They look at the inner workings of language. Why language works like it does, in other words. Think of learning about linguistics in the same way you’d learn how an internal combustion engine works. Linguistics is what’s under the hood… you don’t need to know it to drive a car, but it helps understand what’s going on if you ever break down!
So… TEFL teachers should find these useful in providing more of a background to their teaching and students, too, will find them helpful in understanding language at a slightly deeper level.
Your Mother Tongue (or MT) is the language you learn and speak as a child. It is sometimes known as First Language (FL), Native Language (NL) or Arterial Language (AL). Note that it is NOT always the language spoken by your mother! It is usually the language learned in the […]
Phonetics is the branch of linguistics which studies the sounds of speech and they way in which they are interpreted. Contrast this with phonology which is the study of the sound system of a language. Phonetics looks at the way in which sounds are produced (the position of the tongue, […]
Simply put, Morphology is the study of the words in a language. It does go deeper, but generally speaking it studies and looks at language in terms of: spelling pronunciation definition part of speech etymology (and obsolete usages) non-standard or slang/taboo usage Importantly morphology looks at the way in which […]
Linguistics is the scientific and academic study of language. It tries to answer basic questions such as What is language? How is language represented in the mind? How does language work? The underlying goal of linguists is to discover the underlying rules of all languages; that is, the common elements […]
Lexicography is basically all about compiling dictionaries. It’s about sitting in a stuffy, darkened, room carefully going over words: examining them, investigating them, analyzing them. It’s about asking what exactly words are and what they mean. Perhaps even why people use one word over another. And then writing it all […]