Instructor : RENIEL BELMES GERERO

Course and Code Name : Major 1 ( LINGUISTICS )

Term : First Semester Academic Year 2021-2022
Consultation Time : 5:30- 6:30 / 6:30-7:30 1 hour/MWF
Consultation Venue : Room 3
References : google.com
Introduction to Linguistics

Handout No.1
Focus: Introduction to Linguistics

Linguistics is the study of human language, its nature, origins and uses. This course will give the
students an overview of the field of modern linguistics and basic skills in linguistic analysis. It also
investigates how language are learned and how they change over time. Thus, it gives a standard
direction to shape the students’ understanding about the structures, elements and principles of language.

At the end of this lesson, students are expected to:

1. identify the key linguistic concepts and principles of language

2. describe and explain the importance of the study of language
3. demonstrate familiarity with the theories of language and language learning and their
influence on language teaching
4. revisit the knowledge of linguistic theories and concepts and apply it to the teaching of
communication skills – listening, speaking, reading, writing, and grammar
5. show understanding on how language rules are used in real conversations

A. Linguistics and English Language Teaching

WHAT IS LANGUAGE?
 Teachers’ knowledge on the workings of language and language teaching are essentially
intertwined with each other. The teachers’ competence on how a language behaves will certainly
help teachers explain to the students how the language works, as well as anticipate and respond
appropriately to possible learning difficulties.

1. Knowledge of linguistics, specifically phonology, may be useful for explaining interference

problems that may be experienced by English language learners with the English sound system.
To illustrate, in the absence of the following sounds such as /f/ and /v/ in Philippine languages,
except in Ivatan and Ibanag, Filipino English learners are likely to use /p/ and /v/ as substitute
sounds, e.g., /pæn/ for /fæn/ ‘ fan’ and /bæn/ for /væn/ ‘van’. Language teachers are
advised to remember that each language has its own inventory of phonemes that may differ
from that of another language. Such differences may result in using sounds that only
approximate the target sounds, as shown in the examples.

2. Language teachers need to realize that grammatical units such as morphemes, words, phrases
and clauses behave quite differently across languages. For example, plurality, and tense in
English are expressed through inflections as is {-s/ -es} and {-ed}. However, Tagalog plurality is
expressed as separate words as in mga bata ‘children’. Linguistically speaking, Tagalog verbs
have no tense, only aspects – perfective “kumain’ and imperfective ‘kumakain’, which may
explain the Filipinos’ problems in dealing with English tenses.

3. Helping students to discover the meaning of words by parsing them into small parts depends
heavily on the teacher’s knowledge of morphology or word formation rules. To exemplify,
students may parse or segment the following words, taking note of the morpheme {-ment} that
recurs in embarrassment, government, disillusionment, enhancement. As students discover the
meaning of {-ment} as ‘state or condition’, they may be able to give the meaning of the cited
examples as: ‘state of being embarrassed’, ‘state of governing’, ‘state of being disillusioned’,
and ‘state of enhancing’. Hence, the process of word formation such as derivation may help
learners interpret and remember meaning of words that follow certain patterns in forming short
words into longer words.

4. Teachers’ knowledge about larger units of language use – discourse structure – may be relevant
when teaching exchanges or conversations. The use of language for social functions such as
asking permission involves familiarity with modals that express formality and a higher degree of
politeness when speaking with someone who is older, who occupies a higher position, or is an
authority than the speaker. In this context appropriacy has to be observed in selecting modals.
For example, it is appropriate to use may, not can when asking permission from someone who
is older, higher in position than the speaker. e.g. May I use the office computer?

B. Views about Language

1. The structuralists believe that language can be described in terms of observable and
verifiable data as it is being used. They also describe language in terms of its structure
and according to the regularities and patterns or rules in language structure. To them,
language is a system of speech sounds, arbitrarily assigned to the objects, states, and
concepts to which they refer, used for human communication.

 Language is primarily vocal. Language is speech, primarily made up of vocal sounds

produced by the speech apparatus in the human body. The primary medium of
language is speech; the written record is but a secondary representation of the
language. Writing is only the graphic representation of the sounds of the language.
While most languages have writing systems, a number of languages continue to exist,
even today, in the spoken form only, without any written form. Linguists claim that
speech is primary, writing secondary. Therefore, it is assumed that speech has a priority
in language teaching.
  Language is a system of systems.

Language is not a disorganized or a chaotic combination of sounds. Sounds are arranged in certain
fixed or established, systematic order to form meaningful units or words. For example, no word in English
starts with bz-, lr- or zl- combination, but there are those that begin with spr- and str- (as in spring and
string). In like manner, words are also arranged in a particular system to generate acceptable
meaningful sentences. The sentence “Shen bought a new novel” is acceptable but the group of words
“Shen bought new novel a” is unacceptable, since the word order of the latter violates the established
convention in English grammar, the Subject-Verb-Object or S-V-O word order.

Language is a system of structurally related elements or ‘building blocks’ for the encoding of meaning,
the elements being phonemes (sounds), morphemes (words), tagmemes (phrases and
sentences/clauses). Language learning, it is assumed, entails mastering the elements or building blocks
of the language and learning the rules by which these elements are combined, from phoneme to
morpheme to word to phrase to sentence.

 Language is arbitrary.

There is no inherent relation between the words of a language and their meanings or the ideas
conveyed by them. Put another way, there is no one to one correspondence between the structure
of a word and the thing it stands for. There is no ‘sacred’ reason why an animal that flies is called ibon
in Filipino, pajaro in Spanish, bird in English. Selection of these words in the languages mentioned here
is purely an accident of history that native speakers of the languages have agreed on. Through the
years reference to such animal has become an established convention that cannot be easily
changed. That language is arbitrary means that the relationship between the words and the ‘things’
they denote is merely conventional, i.e. native speakers of English, in some sense, agreed to use the
sounds / kæt / ‘cat’ in English because native speakers of English ‘want’ it to be.
  Language is a means of communication. Language is an important means of
communicating between humans of their ideas, beliefs, or feelings. Language gives
shape to people’s thoughts, as well as guides and controls their activity.

2. The transformationalists/ cognitivists believe that language is a system of knowledge

made manifest in linguistic forms but innate and, in its most abstract form, universal.

 Language is innate. The presence of the language acquisition device (LAD) in the
human brain predisposes all normal children to acquire their first language in an
amazingly short time, around five years since birth.

 Language is creative. It enables native speakers to produce and understand

sentences they have not heard nor used before.

 Language is a mental phenomenon. It is not mechanical.

 Language is universal. It is universal in the sense that all normal children the world over
acquire a mother tongue but it is also universal in the sense that, at a highly abstract
level, all languages must share key features of human languages, such as all
languages have sounds; all languages have rules that form sounds into words, words
into phrases and clauses; and all languages have transformation rules that enable
speakers to ask questions, negate sentences, issue orders, defocus the doer of the
action, etc.

3. The functionalists believe that language is a dynamic system through which members of
speech community exchange information. It is a vehicle for the expression of functional
meaning such as expressing one’s emotions, persuading people, asking and giving information,
making people do things for others.

This view of language emphasizes the meaning and functions rather than the
grammatical characteristics of language, and leads to a language teaching content
consisting of categories of meaning/notions and functions rather than of elements of
structure and grammar.

4. The interactionists believe that language is a vehicle for establishing interpersonal relations and
for performing social transactions between individuals. It is a tool for creating and maintaining
social relations through conversations. Language teaching content, according to this view, may
be specified and organized by patterns of exchange and interaction.

B. Acquisition of Language

1. Behaviorist learning theory. Derived from a general theory of learning, the behaviorist
view states that the language behavior of the individual is conditioned by sequences of
differential rewards in his/her environment.

It regards language learning as a behavior like other forms of human behavior, not a
mental phenomenon, learned by a process of habit formation. Since language is viewed
as mechanistic and as a human activity, it is believed that learning a language is
achieved by building up habits on the basis of stimulus-response chains. Behaviorism
emphasizes the consequences of the response and argues that it is the behavior that
follows a response which reinforces it and thus helps to strengthen the association.

According to Littlewood (1984), the process of habit formation includes the following:

a. The child imitates the sounds and patterns which s/he hears around her/him.
b. People recognize the child’s attempts as being similar to the adult models and
reinforce (reward) the sounds by approval or some other desirable reaction.
c. In order to obtain more of these rewards, the child repeats the sounds and patterns
so that these become habits.
d. In this way the child’s verbal behavior is conditioned (‘shaped’) until the habits
coincide with the adult models.
 The behaviorists claim that the three crucial elements of learning are: a stimulus, which
serves to elicit behavior; a response triggered by the stimulus, and reinforcement, which
serves to mark the response as being appropriate (or inappropriate) and encourages the
repetition (or suppression) of the response.

2. Cognitive learning theory. Chomsky argues that language is not acquired by children by
sheer imitation and through a form of conditioning on reinforcement and reward. He
believes that all normal human beings have an inborn biological internal mechanism that
makes language learning possible. Cognitivists/ innatists claim that the child is born with
an ‘initial’ state’ about language which predisposes him/her to acquire a grammar of
that language. They maintain that the language acquisition device (LAD) is what the
child brings to the task of language acquisition, giving him/her an active role in language
learning.

One important feature of the mentalist account of second language acquisition is

hypothesis testing, a process of formulating rules and testing the same with competent
speakers of the target language.

3. Krashen’s Monitor Model (1981). Probably this is the most often cited among theories of
second language acquisition; considered the most comprehensive, if not the most
ambitious, consisting of five central hypotheses:

The five hypotheses are:

a. The acquisition/ learning hypothesis. It claims that there are two ways of developing
competence in L2:
Acquisition - the subconscious process that results from informal, natural
communication between people where language is a means, not a focus
nor an end, in itself.

Learning - the conscious process of knowing about language and being able to
talk about it, that occurs in a more formal situation where the properties or
rules of a language are taught. Language learning has traditionally involved
grammar and vocabulary learning.

Acquisition parallels first language development in children while learning

approximates the formal teaching of grammar in classrooms. Conscious thinking
about the rules is said to occur in second language learning while unconscious
feeling about what is correct and appropriate occurs in language acquisition.

b. The natural order hypothesis. It suggests that grammatical structures are acquired in
a predictable order for both children and adults, that is, certain grammatical
structures are acquired before others, irrespective of the language being learned.
When a learner engages in natural communication, then the standard order below
will occur.

Group 1: present progressive -ing (She is reading)

plural -s (bags)
copula ‘to be’ (The girl is at the library.)

Group 2: auxiliary ‘to be’ (She is reading.)

articles the and an (That’s a book.)

Group 3: irregular past forms (She drank milk.)

Group 4: regular past -ed (She prayed last night.)

third-person-singular -s (She prays every day.)
possessive -s (The girl’s bag is new.)
b. The monitor hypothesis. It claims that conscious learning of grammatical rules has an
extremely limited function in language performance: as a monitor or editor that
checks output. The monitor is an editing device that may normally operate before
language performance. Such editing may occur before the natural output or after
the ouput.

Krashen suggests that monitoring occurs when there is sufficient time, where there is
pressure to communicate correctly and not just convey meaning, and when the
appropriate rules are known.

d. The input hypothesis. Krashen proposes that when learners are exposed to
grammatical features a little beyond their current level (i.e., i + 1), those features are
‘acquired’. Acquisition results from comprehensible input, which is made
understandable with the help provided by the context. If learners receive
understandable input, language structures will be naturally acquired. Ability to
communicate in a second language ‘emerges’ rather than indirectly put in place by
teaching.

c. The affective filter hypothesis. Filter consists of attitude to language, motivation, self-
confidence and anxiety. Thus learners with favorable attitude and self-confidence
may have a ‘low filter’ which promotes language learning. Learners with a low
affective filter seek and receive more input, interact with confidence, and are more
receptive to the input they are exposed to. On the other hand, anxious learners have
a high affective filter which prevents acquisition from taking place.

d. Implications for teaching:

1. Teachers must continuously deliver at a level understandable by learners.

2. Teaching must prepare the learners for real life communication situations. Classrooms
must provide conversational confidence so that when in the outside world, the
student can cope with and continue learning.

3. Teachers must ensure that learners do not become anxious or defensive in language
learning. The confidence of a language learner must be encouraged in a language
acquisition process. Teachers should not insist on learners conversing before they feel
comfortable in doing so; neither should they correct errors nor make negative
remarks that inhibit learners from learning. They should devise specific techniques to
relax learners and protect their egos.

4. Teachers must create an atmosphere where learners are not embarrassed by their
errors. Errors should not be corrected when acquisition is occurring. Error correction is
valuable when learning simple rules but may have negative effects in terms of
anxiety and inhibitions.

5. Formal grammar teaching is of limited value because it contributes to learning rather

than acquisition. Only simple rules should be learned.

6. Teachers should not expect learners to learn ‘late structures’ such as third person
singular early.
Instructor : ___________________________________________
Course and Code Name : Major 1 ( LINGUISTICS )
Term : First Semester Academic Year 2020-2021
Consultation Time : 5:30- 6:30 / 6:30-7:30 1 hour/MWF
Consultation Venue : Room 3
Reference : Introduction to Linguistics

Learning Task No.1

Answer the following questions: (for 5 points each).

NOTE: This Learning Task falls under Assignment #1

1. How does language work for us human beings? And what happens if we miss the stage of
language acquisition?

2. Does linguistic knowledge affect a person’s communicative competence? Give me a richer

sense of understanding how.

3. From among the views or theories about language cited above, which do you understand and
favor the most? Explain convincingly.

4. What is your concept about communication anxiety? What is its implication/s to the learning
outcomes of both the teacher and the learners?...Elaborate it further.