Poucas palavras:

Blog criado por Bruno Coriolano de Almeida Costa, professor de Língua Inglesa desde 2002. Esse espaço surgiu em 2007 com o objetivo de unir alguns estudiosos e professores desse idioma. Abordamos, de forma rápida e simples, vários aspectos da Língua Inglesa e suas culturas. Agradeço a sua visita.

"Se tivesse perguntado ao cliente o que ele queria, ele teria dito: 'Um cavalo mais rápido!"

sábado, 19 de maio de 2018

Linguist who changed the way languages are taught





From: https://www.smh.com.au/national/mak-halliday-university-sydney-chomsky-linguists-20180509-p4zeap.html

Although far too modest to admit it, Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday, who has died at Manly aged 93, extended the work of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx by drawing the study of language and ‘meaning’ further into the natural and social sciences.

Halliday (often known as ‘MAK’) was born in Leeds in Yorkshire on April 13, 1925. It was almost inevitable he would engage with language. Wilfred Halliday, his father, was an English teacher and a poet of the Yorkshire dialect. Winifred Kirkwood, his mother, taught French.

When war broke out, the British government resolved to deploy military forces in Asia and established a national services foreign language training course. Halliday volunteered for the course in 1942 and was posted to the Chinese Intelligence Unit in Calcutta where, among other things, he debriefed those who had fled Japanese-occupied China.

After the war, Halliday obtained a grant from the University of London to study Chinese as an external student at Peking University, where he also taught English. It was at Peking University he began to collect the strands of thought he would later weave into his theories of functional linguistics and grammar.

They included research on Mandarin and Sino-Tibetan languages with the distinguished linguist Luo Changpei and on the languages and dialects of the Pearl River Delta led by Wang Li of Lingnan University at Canton (now Guangzhou). Thus Halliday saw Mao’s Red Army sweep to victory twice. He was in the crowd watching it march into Beijing in February 1949 and, later that year, he saw it triumph in the south.

Halliday returned to England for post-graduate work at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) where he was influenced by the leading English linguist, John Firth and, later, by the sociologist Basil Bernstein. As Halliday’s China experiences had left him a firm Marxist, the increasing tensions of the Cold War and outbreak of McCarthyism made him ineligible to remain at the SOAS.

Halliday joined the Chinese department at Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in 1955 under Firth’s supervision. There, Halliday became an active member of the Communist Party and worked alongside luminaries including eminent historians Joseph Needham and Eric Hobsbawm. Halliday broke with the party over the Soviet Union’s brutal invasion of Hungary in 1956.

It was at Cambridge that Halliday applied his insights into language. Drawing on Firth’s work, Halliday came to see language as a social construction and, crucially, the mechanism by which society is reproduced and, occasionally, transformed. That insight, combined with his commitment to improving social conditions, left Halliday searching for a new way of teaching language to improve literacy rates and give ordinary people greater opportunities.

This socially focused approach put Halliday at odds with established figures on the ‘nature’ side of the ‘nature or nurture’ debate. They included Noam Chomsky and his followers, who believed the human capacity for language was innate rather than acquired during life.

Halliday argued the key to language development lay in how children attribute "meaning" to elements in their environment. In contrast to Chomsky and his followers, who advocated an inherent universal human grammar, Halliday developed a theory of language based on a system of choices. The results were Halliday’s models of systemic functional grammar and systemic functional linguistics.

His approach remains a strong influence on the field of descriptive linguistics and on teacher training curriculum across the world today. An unexpected opportunity to demonstrate his theories arose on his resignation from the University of London to take up a post at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

By then Halliday had married Ruqaiya Hasan, one of his early postgraduate students and a formidable linguist. When the Canadian government declined to grant Halliday a visa, he realised their young son, Neil, offered a chance to closely monitor how children develop grammar.

Halliday’s study showed how children build grammar in stages through the specific interactions of their lives. This led to the publication of his seminal work Learning how to Mean in 1975, in which Neil was given the rather unconvincing pseudonym ‘Nigel’. It is indicative of Halliday’s sense of humour that he considered dedicating his book to the Canadian government.

Halliday’s ground-breaking work was recognised by the University of Sydney, which appointed him foundation professor of linguistics in 1976. For the following decades, the family home at Killara and later Manly would be an international meeting house for language studies with both Halliday and Hasan (who was appointed Professor of Linguistics at Macquarie University) both in great demand for international conferences, visiting professorships, and publications.

Halliday’s retirement in 1987 gave him the chance to pursue a range of pastimes, including bushwalking, train travel and the Herald’s cryptic crossword. He and Hasan divided their time between Manly and Urunga on the NSW north coast, where they listed the native birds of the district.

A steady stream of conference papers and books flowed, culminating in the publication of Halliday’s 11-volume collected works. He retained ties to China, where his theories struck fertile ground, and regularly lectured at the major universities in Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai.

Both Halliday and Hasan attended the opening of a Centre for Language Studies based on his work at City University in Hong Kong in 2006. Waiters at Manly yum cha restaurants were often astonished to find an elderly Westerner ordering off the menu in fluent Mandarin.

Halliday’s thick glasses and long sideburns gave him an owlish appearance; features picked up by the cartoonist who drew him (and Chomsky) for Icon Books’ Introduction to Linguistics. A remarkably friendly, approachable man considering his Olympian academic status, Halliday remained optimistic about the future, although his views were tempered by Yorkshire pragmatism.

Concerned that media reports on China often overlooked positive developments there, he nevertheless worried over China attempts to expand its geopolitical influence. “We may have to get used to having less freedom” he observed during our conversations on foreign affairs. Donald Trump’s electoral appeal reminded Halliday of Marx’s comment that the working class often voted against its own interests.

Hasan’s death in 2015 deprived Halliday of his lover and collaborator. He celebrated his 93rd birthday, but a painful outbreak of shingles clouded his last years.

Halliday married several times prior to his relationship with Hasan. His first marriage was to Trenchu Wong at Shanghai in 1947. He later married Irene (‘Pat’) Woolf, with whom he had a son Andrew and daughter Polly. After their divorce, he and the geneticist Anne McLaren had a daughter, Caroline.

Halliday later married Brenda Stephen and they had a daughter, Clare.

Halliday is survived by his children and four grandchildren, Bianca, Nicole, Rhona and Cameron and an extraordinary intellectual legacy with which a third generation of scholars continue to engage and extend.
Justin Cahill
Michael Halliday 1925 - 2018

PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
Your feedback is welcome. Please direct comments and questions to me at bruno_coriolano@hotmail.com
Did you spot a typo?
Do you have any tips or examples to improve this page?
Do you disagree with something on this page?

Use one of your social-media accounts to share this page:


Nenhum comentário: