Plenary Speakers

Dr Anjum Saleemi - University of Management & Technology, Lahore

Abstract:

Developing Language and Thought Simultaneously

Setting aside the differences between the purely formal features of natural language and the nature of human thought, one cannot possibly imagine a first language emerging in the child without the concomitant development of the (critical) human thinking ability. After all, if language could not be used to express thought, there would not be much apparent use for it and consequently much less motivation to learn it regardless of how innate its mechanisms putatively happen to be. On the other hand, the subsequent late or adult acquisition of a second language is, by definition, supposed to occur only after the primary mechanisms of language and thought are already in place. This clearly poses a dilemma for adult language learning, as it has to proceed under the peculiar conditions in question, wherein the fundamental thinking abilities cannot be the driving force behind it. In this talk I intend to (additionally) invoke the use of higher level of thinking, namely, the critical reasoning ability, to play the same part in adult language acquisition that basic thinking ability does in early language development. I suggest that adult language teaching should be informed in both theory and practice by two guiding principles: (i) it should co-opt the previous thinking ability of the learner in getting the process of late language learning started, and (ii) it should recruit the help of specially deployed critical reasoning in further development of the target language by exploiting the latter as one of the main vehicles of the content of the former. In part of this talk I intend to demonstrate some practical strategies that I believe should help accomplish these twin tasks in a natural and pedagogically effective fashion.

Dr Anjum P. Saleemi holds an MA and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Essex in the United Kingdom . He has additional major interests in the Philosophy of Language and Mind, theories of the evolution of life and consciousness, Cognitive Sciences in general, spirituality and mysticism, and a variety of socio-political, literary and artistic matters. He is the author of Universal Grammar and Language Learnability (Cambridge University Press, 1992) as well as of a large number of research articles, besides being a co-editor (with Ocke-Schwen Bohn and Albert Gjedde) of In Search of a Language for the Mind-Brain (Aarhus University Press, Denmark , 2005). Having had previous affiliations with the National University of Singapore, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California at Berkeley , University of Aarhus , National Chi Nan University in Taiwan , Lahore University of Management Sciences, among other places, Dr Saleemi is currently an HEC Professor at GC University. He is an elected member of the New York Academy of Sciences and a couple of other similar learned societies.