Linguistic relativity and its impact on language teaching

Abstract

ABSTRACT Languages are relatively constructed irs terms -of their intrinsic grammars. The grammatical structure of a language determines the way people perceive external phenomena. In language teaching programs the principle of relativity is either ignored or overlooked and as a result of this the reasons of under learning are not evaluated in terms of revision or reorganization. This thesis aims to fill up the vacuum in language teaching pedagogy by bringing a new dimension to the teaching of foreign languages at- schools. In this dimension, the. concept of mother tongue interference has tşeöh revised and related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with a special reference to the limitation it puts to the learning of target language. Such an approach, it is believed, will renovate the function of contrast i ye analysis in the milieu of language -mind and language- philosophy correlates by bringing sound evidence from the mother tongue and the other tongue. To achieve this aim, the principle of linguistic relativity has been reanimated and extensively studied in language-culture context with a posterior application in language teaching process. The last, but not the least, assumption of the thesis is to shed light on the speculative relation bet-ween the philosophy of language and the teaching of it.