From Colorless green ideas that Sleep Furiously to Meaning-Based Learning and Teaching

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is arguably the most important sentence in what is known as the field of “Linguistic-Cognitive Science." This sentence was invented in 1957 by Noam Chomsky, father of the influential transformative grammar approach, as an example of a sentence whose grammar is correct but for which the meaning is simply nonsense. At the time, Chomsky used this sentence to argue against the then-popular models of grammar, and the need for more structured models. History shows that Chomsky won that argument overwhelmingly as his linguistic legacy became prominent and almost without any significant competing view in the United States.

As the formal and context-free grammar advocated by Chomsky gained almost canonical status by the 70’s in the US, a functional meaning-based grammar called Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was being developed across the Atlantic by linguist Michael Halliday. SFL looks at language as a system, a meaning-making system, in which meaning is made based on choices regulated by a) the values we hold, the biases we adopt, b) the genre (the staged, purposeful way in which people go about achieving purposes using language), and c) the register (the topic talked about, the role relations between those involved, and the medium used). Language is seen as a system of meaning potential and therefore SFL gives priority to studying the choices in language. As such, it allows us to ask why, out of so many choices (paradigms), did a speaker make that choice and not another.

Thus, unlike Chomsky, Halliday was not interested in what an ideal speaker would be able to do as the result of innate characteristics of human beings, he was interested in describing, explaining, and interpreting what speakers actually do with language; how they used language to mean in different contexts; why they make the choices they make, and what may be the social consequences of such choices.

It is perhaps irrelevant and not useful for us as practitioners and teachers to get into debates to choose between Chomsky and Halliday as both their theories make important contributions to the field of linguistics. The questions they asked, what they were interested about was radically different. Just as it does not make any sense to argue that the color blue smells much better than green, it is equally unfruitful to even contemplate a winner in this debate. I am convinced that it is much more useful not to treat this as a a matter of being correct or incorrect, but as a question of appropriateness and focus. What approach is most likely to help you as a teacher to meet the needs, rights, and backgrounds of all your students, including those from culturally and/or linguistically diverse backgrounds? What approach will help you as a teacher to meet your students where they are and help them move forward?

Once we know that Halliday's concern was first and foremost the analysis of everyday speakers and how we mean in naturally occurring language in actual contexts of use, Chomsky’s concern with the formal properties of English, the innate nature of the Language Acquisition Device and the ideal speaker becomes worth being familiar with but with little application to the everyday practice of teachers. This is why if we are to meet the needs, rights, and backgrounds of our students, we should move from correctness to appropriateness, from form to meaning: from Colorless green ideas that Sleep Furiously to Meaning-Based Learning and Teaching. On these grounds, not on the dogmatic and modernistic dichotomy of right and wrong, is that I consider myself teacher who subscribes to the SFL framework; a framework that leads me to interrogation, wonder, and possibility of language in use; a framework that treats language as a means to express identity(ies) and that simultaneously impacts the very identity(ies) it seeks to realize.