Defining linguistic reasoning

Roy Dielemans,Peter-Arno Coppen

doi:10.1075/dujal.19038.die

Abstract

Abstract Until recently, throughout the world, linguistic theory was virtually absent in secondary education, mostly limited to grammar teaching still based on 19th century linguistic theory. There is a growing call, however, for enriching grammar teaching with modern linguistic insights, integrating higher order critical thinking skills, like reasoning. This study tries to lay the groundwork for a model of linguistic reasoning in particular. Based on a well-established model for historical reasoning (Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2018), a linguistic model is developed in two steps. First, the components of the historical model are theoretically analysed and transposed to the linguistic domain, and second, the model is applied in qualitative analysis of linguistic experts’ reasoning. It is found that the model fits linguistic reasoning fairy well: all central components can be observed, and are evenly distributed over different experts. It is concluded that the linguistic reasoning model can be used in the development of a new grammar pedagogy.

Highlights

Teachers, parents and students often consider grammar education an extremely useful and relevant part of the language curriculum (Gartland & Smolkin, 2015), traditional grammar teaching has been criticized all around the world for being too superficial, mainly based on decontextualized parsing exercises and rules of thumb
We will focus on linguistic reasoning, first because it can be considered as one of the key components of higher order thinking, and second, because it is already well-researched in a similar domain
To answer the main research question What is linguistic reasoning?, we try to transpose the components of a well-established model for another discipline from the humanities, historical reasoning (Van Drie & Van Boxtel, 2007; Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2018) into the linguistic domain based on a theoretical analysis grounded in our own observation of linguistic discussions in the literature and examples of linguistic reasoning elicited from experts

Summary

Introduction

Parents and students often consider grammar education an extremely useful and relevant part of the language curriculum (Gartland & Smolkin, 2015), traditional grammar teaching has been criticized all around the world for being too superficial, mainly based on decontextualized parsing exercises and rules of thumb. We will focus on linguistic reasoning, first because it can be considered as one of the key components of higher order thinking, and second, because it is already well-researched in a similar domain (historical reasoning). To answer the main research question What is linguistic reasoning?, we try to transpose the components of a well-established model for another discipline from the humanities, historical reasoning (Van Drie & Van Boxtel, 2007; Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2018) into the linguistic domain based on a theoretical analysis grounded in our own observation of linguistic discussions in the literature and examples of linguistic reasoning elicited from experts. How can a well-established model for historical reasoning be transposed to the linguistic domain?. 2. To what extent can such a model be used to describe linguistic reasoning from experts?

Linguistic reasoning and critical thinking

Historical reasoning

Components

Asking historical questions

Using historical sources

Using historical concepts and using historical meta-concepts

Historical contextualization

Types of reasoning

Individual resources

Sociocultural resources

Applying the model to linguistic reasoning

Using linguistic concepts