They look at the inner workings of language. Why language works like it does, in other words. Think of learning about linguistics in the same way you’d learn how an internal combustion engine works. Linguistics is what’s under the hood… you don’t need to know it to drive a car, but it helps understand what’s going on if you ever break down!
So… TEFL teachers should find these useful in providing more of a background to their teaching and students, too, will find them helpful in understanding language at a slightly deeper level.
A Neologism is newly created (or “coined”) word. New words often apply to new concepts or inventions, or perhaps when an old idea takes on a new meaning. Some random neologisms: aspirin hyperspace internet Islamaphobia wiki bling wmd phishing Quite simply, these words did not exist several years ago. Trivia […]
A native speaker of English is a person who has grown up speaking English as their first language or mother tongue. In terms of English teachers this usually means from one of the major English speaking countries: the USA, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand or South Africa. […]
In the fields of computational linguistics an n-gram is a sequence of items from a corpus of language. An n-gram could be any combination of letters, phonemes, syllables or words, etc. Looking at n-grams is useful to help work out how language works and is used in everyday situations. Google […]
Multilingualism is the ability to speak more than one language. In some definitions this means speaking a language as a native speaker or to native speaker standard, however some definitions are more flexible allowing multilingual to mean being able to communicate in more than one language (though not necessarily to […]
MT Influence or Mother Tongue Influence is when the grammar or vocabulary of a student’s Mother Tongue influence the way in which they use their Target Language or TL. For example, in Greek (and a number of other languages) people say open or close a light instead of turn on […]