| Description |
Introduction What is language? What is linguistics? What is English? And what is it like? All of these questions are relevant at the start of the semester, but in this second part of a combined very short introduction to Phonetics and Linguistics for English Language Teaching, we will be focusing mostly on what English is (like). The course will provide individual glimpses into the linguistic study of English and the discipline of linguistics. These are relevant with a view to the subject matter of our teaching, the E in ELT, and its form, meaning and use. |
| Training objectives |
Aims and rationale The short-term aim of this course is to help students understand and apply metalanguage used to describe and analyse English and to reflect on some concepts of language and linguistic analysis that have informed ELT. The long-term aim of this course is to start a process of discovery of different approaches to the study of English that teachers (and other language professionals) can draw on as needed. This should help to make your choices more informed and your practice more principled and to develop your knowledge base and skills repertoire for promoting foreign language learning in the classroom. Another rationale for this course is that every (future) language teacher, consciously or unconsciously, already has an informal, implicit theory of language (i.e. ideas and conceptualisations of what language is, what it consists of, how it works etc.) and that every textbook or grammar is, more or less explicitly, based on linguistic intuitions/analyses and descriptions/prescriptions. Since ELT is thus never purely practical it is useful to acquire some basic ‘tools’ with which to examine our own and other people’s ideas and idealisations about English critically. |