The advice offered by Professors Adamson and Sayers would be very appropriate.
I will present an opinion, too. I am not a professor of Linguistics yet but I am in a second MA program (English Composition). My college degree and my first MA were in Linguistics.
In college in the early 1980s, as a Linguistics major, I found myself doing uncannily well with Mandarin. It was not my first foreign language and perhaps that fact is relevant to an extent.
Anyway, Linguistics studies the phenomena of language. A phenomenon I think would be relevant to the English literature students who want to know something of Linguistics is as follows :
Many languages do not use the alphabet as we English speakers know it (and some of us English speakers have as the L1 a language that uses a non-Roman-alphabet-based writing system): Korean, Hindi, Arabic...and Mandarin Chinese are examples.
Chinese is unique in the group of such languages because each Chinese character refers to a particular spoken syllable and the 'how do you pronounce that character' thing is not necessarily indicated by the glyph. Korean is completely different because contemporary Korean has a very close correspondence between the pronunciation and the written form (written Korean is kind of an alphabet and written Chinese is not an alphabet).
Japanese is kind of in the middle, with its Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana.
Hindi, Arabic, and the others I know are generally good at representing the how of the sound, but beyond this I do not know.
After this long-winded introduction, back to English. The numbers 0 - 10 (and all of them really) are similarly like written Chinese and not like anything else. How do you say 2 in English? Two. But that 2 glyph does not signal how the pronunciation should be. I only know 'two' because I learned the pronunciation long ago.
This very specific Linguistics - studied phenomenon might well be of some interest to the literature students.
Another thing, a less technical thing, is that Composition scholars do study the question of style and the issue of 'why is some written language better..expressed in a smoother fashion, or more efficient fashion, or considered by experts to be better somehow.
Indeed, 'Stylistics' is a subfield of both English and Linguistics.
Jim Jones, Freelance Translator and Editor
Atanet.org, Chinese to English Language Chair
AB uChicago, MA NEIU
1: Chinese, German, and Spanish to English
2: Editing, English
3: Mandarin tutoring and consulting, English tutoring, and some Spanish tutoring.
Articles and Cartoons have appeared in the ATA newsletter of the Chinese Language Division.
Three hour training for experienced translators on the new Chinese to English certification at ATA60 on the morning of October 23: AST-7 on AST Day [https://www.atanet.org/conf/2019/astday/]
Last October: Presented 60 minute workshop at ATA59, on Chinese to English translation and ATA Certification: my team's efforts had been approved at ATA58.
Original Message
From: Dave Sayers
Sent: Friday, September 27, 2019 1:04 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Reply To: Dave Sayers
Subject: Re: Linguistics for English Majors
I've previously run induction activities for new undergrads, who presumably have a
similar level of knowledge. For this I had a few activities to stir their interest.
One exercise was a quiz based on regional dialect recordings from the BBC Voices
project (this was when I worked in the UK but there are similar resources in other
countries). I played four selected recordings from disparate parts of the country,
and asked the students to guess where each person was from, and to be as specific as
possible. This led on to a *brief* - and I hope engaging/motivating - discussion of
how we can define sounds using phonetic terminology, along with a bit of playing
around with making different sounds all together by e.g. moving the tongue around in
the vowel space.
I then moved on to some perceptual dialectology, basically Dennis Preston's well
known 'draw a map' task: give them a blank map of the country and ask them to mark
off all the dialect areas they know about. They did it individually at first, then
compared in groups, and mentioned where they were each from. The pretty reliable
outcome of this task is that the closer to where a person has lived, the more
distinctions they know, then the distinctions get broader/bigger/vaguer the further
from where they live. Depending on the age group it can be worth asking them to keep
it respectful!
Best of luck!
Dave
__________________
Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132
Senior Lecturer, Dept Language & Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä,
Finland | www.jyu.fi
Communications Secretary, BAAL Language Policy group | www.langpol.ac.uk
[log in to unmask] | http://jyu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
On 27/09/2019 01:43, Paulina Bounds wrote:
> Hey all,
> I was asked by English Club at my dept to present about what linguistics is,
> basically to see if they could be interested. I'm at Englosh Dept that only offers a
> few upper level ling classes (I teach them all). There is no ling major or minor,
> English majors usually come to my classes with absolutely no prior knowledge of ling.
>
> I get about 30-40 minutes for this presentation , and would like to make it engaging
> to them and hopefully spark interest in taking classes. So, i'm looking for what
> worked for you, I'm open to all suggestions.
>
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 3:59 PM SIEGEL, Jason <[log in to unmask]
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>
> Dear all,____
>
> __ __
>
> Please see the attached Call for Papers. In the event that attachments are not
> allowed on the listserv, you can find the CFP at
> https://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/4382.____
>
> __ __
>
> Best,____
>
> __ __
>
> *Description: Description: Description: uwi_crest**____*
>
> *UWI**____*
>
>
>
> *Dr Jason F. Siegel*
> Research Fellow in Lexicography____
>
> Director, Richard & Jeannette Allsopp Centre for Caribbean Lexicography____
>
> Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature____
>
> Faculty of Humanities & Education____
>
> *The University of the West Indies____*
>
> CAVE HILL CAMPUS____
>
> PO Box 64, Bridgetown BB11000, Barbados____
>
> __ __
>
> *Telephone:*(246) 417-4468 | *Fax:* (246) 417-0422____
>
> *E-mail:*[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>____
>
> *Facebook:*https://www.facebook.com/uwicavehill____
>
> __ __
>
> Description: Description: Description: Cave Hill Email Signature19-01____
>
> __ __
>
> *Confidentiality:*This email (including any attachments) may contain
> confidential, proprietary and privileged information, and unauthorized disclosure
> or use is prohibited. If you received thismessage in error, please notify the
> sender and delete this email from your system. Thank you.____
>
> __ __
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> To unsubscribe from the TEACHLING list, click the following link:
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=TEACHLING&A=1
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> To unsubscribe from the TEACHLING list, click the following link:
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=TEACHLING&A=1
>
########################################################################
To unsubscribe from the TEACHLING list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=TEACHLING&A=1
########################################################################
To unsubscribe from the TEACHLING list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=TEACHLING&A=1
|
