major difficulties (1) that a person who wants to speak a new language would face. Nobody who belongs to a group who do not speak a new language wants this language learner to speak a language which they do not know. (2) They even go to the extent of pooh poohing this new model (3) or even an incarnation according to them. Hence, there is an urgent need for protecting the speaking individual (4) from social resistance. Edith Wharton, Pulitzer Prize winner from the US has a character, Newland Archer, in the Age of Innocence who is the best example that one can refer to of social resistance as it happens in everyday life. (5) So, in the conduct one has to take great care to avoid group resistance from equals (6) or the so called upstarts.
8. Positive Attitude of The Developer
It is in the scheduling and conduct that the teacher has to perform the executive nature of teacher personality (1) which is a function all teachers largely use only for disciplining the student with the word discipline in its traditional meaning. One remembers Roger Fritz arguing very strongly in his book The Power of a Positive Attitude that human endeavours become effective only when there is a positive attitude (2) in the developer, its presence in the developed is secondary, he adds. As far as scheduling learning of a new spoken language is concerned, it does matter that it is not intermittent (3) with plenty of days in between. What can happen is that the skill identified and developed may be lost (4) if there is a lot of time spent before the next practice. Even teaching an ordinary physical skill like cycling cannot be developed by taking the apprentice through a session once a month. (5)
9. Little Light Converting To Full Light
Jack Kerouac who wrote the famous novel On The Road, was born and brought up in a French speaking area in Massachusetts though he wrote many novels which came to be compared with those of Nobel laureate Earnest Hemingway’s as they lived more or less in the same time. Of course, Kerouac is known for his novels which he wrote in English. However, it is stated by many of his critics that he should be admired for his writings, especially because he lived his younger years in an area where people were speaking French. Yet, he became a master in using English language, both in speaking and in writing. He is supposed to have said that learning and speaking English well was a case where he suddenly saw a little light popping up and it brightened and became full light. That is how he described his development of the mastery over the language.
10. Several Processes of Experiencing Language
Hence, allowing a new learner to experience the language (1) and its continuous use from time to time within a stipulated span of units of apprenticeship (2) would necessitate identifications of different skills in the spoken language (3) by the person who is organising it. Hence, it is necessary to schedule the interventions (4) for learning and development and conduct different units of exercises (5) during the interventions where the apprentice gets a maximum chance to practice speaking (6) without being found fault with for the possible lapses (7) and the schedule and conduct of the intervention is simple enough for the apprentice. (8) Learning to speak a language has to become an extremely simple process (9) and needs to be made a common exercise.
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Prof. Sunney Tharappan, is Director of College for Leadership and HRD, Mangaluru. He trains and writes and lives in Mangaluru.
Next week – Influence Processes