Description

All language teachers benefit from understanding of how language in general works. This course is designed to help students to understand and use in their language teaching the basic concepts, methods and approaches of linguistics. The following topics are covered in the course; phonetics (sounds/sound inventory of a language), phonology (how we understand and organize the sounds and patterns), morphology (word structure, morphernes; how smaller units of meaning make up words), syntax (sentence structure, how words make up sentences), semantics (how we understand and parse sentences, structural ambiguity, context within sentences), pragmatics (how context impacts meaning on a textual level), social aspects of language(dialects, sociolects, language change, etc.). Although most of the examples will involve English, for comparative and contrastive purposes other languages will be used (no need to understand them). Students will be encouraged to come up with as many of their own examples as possible.