Linguistics

This course examines bilingualism and bilingual people including the acquisition and learning of two languages, personality and intelligence, and variables of cognitive development. It also discusses bilingual education programs for linguistic minorities and majorities as well as multiculturalism.

This course fosters students' understanding of the fast-emerging trans-national English-speaking culture by exploring such socio-linguistic themes as language and gender, language and race as well as cultural diversity. It provides students with skills needed to make them into international citizens and leaders in today's global society. This course introduces how English has become a global language, what changes and variations English has come through, and what issues such changes have generated. The English language is playing a pivotal role as an important tool to communicate in today’s globalized world. As it spreads out throughout the world, linguistic changes have appeared in different varieties of English and the new varieties are received differently in different parts of the world. Students learn about linguistic descriptions of the new varieties of English, attitudes towards New Englishes, and issues related to learning and teaching of the English language. In addition, students take a peek at what
is happening to languages whose speakers are decreasing in numbers (as opposed to English whose number of speakers is increasing).

In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky revolutionized the study of linguistics by treating language as something produced by the human brain. From this change in perspective, the study of language became an indirect way of studying the human mind. In addition to opening up new ways to approach the subject, this change also built a foundation for doing linguistics as a science. Grammar is seen not as a known set of rules that people need to study in order to learn but rather as the rules that result from the human mind trying to make sense of the language it is exposed to. In this class we will look at two sub-areas of linguistics from this perspective: syntax (the study of phrase structure in language) and semantics (the study of linguistic meaning).

This course gives students knowledge of the main processes of phonetic articulation (mode, manner, and place of articulation, airstream mechanisms, voicing, secondary articulations (velarization, palatalization, lip-rounding etc, vowel articulation including backness, height, and roundness, plus a basic understanding of tone and pitch). It also provides students with an understanding of how those processes are used in producing speech sounds, and with an ability to represent different sounds using an international standard (the IPA). In addition, students are able to discriminate sounds aurally, and produce them from IPA script. The course first focuses on the sounds of English before examining sounds that are used in the world's languages. This course is a pre-requisite for the Introduction to Phonology course.

This course explores the research on the processes by which children acquire their first language. It also examines second language acquisition and theories of second language learning.