Course Description

Many instructors and advanced learners of additional languages are driven by their admiration for linguistic forms, their curiosity about how language represents the world, and their interest in comparing patterns across languages. This course aims to deepen teachers’ knowledge of linguistic forms so that they can be better equipped to describe, promote, and assess learners’ use of those forms. To that end, this course begins like a traditional Introduction to Linguistics course in that it addresses the primary categories of language description: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. We will also touch on language typology, language variation, and various writing systems. Teacher-learners in this course will also develop skills for investigating language in use through corpus analysis. Corpus-based tools allow us to locate linguistic features in authentic contexts, identify lexicogrammatical patterns, and explore variation among genres and registers.

Given that the aim of this course, like all FLT courses, is to promote excellence in language teaching, we will consistently draw connections from our study of language description to pedagogical practices for teaching pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and pragmatic competence. Throughout the course, we will emphasize approaches to instruction in linguistic features that are implicit, inductive, learner-centered, and compatible with contemporary communicative methods and standards. As Kumaravadivelu (2001) advocates in Beyond Methods, we will strive to enhance language awareness in order to “activate the learners’ intuitive heuristics, ultimately enhancing their state of readiness to internalize the grammatical system of their L2” (p. 175). Teacher-learners in this course will develop skills and strategies for leading learners through a process of discovery that can improve their language use and enhance their appreciation for languages and linguistics.

This fully-online course includes 12 content modules to be completed each week, each consisting of instructor presentation videos, readings, discussion prompts, exercises, and supplemental materials. This course also involves a series of more extensive assignments in which we will synthesize and apply the course content. These will involve creating visuals and presentations that explain features of our target languages; exploring research that has investigated the learning of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation in foreign languages; analyzing authentic texts and learner language; and designing instructional materials to develop language awareness. As the semester proceeds, these assignments will be incorporated into a collaborative Language Concepts website that can be shared with language learners and fellow teachers.