Constructions of Meaning: Higher Order Thinking Skills in Language Teaching
By: Rodolfo Mattiello
Higher order thinking skills. If you are a neuroscience aficionado you have certainly heard of this term before and in case you are a language teacher with different interests, it may have never been on your word-of-the-day list. Regardless, these skills are essential for language learning, considering that constructions consist of linguistic signs composed of words and structures. A language teacher who has this clear in their mind may even reconsider the dichotomic approach involving words and grammar.
Higher order thinking skills
It is very important to understand what higher order thinking skills are before analyzing where they are deployed in the process of language acquisition. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive tasks, and judgement (association) is one of them. This is a higher order thinking skill that is used to make inferences, read contexts, sort out relationships and make semantic associations (Barbas, 2009; Chafee &, Heilbronner, 2022; DeVito et al., 2010). Let’s try to understand them.
Making inferences
One of the many interesting experiments you can do with an infant is the analysis of their crying. When they cry, several causes may come to a parent’s mind: hunger, pain, and tiredness are some of the trivial examples. A crying infant will promptly have a parent (or a caregiver) check on them, which can be seen as the first cause-consequence situation the infant is exposed to, leading them to make the association “if I produce this sound, someone will come for me” (A > B). When the caregiver arrives, they may think the infant is hungry and offer them something to eat, which of course will please the child and result in a second situation to be analyzed: the adult gives food and the infant feels pleased (B > C).
That is the moment the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is deployed and has the child come to a more complex conclusion. They may infer that when they cry, an adult comes to them and the same adult brings food that pleases the infant, then by crying the final result will be the famous food in the belly. If A > B, B > C then the child assumes A > C. By thinking in this way, the child is making inferences.
Reading contexts
Do you recognize this common classroom scenario? The kids in the classroom are silent, looking down at their desks with no communication with the classmates around them. Sheets of paper on the desk, pencils and pens right beside the paper, some students biting the pencils very pensively. And how could I forget? – The teacher is walking around the room very attentively.
If in your mind you pictured an exam day in a school classroom, then you are absolutely right. In addition, you used one of the PFC’s skills to define meaning through context. Of course one must have had a similar experience before to retrieve it when a scenario that resembles an exam day occurs in the classroom. It is our higher order thinking skills that allow us to understand that an exam is happening when we see a scenario like the one described here.
Sorting out relationships
One very frequent activity teachers assign to kids is to paint only the flowers red in an illustration with different plants. Kids have to identify the flowers in a universe that contains trees, bushes, and leaves and then color only them, isolating the flowers from other types of plants. At first glance, it might seem like a childish activity that makes them spend their time to calm down after recess, for example.
Although calming down may be one of the direct consequences of such an activity, there is much more to it. Differentiating, grouping, selecting are other higher order thinking skills that we deploy when an activity such as that described above is assigned to us. Teachers are actually stimulating the use of their students’ PFC, which will help the students perform many other types of work in the future.
Making semantic associations
Evening. You are in your bedroom looking at the mirror, staring at yourself to rehearse a school presentation for the following morning. The presentation will be done in front of the whole group and, of course, you want to put your A-game into practice. There you are, thinking about the words and constructions you will use in order to make the best impression in front of your classmates and the teacher—the one who will grade your work. “I’m gonna say that recycling is best for everyone.” Then you think better of it, make some adjustments and go, “Nah. That’s gonna make me sound foolish.”
This realization of what a certain combination of words turned into sentences means is, once again, the result of our prefrontal cortex in action. We don’t always deploy this higher order thinking skill in less dynamic situations. In everyday interactions, the time we have for planning the best way to convey a message is minimal, yet we do it very well.
These are some examples of how our higher order thinking skills work when we deploy our associative abilities. They are extremely important when our students are in the process of learning languages and help us understand the perspective of researchers in the area of Cognitive Linguistics, which suggests that linguistic signs consist of a combination of words and the relations between them (constructions). Understanding how these signs are formed can contribute to a more effective approach in language (L1, L2, Ln) teaching.
Linguistic signs
For many decades, the language learning scenario in Brazil has tried to isolate the teaching of words from the teaching of grammar rules (constructions). Some educators have even taken a more Chomskyan view by disconnecting the constructions from spoken discourse, working their norms out explicitly not embedded in speech (Diessel, 2019) or from activities that involve real-life situations where the language is used and the rules embedded. This approach brings to the surface some issues that may negatively interfere with the language learning process.
1. Students have only one path to retrieve words
We benefit when words are encountered with other words in collocations in a retrieval attempt (Blumenthal-Drame, 2012; Dabrowska, 2015). In a lesson plan that focuses on teaching words separately from their context, students are deprived of the advantage of multimodality because “retrieval of complex units may be easier than retrieval of individual words of comparable frequency, since the component units can act as retrieval cues” (Dabrowska, 2004, p. 18). For example, students who are in an environment where language is used and encounter chunks (prefabricated language) like thanks, thank you, thank your friend, and say thanks to your parents are more likely to access not only the word to thank, but also its concept.
2. Students focus on the rules
Focusing on grammar rules is a genuine Chomskyan language teaching approach based on the premise that by learning the norms of a language, students will deploy their so-called linguistic competence to produce an infinite number of sentences (Diessel, 2019). This teaching objective has a gap because it rejects the semantic load that is inherent in the language. In other words, students will not have a chance to associate their mental representations (concepts) to the structuring of a sentence. Thus, students will end up internalizing textbook grammar rules (constructions) without understanding how to produce them with actual words to convey a message.
In Cognitive Linguistics, language is understood as an association involving phonology, words, and constructions that together are responsible for the development of meaning (Diesel, 2019). Such association, as mentioned before in this article, requires the use of our higher order thinking skills to produce spoken discourse by retrieving a specific mental representation, finding the right words, and inserting them in a specific construction, so that the hearer clearly understands the message.
Look at this utterance:
“They’re putting people in jail.”
In this utterance, we have two nouns, two verbs, one pronoun, and one preposition, that together, and in this specific construction, describe a particular situation. The verb phrase (VP) they’re putting suggests a routine and the gerund form “-ing” reinforces the concept of an ongoing situation. The speaker could have decided to use a different construction, but the meaning would probably differ, so the choice of this construction from the set of all possible options is not a coincidence. It is architectured. The same goes for the nouns. Why people and not immigrants, criminals, or any other word? In this linguistic sign, we can identify the presence of a symbolic relation where the choice of people is retrieved in a lexical network that provides the following scope.
In Figure 1—reproduced from Langacker’s (2008) system—it is possible to identify what is implied when one utters the word people, which automatically relates to the concept, the mental representation associated with the word. The scope that follows and the reason for the word choice is that it can represent human beings, and is also linked to a humane perspective. Therefore, what is being conveyed is that human beings are being put in jail, giving a humane viewpoint instead of an alternative viewpoint which would have resulted from a different word choice. Using the same symbolic association for constructions it is possible to analyze the use of the verb phrase “-ing”: following the same procedure for symbolic associations to create meaning, the gerund provides a recurring situation as well as a current situation. The gerund form is chosen on purpose, crafting the message to express the speaker’s mental state. This result would not be possible if the Chomskyan perspective was present in the teaching approach that isolates words and constructions. Approaches that focus on rules separate from the words that basically give light to sentences remove the associative character of language learning. In other words, students don’t have the semantic basis to form meaning, leaving the teaching of rules hollow.
Classroom practices
Understanding that the language development process deploys our higher order thinking skills for associations can help teachers improve their classroom practices. Instead of having separate lessons for vocabulary and grammar, design a lesson plan where the construction (using rules and words altogether) is present so that the students have their semantic association skill used. By doing so, learners will attempt to generalize the construction in different contexts and with different words, as their schema of the language is being built at the same time.
Generalizations are another instance of our prefrontal cortex being activated. Once the linguistic sign is internalized and the learner tries to replicate its use with different words, we understand that they are making inferences by assuming that using the construction with different vocabulary will generate a similar result or achieve the same linguistic goal. Therefore, an effective practice is to use actual spoken discourse and point out what each sentence means. Give the students opportunities to produce and create sentences using their understanding of a given construction and then check if they can infer how to use it coherently in different contexts.
Language teachers that understand how the prefrontal cortex works and opt for an approach where the rules are not empty certainly improve the odds for a better ultimate result with students performing in the target language and even using their higher order thinking skills to generalize a construction and attempt to use it in different contexts to convey different messages.
References
Barbas, H. (2009). Prefrontal cortex: Structure and anatomy. In L. R. Squire (Ed.), Encyclopedia of neuroscience (pp. 908-918). Academic Press.
Blumenthal-Drame, A. (2012). Entrenchment in usage-based theories: What corpus data do and do not reveal about the mind. De Gruyter.
Chafee, M. V., & Heilbronner, S. R. (2022). Prefrontal cortex. Current Biology, 32(8), R346–R351. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.02.071
Dabrowska, E. (2004). Language, mind, and brain: Some psychological and neurological constraints on theories of grammar. Edinburgh University Press.
Dabrowska, E., & Dagmar, D. (2015). Handbook of cognitive linguistics. The cognitive foundations of language: Frequency and entrenchment. De Gruyter.
DeVito, L. M., Lykken, C., Kanter, B. R., & Eichenbaum, H. (2010). Prefrontal cortex: Role in acquisition of overlapping associations and transitive inference. Learning & Memory, 17(3), 161–167. https://doi.org/10.1101/lm.1685710
Diessel, H. (2019). The grammar network: How linguistic structure is shaped by language use. Cambridge University Press.
Langacker, R. (2008). Cognitive grammar: A basic introduction. Oxford University Press.
Rodolfo Mattiello, MSc., is an English teacher, a guest lecturer for Language Acquisition at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná, Brazil. He’s the founder of Mattiello Consultoria and BELíngue, a book author, and co-hosts the Chá Pedagógico podcast.