Online 12th ISAPL International Congress
NEW PERSPECTIVES IN PSYCHOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH:
LANGUAGE, CULTURE, TECHNOLOGIES
June 3-5, 2021
The Conference ended just a few
hours ago,
On Saturday, June 5th, 2021, at
18:30
Virtual Celebration and Beer for All
It is now
high time to look at the future because the conference was a success despite
the COVID-19 pandemic that has been bombarding us with confinements and travel
bans. We just ran Virtual, and we made it an event.
A new team
is taking over and can start working hard for the next congress, probably in
2024, in a European locale to be defined soon. The starting point of this 24th
congress is solid and firm. No quicksand under our feet and we hope the
troubles of the last two years can be finally behind us and we will try not to
look back, with or without anger.
Our fields
of research are numerous:
1-
Teaching languages and all that can be taught in languages: reading, writing,
performing, reciting, dramatizing, etc.
2-
Translating and in this field, trying to invent a new method to translate and
trying to devise a new procedure of machine-translating because what exists on
the market does not satisfy our needs, though, for the most creative and
inventive forms of linguistic expression, a translation-machine might never be
good enough.
3- The
didactics of foreign languages, either within a multilingual or a polylingual,
or a simple bilingual frame. Along with the phylogeny of the acquisition of one
first language or two first languages by a child starting even before
his/her/their birth.
4- The
discovery, collecting, and defending of all languages of all peoples in the
world. We will concentrate on endangered languages first, international and
global communication languages second, and then all other languages that are a
heritage of humanity that has to be saved from minorization and eventually
perdition.
5- The
cultures contained, developed, and transmitted by these languages with the
strong motivation to give all cultures the fullest possibilities to find a way
to live for the speakers of these languages, and for the whole world, because
all cultures are a heritage for the whole humanity, equally and unrestrainedly.
An Overview of the phenomenal task that is ours.
Our main
scientific commitment will be what it has been for now several decades, i.e., APPLIED
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS.
Psycholinguistics
because in the 300,000-year-long phylogeny of Homo Sapiens, of humanity, two
virtual dimensions developed in the real brain, first the mind, what the
Buddhists call the sixth sense, and articulated language. Homo Sapiens became
what we are by becoming a fast long-distance bipedal runner, which implied the
mutation of our feet and legs, plus a whole set of mutations selected for that
very object: running on our two feet long distance and fast, Marathon-like, to
hunt or escape from predators. These mutations had one collateral side-effect:
the development of articulated language that started thus something like
300,000 years ago, and this phylogeny developed, word after word, sentence
after sentence, utterance after utterance, our modern languages that emerged in
Black Africa and migrated out of Black Africa to Northern Africa first, the
whole of Asia second, and Europe and Central-&-Northern Asia third, with
the last wave of these migrations staying on the Iranian plateau. These
migrations out of Black Africa were finished around 45,000 BCE.
After the
peak of the Ice Age, further migrations from Siberia and South East Asia will
reach North and South America before the Peak of the Ice Age (19,000 BCE), and
the last wave of the third migration out of Black Africa that stayed on the Iranian
Plateau only migrated after this Ice Age Peak, West to Mesopotamia and then
Europe, and East to the Indian sub-continent.
We are
trying to get a full picture of the phylogeny and history of Homo Sapiens to
understand the linguistic mosaic of humanity, and this mosaic has to be
preserved, protected, and validated because the mind and language developed,
have developed, and are still developing along parallel lines, simultaneously
and reciprocally. One language that dies here or there, and the human mind is
impoverished and loses a few intellectual cells.
An Overview of the phenomenal task that is ours.
But we
strongly believe in the “applied” dimension of our science, and all sciences as
for that. It means intellectuals, linguists, scientists, academics have to come
out of their protected abstract and comfortable ivory towers and descend into
the fields of real life, of practice, and to do this all tools, including the
most advanced and those that do not exist yet will have to be used day after
day, relentlessly, to change the course of our own species and of the earth.
All those who will not do it will be left behind. We only know about computers,
Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and a few other tools of the type, but
Virtual Reality is coming, and it will be in all our schools sooner than we may
think. Jaron Lanier used it for Boeing to train pilots last century. After the
present crisis that is running through humanity, revealing the inequality,
injustice, and unfairness of human policies in the world, we will never go back
to pre-pandemic normal, we will have to invent a new normal, just, fair, and
sustainable.
For
education, which concerns us, applied psycholinguists, directly, the pandemic
crisis has bluntly revealed the countries that have been able to devise a “new
normal” by discovering that distance learning enables us to lower the number of
students in the classes and the classrooms by alternating in complementary
fashion distance learning and face-to-face learning, provided the educational system
be able to promote self-learning for all equally as a right and a duty, and
guidance from the teachers who will have to be trained, self-trained,
innovative, and creative. We are entering the age of guided self-learning and soon
enough beyond Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning we will navigate in the
cosmos with Virtual Reality, not to entertain in a way or another (which will
be possible of course) but to mine this cosmos for knowledge and bring it back
to the class and the classroom for discussion, confrontation, and synthesis
into working hypotheses that will be like stages on our road to more knowledge
and a better life in the real world, with eventually a better environment on
our planet, and the mission not to pollute the universe or the cosmos with our
trash.
I might
not be one pioneer on this Virtual Reality frontier, but I can assure you I am a
practitioner on the Guided Self-Learning front with the students I am coaching
into becoming the English-speaking elite of the avant-garde start-ups of
medical progress, among others.
Dr.
Jacques COULARDEAU
Vice-President
of ISAPL
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 5:19 AM
