TOPIC 2.

LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE

TEACHING
Halliday, M. A. K., A. McIntosh and P. Strevens (1964). The Linguistic Sciences and
Language Teaching. London: Longman.
Fromkin, V. R. Rodman, P. Collins & D. Blair (2006). An Introduction to Language.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Wilkins, D. A. (2008). Linguistics and Language Teaching. Melbourne, Victoria: Edward
Arnold.
Books, book chapters and articles on introduction to language or introduction to
linguistics.
2. Language & linguistics and foreign language teaching
a. Definition of language and linguistics
b. Phonetics & phonology
c. Morphology
d. Syntax
e. Semantics & pragmatics, and other related issues
f. The relationships between linguistics and foreign language teaching (FLT)
a. Definition of language and linguistics
WHAT IS LANGUAGE
- Cambridge Dictionary: Language is a system of communication consisting of sounds,
words, and grammar:
- Oxford Dictionary: defines language as “the method of human communication, either
spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way; a
system of communication used by a particular country or community.”
- Sapir (1921:7) in Language: Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method
of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced
symbols.
- Mario Pei and Frank Gaynor (1954) in A Dictionary of Linguistics: Language is a
system of communication by sound, i.e., through the organs of speech and hearing,
among human beings of a certain group or community, using vocal symbols possessing
arbitrary conventional meanings.
- Jack et al.(1985) in Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics: Language is the
system of human communication by means of a structured arrangement of sounds (or
their written representation) to form larger units, e.g. morphemes, words, sentences.
- Hadumod Bussmann (1996) in Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics:
Language is a vehicle for the expression or exchange of thoughts, concepts, knowledge,
and information as well as the fixing and transmission of experience and knowledge. It is
based on cognitive processes, subject to societal factors and subject to historical change
and development.
- Language is a means of communication. It is a means of conveying our thoughts ,ideas,
feelings, and emotions to other people. Jack C. Richards and Richard Schmidt define the
language :"the system of human communication which consists of the structured
arrangement of sounds (or their written representation) into larger units, e.g. morphemes,
words, sentences, utterances. In common usage it can also refer to non-human systems of
communication such as the “language” of bees, the “language” of dolphins.
WHAT IS LINGUISTICS?
- Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics defines linguistics
as the study of language as a system of human communication.
- Chomsky defines linguistics as principally concerned with the universals of the human
mind. He considers linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology.
- The study of language in the western world goes back many centuries to Greek and
Roman antiquity and biblical times.
- In the twentieth century, speech sounds (phonetics and phonology) grammar
(morphology and syntax) → meaning (semantics) → the study of texts (discourse
analysis).
- Linguists have of course always been aware of the fact that in language all aspects are
involved, namely, psychology, society, cognition.
- Linguistic is the scientific study of
the structure and development of language in general or of particular languages
Linguistics is defined as the scientific study of language .It is the systematic study of the
elements of language and the principles governing their combination and organization.
Linguistics provides for a rigorous experimentation with the elements or aspects of
language that are actually in use by the speech community. It is based on observation and
the data collected thereby from the users of the language, a scientific analysis is made by
the investigator and at the end of it he comes out with a satisfactory explanation relating
to his field of study. This sort of systematic study of language has rendered the traditional
method language study outmoded or unfit for any theorization. (Sreekumar, 2011 :20)
b. Phonetics & phonology
- Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
- Phonetics is the study of sounds. To understand the mechanics of human languages one has to
understand the physiology of the human body. Letters represent sounds in a rather intricate way.
This has advantages and disadvantages. To represent sounds by letters in an accurate and uniform
way the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) was created.
- We begin with phonology and phonetics. It is important to understand the difference between
phonetics and phonology. Phonetics is the study of actual sounds of
human languages, their production and their perception. It is relevant to linguistics for the simple
reason that the sounds are the primary physical manifestation of
language
- Phonology on the other hand is the study of sound systems. The difference is roughly speaking
this. There are countless different sounds we can make,
but only some count as sounds of a language, say English. Moreover, as far as
English is concerned, many perceptibly distinct sounds are not considered ‘different’. The letter
/p/, for example, can be pronounced in many different ways, with
more emphasis, with more loudness, with different voice onset time, and so on.
From a phonetic point of view, these are all different sounds; from a phonological
point of view there is only one (English) sound, or phoneme: [p]