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.
A Syllable is a unit of spoken language which typically consists of a vowel, optionally with a consonant before and/or after it. The number of letters in a syllable is not important as it is the sound of the syllable which matters. One way to think of syllables is as […]
Professor emeritus at the University of Southern California. Krashen is a linguist, an educational researcher, and an activist. Krashen has contributed to the fields of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Bilingual Education, and Reading. He is credited with introducing various influential concepts and terms in the study of second language acquisition, […]
¿Hablas español? About 470 million people do! In fact Spanish is the second most popular first language in the world (after Mandarin; English is third) and also the third most popular language on the internet (after English then Mandarin). As a first language it is mainly spoken in Spain, Latin […]
Stress is used to talk about the emphasis given to certain sounds, words or phrases when we speak. In English there are basically 2 times we talk about stress: on words in an utterance; and on syllables in a word. Stress on Syllables Take the word, august, as an example. […]
Semantics is the study of meaning. This can include the meaning of individual words and also the way in which their meaning may have changed over time. Meaning in languages is mainly studied by linguists. In fact, semantics is one of the main branches of contemporary linguistics. But there are […]