Howard Gardner's Linguistic-Verbal Intelligence
Spatial Bodily kinesthetic Musical Naturalist Introduction Interpersonal Intrapersonal Logical mathematical Linguistic-verbal intelligence is that ability to use words effectively either orally or in writing, that is, the ability to exhibit language development in its fullest form, in short, the overall structure of language. This way of knowing and comprehending the real world is the ability to use language to achieve a goal and enhance understanding. A core component of this traditional IQ-type intelligence is sensitivity to the meanings, rhythms, and sounds of words ... in short, sensitivity to the different functions of language.
Young children with this dominance often demand story after story around bedtime. When they enter school, they have highly developed verbal skills, enjoy developing rhymes, and often pun. In short, they tend to think in words. They like oral and silent reading exercises, playing word games, enjoying a variety of reading and writing materials at learning centers, making up poetry and stories, getting into involved discussions, debates, formal speaking, creative writing, and telling complicated jokes. They tend to be precise in expressing themselves; they love learning new words, verbalizing, spelling, and writing well. Also, their understanding of what they have read (reading comprehension) tends to be well above the classroom norm.
As adolescents, they possess strong vocabularies, and, at times, can get so lost in a thick book that they almost forget about their dinner. At this age, they may subscribe to their favorite magazines, or use a word processing application to keep a personal diary or secret journal. As adults, authors, poets, journalists, and lawyer are just four of the many types of individuals they may become. I believe that the movie maker and actor, Woody Allen, is strong in this intelligence.
As an aside, although the two mainstream intelligences, the verbal-linguistic and the logical-mathematical encompasses, mainly, all of the traditional 3 R's of reading, writing, and arithmetic, they only account for twenty-five percent of Gardner eight intelligences. And more importantly, these two intelligences comprise mainly all of what is considered in most traditional Intelligence Quotient (IQ) types of tests ...those standardized normalized tests that dominate so much of what (supposedly) constitutes intelligence.
home | last modified on Sunday, 11 August 2002.| e-mail
Copyright © by Clifford Morris, 2002