In this course, we will focus on those aspects of linguistics that are most useful for people teaching a foreign or second language: articulatory phonetics, the study of how speech sounds are produced; phonology, the study of sound systems and how sounds vary according to their environment; morphology and morphophonemics, the study of word formation and how the pronunciation of morphemes varies; semantics/pragmatics, the study of meaning and how a given meaning is expressed in different languages, as well as how language is used in social contexts. Finally, we will look at some of the results of second language acquisition research to see what it can tell us about how people learn a second or foreign language.
Instructor: Ruth Lanouette, associate professor of German, Lawrence University