Using etymology in the classroom

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For example, my students might typically read a short essay by Stephen Jay Gould, 'Sizing up human intelligence', from the book Ever Since Darwin (Gould, ...
Using etymology in the classroom Herbert D. Pierson

This article argues that instruction in etymology, although at present neglected in the second-language curriculum, could offer meaningful linguistic information and principles to the intermediate/advanced secondlanguage learner. Etymology, the study of word origins, has all the attributes of what educational psychologists term meaningful learning. This is a type of learning connected to prior learning, more highly retainable and generalizable, making it superior to simple rote learning of vocabulary. Practical illustrations of how etymology could be integrated into a second-language programme are given, based on the author’s own experience as an ESL specialist in Hong Kong.

Introduction

When contemplating the study of etymology, one can easily conjure up the image of philologists poring assiduously over texts, puzzling out the primitive origins of words. If this is the impression, it is not surprising that etymology might appear to second-language teachers as an archaic academic discipline dealing with obscure language matters touching only incidentally on pedagogy. I would like to suggest a different view. I believe a meaningful approach to etymology in second-language learning, as opposed to rote memorization of words, prefixes, suffixes and roots, can offer intermediate/advanced second-language students both practical and theoretical linguistic knowledge congenial to a more permanent retention of words and concepts. Using English as a Second Language as springboard, I will argue that the study of English etymology, like the study of grammar and phonetics, could be considered an appropriate component in a balanced second-language curriculum. I will proceed by introducing the study of etymology, then connect it with the theory of meaningful learning, recount how I ‘discovered’ etymology, and then demonstrate how etymology can be used in the classroom for intermediate/advanced learners, based on my experience as an ESL teacher in Hong Kong.

What is etymology?

Etymology is briefly defined as the scientific study of the origins and history of the changing meanings and forms of words (Ross, 1969). As an academic speciality, it is generally covered in post-graduate English literature courses as part of the history of the English language, and so it is unlikely that etymology was part of the professional training for most ESL teachers. Although etymology might be used in the language-skills classroom by teachers to supply background information to the interested student, it is patently not central to the language-teaching repertoire. It is apparently inconsequential, for none of six principles of vocabulary acquisition culled from contemporary pedagogical research and cited by Nelson-Herber ELT Joumal

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(1986) allude to it. In a random survey made by the author several years ago of the curricula in fifteen second-language teacher-training programmes in North America, only two institutions listed a course in the history of the English language in their core programmes. Etymology as meaningful learning

Although etymology stands at the periphery of second-language teacher education programmes, etymological training could benefit second-language instruction. The teacher and student, by becoming serious amateur etymologists, would find themselves moresensitive to the meaning of words and their relationships with other words from both history and other languages. The knowledge of these word relationships could contribute to what educational psychologists call meaningful learning (Ausabel, 1968), a quality of learning which is related to prior learning, and thus is more likely to be retained and generalized to other learning. Ausabel (1967) describes meaningful learning as a task which is ‘relatable on a nonarbitrary, substantive basis to a previously learned background of and emphatically differentiates it from rote ... ideas and information’, learning, which he describes as ‘discrete and relatively isolated . . . only relatable to cognitive structure in an arbitrary, verbatim fashion’ (p.209). Because it can be anchored to ‘existing ideational systems in the learner’s cognitive structure’ (p.209), meaningful learning is less vulnerable than rote learning to forgetting. Meaningful learning takes place when the learner connects new learning to what he or she already knows (Thelen, 1986). Meaningful learning does not occur capriciously or spontaneously, but rather deliberately under conditions in which the learner is cognitively prepared, and what is to be learned is systematically and rationally organized. For this reason psychologists of learning like Ausabel and Robinson (1969) generally subscribe to three necessary conditions for meaningful learning to take place: 1 What is learned can be linked to other areas of learning. 2 The learner must have already internalized ideas to which learning can be connected; and 3 The learner intends to make these connections.

the new

Based on these criteria, etymology could be considered meaningful learning in the language classroom. In a properly structured ESL class in which an etymological approach is implemented, these conditions for meaningful learning can be met. For example, the phrase circuitous reasoning might occur in an ESL class for electrical engineering students. Engineering students would most probably be familiar with the vocabulary item circuit, as in circuit board. It is a concrete entity which in a laboratory environment might be a well defined physical segment on an electric apparatus, knowledge of which is acquired by sight and touch. Since these students would presumably have internalized this prior sense knowledge, they might, with the aid of a good dictionary, etymologically analyse the word circuit into its constituent parts. This would reveal two distinct linguistic components of Latin origin, circum from a preposition meaning around, and eo from the verb meaning to go. Combined, the two segments convey the notion to go around. Such etymological information would make the meaning of phrases like circuitous reasoning and racing circuit recognizable and comprehensible to students. This etymological knowledge of circuit is specific linguistic information offering second-language learners, as Beck 58

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(1984) aptly says, an anchor to ‘possess capability to generalize to other words.

ownership

of words’

and

the

Etymology ‘discovered'

My ‘discovery’ that etymology might be advantageous for second-language curricula stems from two sources, my quasi-classical educational background, and my experiences as an ESL specialist in the educational environment of Hong Kong. In secondary school and university, I received a quasi-classical education in Latin and Greek. These studies have left their mark, enabling me even now to marvel at the origins of the rich English academic vocabulary which my university-level students encounter each year in such diverse academic disciplines as physics, mathematics, biology, economics, sociology, and psychology. The value of classical studies for language teaching might have escaped my awareness had it not been reinforced during graduate school. While studying the history of the English language, I was given practice in diachronic linguistic analysis in which ordinary English words were traced back to their Hellenic, Germanic, Italic, Sanskrit, and hypothesized IndoEuropean forebears. This training enabled me to recall and capitalize on the experience of my earlier classical education by offering me a scientific appreciation of word development, making me aware of relationships, often subtle and hidden, that exist between words. For example the word genuine is derived from the Latin word genuum meaning knee, because in Roman times an infant’s paternity was acknowledged when it was placed on its father’s knee. Today I am conscious that some of the most abstract English words have a basis in the concrete world, something which I subsequently discovered to be characteristic of the ideographs which make up the modern Chinese writing system.

Etymology and Chinese characters

Being a second-language specialist in Hong Kong, dealing with Chinese students, whose orthographic system is radically different from English, also alerted me to the value of etymology in second-language pedagogy. I discovered early in my study of Chinese characters that the mystery surrounding the Chinese writing system could be dispelled by knowing that what is presented as an abstract configuration of dots, combined with horizontal, vertical, long and short brush strokes, evolved from ancient pictographic representations of the material world. One need only consult the scholarly etymologies (Blackney, 1935; Wieger, 1965) or popular accounts (Ann, 1982) of Chinese characters to see how contemporary Chinese ideographs, even those with the most abstract meanings and originated in concrete realities. (See appendix for representations, examples.) Although written Chinese abounds with graphic illustrations of this evolution, Chinese language teachers in Hong Kong seldom exploit this feature to make learning fun and interesting for students. Young Chinese school children in Hong Kong learn their Chinese characters by rote memory, copying them in little composing books made for this purpose. Such an approach is not always congenial to the older or non-Chinese learners of Chinese ideographs, since it begins in a void, unrelated to any familiar prior learning. Chinese children copying the characters by rote can at least connect them to a Chinese vernacular. For this reason, I have often wondered how many experienced language teachers in Hong Kong similarly expect students to learn English vocabulary in an equally rote 59

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manner, because this is the way they learned questionable transfer of learning skills.

the ideographs.

To me this is a

Meaningful vocabulary learning in ESL

Another discovery, but this time about the material origins of abstract technical vocabulary in English, was made by science students at The Chinese University as they were analysing key English terms in mathematics. The word that always stands out in my memory is calculus, which, examined etymologically, goes back to the Latin antecedent calx, calcis meaning pebble. From this etymological insight, my students grasped the relationship between pebble and the study of calculus, making the word calculus and its affinity with such words as calculate, calculation, and incalculable meaningful and ultimately more retainable. This led me to believe that etymological knowledge might be beneficial for intermediate/advanced ESL students as a tool for expanding their vocabularies more permanently. I speculated that when undergraduates in Hong Kong embark on the study of a particular discipline in the humanities, sciences, or social sciences, they are almost all relying on English textbooks. For this reason, it is imperative that they become literate in the jargon, the technical terms, and the specialized vocabulary of the field. They must absorb a core English vocabulary specific to an academic discipline. Each day that students progress in a target discipline, they are encountering this core vocabulary which conveys the intellectual flow of the discipline. This is particularly true of studying at the introductory level, where it might be more correct to say that a course entitled ‘Introduction to Sociology’ is really one in the ‘Introduction to the Vocabulary of Sociology’. Acquiring the specialized vocabulary is the first step in gaining entry into a profession or academic discipline. The specialist might in a sense be saying to the student. ‘If you want to become one of us, talk the way we talk, and use the words the way we use them’. Undergraduates in Hong Kong can meet this challenge by mindlessly memorizing English or Chinese glossary definitions of discipline-related concepts, but as these same students are by no means unsophisticated, this is not necessarily an efficient way to enlarge one’s active or passive vocabulary. It is low-level learning, akin to the rote learning students were accustomed to in primary and secondary school. Such rote vocabulary learning will remain, I believe, cognitively unstable as long as it is unconnected to previous word knowledge.

Vocabulary problems

My ‘discovery’ of etymology as a teaching tool was fortuitous, since most undergraduates in Hong Kong maintain, like most second-language students, that it is simply unknown vocabulary items which are at the root of, their language-learning problems. Although these same undergraduates have had at least fourteen years of formal English language instruction behind them, many remain inordinately insecure and struggling Englishlanguage learners, who remedy language problems by dependence on pocket-sized English-Chinese dictionaries. Admittedly, the development of a substantial core vocabulary is part of initiation in any academic discipline, and the dictionary or glossary does play an important role in the process. For this reason I do not object to a judicious use of such learning materials, but I do object rather to an inefficient use that is often inaccurate, time-consuming, and ultimately detrimental to intellectual growth. Typically, whenever these students stop at a difficult word in a text, they dutifully consult the ubiquitous tiny English-Chinese dictionary, and

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within seconds several Chinese characters are pencilled into the text. It is not unusual to find large portions of textbooks and library books covered with Chinese ideographs, just like so much graffiti on a city block. To discourage this practice I frequently confiscate such dictionaries whenever they surface in the classroom, explaining to the owners that such materials seriously impede advanced linguistic development. Such dictionaries, by providing one or two Chinese characters corresponding to an English word, deprive the learner of the treasure of linguistic information and detail contained in a larger dictionary. The collegiate dictionary

I have urged students to liberate themselves from tiny English-Chinese dictionaries and use second-language learners’ dictionaries like the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English or The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary published by OUP. Now on reflection, I realize I should have made greater demands. At present I encourage advanced students, if they can afford it, to buy a good college dictionary.1 I even make the two etymological dictionaries2 in my possession available to students. Outstanding second-language learners’ dictionaries like the two mentioned above can have limits for the diligent intermediate/advanced learner, because they lack the important linguistic history and detail contained in etymological and collegiate dictionaries.

Etymology in the classroom

As I have developed enthusiasm for the practice of meaningful etymology in the ESL classroom, I have put the burden of working out the origin of words on to students, in order to foster an appreciation of etymology and the tools of etymology. For example, my students might typically read a short essay by Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Sizing up human intelligence’, from the book Ever Since Darwin (Gould, 1980). After reading this six-page essay, they are asked to mark down any problems they might have had with the text. Not unexpectedly they draw up a list of Graeco-Latin words such as fascination, preclude, cranial. These students should be capable of puzzling out the meanings from the context, but as they are either reluctant or unable to do so, and because the learning style of undergraduates in Hong Kong, like that of most conscientious second-language learners, is dictionary-dependent, they instinctively consult a dictionary. For this reason, I propose, whenever possible, that they use a larger dictionary in order to derive the origins of the words in question. This they do outside the class, and they come up with roots and meanings like: Fascinate from the Latin

verb fascinare

Precludes from the Latin to shut; and

words

Cranial from

the Greek

word

meaning

prae meaning kranion meaning

to cast a spell;

before and claudere meaning skull.

The etymological information which the students abstract from the dictionary is then interjected into the original context to demonstrate the power of such information. Fascination appears in the sentence, ‘Size has a fascination of its own’. To keep the burden of active learning on the student, I question the students about the relationship between the etymological information, in this instance fascinare, and the concept of size. Provided that the learners know what to cast a spell means, a lively ‘meaning-full’ discussion should follow in which the use of the wordfascinate can be explored in 61

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other contexts, such as in the relationship between men and women or the arts. The same process continues with the word preclude when talking about that the size of ants as in, ‘. . . it is their size rather than their social structure precludes high mental capacity’. From an etymological point of view the word preclude literally conveys the idea of to shut or close before/ahead, which if applied to the above context, should enable students to arrive at the notion of preventing. They could then toy with etymologically related words like exclude and include to see how minute variations on the basic Latin root of claudere affect nuances of meaning. The adjective cranial in the context of the sentence, ‘. . . I have plotted cranial capacity against inferred body weight’, has its origins in the Greek word kranion, meaning skull. A concrete word like this will reveal several new but easily identifiable words like craniate, craniology, craniometry, craniotome, cranium, etc. However, because this Greek root refers to a specific concrete entity which has changed little over the centuries, a wider generalizability is absent. Student etymology projects

Each year my students are required to produce a list of discipline-specific vocabulary items. From these lists they choose twenty words which they examine in depth, using all the available library resources. The analysis consists of discussing the origin of the words, usually going back to Latin or Greek, which students are required to explain in detail, explaining how these word origins are connected to an academic speciality. This is presented in a written report to the teacher and an oral report to the class. This activity is favoured by undergraduates, who, while not being trained in philology, show a willingness to learn more about the history and origins of Enlgish words. What is remarkable about this training is that later these same students quite often use etymology to start off written reports or discussions in their own academic speciality by making reference to the origins of a key word and elaborating on it.

Learning about

I have only in passing alluded to etymology as a potent cultural learning tool. My Chinese colleagues frequently tell me that if I want to begin to know the thousands of years of Chinese culture, I must learn more about the language through which this ancient culture has been passed down. I fully accept such advice, but also add that the key to knowing Western culture at its deepest level begins in an understanding of the GraecoRoman and Hebraeo-Christian cultural roots which have shaped it. These roots are evident in the languages of the West. A systematic knowledge of word origins would do much to nurture mutual cultural understanding and respect. If one wishes to know more about Chinese or Western culture, one can start by examining their words and origins.

culture

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I would like to see applied linguists, teacher trainers, and second-language teachers alike take a closer look at etymology to consider what it can accomplish for the linguistic and cultural development of students. Etymology can also be used in research, for example, to ascertain whether meaningful learning in the sense described in this article is more efficient than rote learning. This is still a heatedly argued topic in Hong Kong, where there is a long tradition of reliance on rote memory for academic success. If memory is a superior type of learning, one must ask under what circumstances? Teachers themselves should look at etymology and consider the Herbert Pierson

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most appropriate instructional methods by which it can be profitably integrated into a second-language curriculum. Finally, it must be remembered that there is no simple answer as to what makes the language learner learn more, but it is my conviction that formal etymological training in the second-language classroom, because it has the characteristics of meaningful learning, could contribute significantly to making more competent and confident second-language learners. • Received May 1987

Notes

Wieger,

1 The Random House Dictionary of the English Language or The Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 2 The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology.

Appendix

References

Ann, T. K. 1982. Cracking

the Chinese Puzzles. Hong Kong: Stockflows. Ausabel, D. 1967. ‘A cognitive-structure theory of school learning’ in L. Siegel: Instruction: Some Contemporary Viewpoints. Scranton, Penn: Chandler. Ausabel, D. 1968. Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View. New York: Rinehart and Winston. Ausabel, D. and F. Robinson. 1969. School Learning: An Introduction to Educational Psychology. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston. Beck, I. 1984. ‘Developing reading comprehension: the impact of the directed reading lesson’ in Learning to Read in American Schools: Basal Readers and Content Texts, edited by R. Anderson, J. Osborn, R. Tierney.

Hillsdale,

N. J.: Lawrence

Erlbaum.

Blackney, R. 1935. A Course in the Analysis of Chinese Characters. Shanghai: The Commercial Press. Could, J. 1980. Ever Since Darwin: Reflection in Natural History. New York: Penguin. Nelson-Herber, J. 1986. ‘Expanding and refining vocabulary in content areas’. Journal of Reading, XXIX/7:626-33.

Ross, A. 1969. Etymology. London: Andre Deutsch. Thelen, J. 1986. ‘Vocabulary instruction and meaningful learning’. Journal of Reading, XXIX/7:603-

609.

L. 1965. Chinese Characters.

New York: Dover.

Exaniples of Chinese character etymology 1 The character for words portrays the picture

of vapour being emitted from the mouth of the speaker. 2 The character for mule conveys the picture of strength, as in a flexed arm muscle, and the picture of a field crossed by furrows and trenches; hence male equals strength exercised in the field. 3 The character for bright or clear pictures the sun and the crescent moon, suggesting that the radiance of these two heavenly bodies has the power of elucidation. 4 The character for East pictures through a tree early in the morning.

the sun shining

5 The character for home shows a roof with a pig underneath it, probably a portrait of Chinese village life where domestic animals roamed freely. The author

Herbert Pierson is Lecturer in the ELT Unit and Instructional Developmental Officer at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he has worked for the past sixteen years. He holds an Ed.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from SUNY-Albany. His current research interest consists of integrating English studies more closely with other academic disciplines at the university in order to produce a more challenging and enriching learning experience for undergraduates.

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