Learning New Tricks: Linguistics

If I promised that I’d post at least once a week,would you believe me? No? I wouldn’t believe me either. Anyways, let’s get the excuses over with shall we? I was busy working, tutoring, studying, blah blah blah. There, now we can get on with today’s post. 🙂

It’s official. I’ve started my journey to obtain a Diploma of Applied Linguistics. You always have to start at the beginning though, so I completed LING 100A last month and it was quite the crash course.

I have never taken a summer course in my 5 years of university, so I was unprepared for the fast-paced intensity of summer learning. The class was 2 hours a day, Monday to Friday and you had to keep on your toes to survive. I had to study linguistics everyday in order to keep up with the class (and even then I still felt like I was just barely keeping up.) Also, I have little linguistic experience and, doing nothing but Japanese and English classes for the past 5 years, linguistics took me a little getting used to.

That being said, I have found myself starting to enjoy linguistics more and more. I find the scientific analysis of language a very useful and interesting subject. I mean, language is something we use everyday but something we rarely think about in great detail. It’s something that seems to come instinctually to us, so when we are asked why language works like it does, we rarely have an answer.

I am also starting to realize why understanding linguistics is essential in becoming an ESL teacher. When I first started researching what it takes to become an ESL teacher I was surprised to learn that the program I needed was called the “Diploma of Applied Linguistics”. “Linguistics?” I thought, “Why do I need to study linguistics to teach ESL?” But in order to teach languages, you need to know how languages work. This was evident to me even when I was learning the simple things of linguistics like the place of articulation of the sounds in the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).  My linguistic guru (a friend of mine who majored in Linguistics and is paid in rice crispie squares) was teaching me how to sound out theta ( ɵ -the “th” sound in words like ‘thin’). She suggested that I put my tongue between my teeth to create this sound. When I asked why, she explained to me that theta’s point of articulation is interdental (between the teeth), she also pointed out that this could be a method to help ESL students pronounce this sound properly.

So, with lots of tutoring, studying, and drawing tons and tons of syntax (sentence) trees (the people in Starbucks must have thought I was mad) I have managed to survive my first course of my diploma with a solid “B”.  Even though linguistics is a little more science-y than my artsy mind is used to, I am intrigued by the subject and look forward to learning more in September. It’s nice to know that I’m still capable of learning new tricks.