Overview
The study of linguistics is often perceived as abstract or obscure. In a world that seems to move so quickly –with frantic schedules and ever-looming deadlines, who has time to study the theories, structures, and details of our letters, words, and sentences? After all, the majority of the verbal and written language we use serves a direct purpose: to communicate our thoughts, feelings, wants, and needs. For many native English speakers, phonology (sound patterns), morphology (study of how words are built), syntax (study of sentence structure), and semantics (study of meaning within language) remain elusive and perhaps of no clear use. This is because we acquired our first language for the practical purpose of communicating sentiments, needs, and desires. Language became a tool to help us survive and navigate through the joys, challenges, emotions, and benchmarks of life. The development of our first language seems almost intuitive. Rarely do we take a metacognitive approach to analyzing the specifics of how we learn to speak. Think about it. Have you ever heard a dad saying to his three-year -old, “Sweetheart, you must affix the bound morpheme ‘ed’ to the free morpheme ‘talk’ if you want to change the tense of this derivative from present to past.” I am almost certain that you have never heard a mom saying to her seventh grader, “Darling, you have to add stress to the diphthong in the second syllable of the word ‘compound’ so your listener will understand the verb form as opposed to the noun.”
For most of us, our exposure to the study of English linguistics, if at all, has been in class where developing effective communication skills was the goal. However, for language teachers, particularly those who teach English learners, developing an understanding of language structure and first and new language acquisition (how one acquires first and subsequent languages) is crucial to instruction. Our schools are becoming more culturally and linguistically diverse each year. So, it is important to understand some of the similarities and differences between English and other common languages spoken by our students. When we do, we are able to capitalize on the transferable skills of students from their L1 (first language) to English as well as overcome some of the factors that may hinder their development of the language.
Throughout this course, we will focus on the specific principles of linguistics that pertain to English language development, and provide useful tools to help understand some of the language issues that arise with ELLs (English Language Learners) as they journey through the process of acquiring English. Please note that some linguistic terms are quite technical. We suggest that you bookmark a few linguistic dictionary web sites so that you will have easy access to a glossary. We have included a few of our favorites to assist you with technical terms:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~pxc/nlpa/nlpgloss.html
http://www.sil.org/mexico/ling/glosario/E005ai-Glossary.htm
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/
Click on the projector to listen to an educator of Linguistics and English Language Development discuss the importance of Linguistics.
