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LinguisticsLinguistics is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as: The study of the nature, structure, and variation of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics.
Linguistics comprises many sub disciplines, each having their own divisions. You probably are familiar with all of them, phonology, morphology, semantics, pragmatics and discourse analysis. On this website we will be looking at some of those categories and shedding some light on the implications for the English Language Learners. Personally, historical linguistics fascinates me. It tells us about the processes of language change and the results. Linguists study how language is structured, and changing as we speak in all the possible ways in terms of the sounds, parts of the words, grammar or rules governing language, meaning of the words, and how social factors such as regional, class, gender, and dialect affect this evolution both in written and speech discourse. In depth study of linguistics and language change directly affects how educators might approach teaching their ELL students in the classroom and shatters many of our assumptions about the correct and incorrect English standards students are expected to learn. |
About
I am Nooshin Haghparast, a former teacher and have taught 4th and 5th Grade students for 17 years. Even though I do not teach currently, I love learning more about Linguistics and may tutor or volunteer to help some English Language Learners in the future. I enjoy reading, hiking, doing yoga, and traveling. Also, in my spare time I delve into learning languages and particularly how the English language works is quite fascinating to me! This website is set up with only one intention: to provide a linguistic resource for all the teachers of English Language Learners.
References for this site:
- Curzan, A. & Adams, M. (2012). How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction, Third Edition. New York: Pearson Education.
- Denham, K. & Lobeck, A. (2005). Language in schools: Integrating linguistics knowledge into k-12 teaching. Yahweh, NJ: Earlbaum.
- Gilakjani, A.P. & Ahmadi, M.R. (2011). Why is pronunciation so difficult to learn? English Language Teaching, 4(3), 74-83.
- Wong Fillmore, Lilly, (2000). What teachers need to know about language. Eric Special Report