Grammatical Structures of English Module 01 [PDF]

Zitiervorschau

MODULE IN GRAMMATICAL STUCTURE OF ENGLISH

Prepared by Dr. Leilani M. Ibay-Pamo

Introduction English originated in England and is the dominant language of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is also an official language of the Philippines, India, Singapore, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa. English is the first choice of foreign language in most other countries of the world, and it is that status that has given it the position of a global lingua franca. It is estimated that about a third of the world’s population, some two billion people, now use English. The Philippines is recognized globally as one of the largest English-speaking nations with majority of its population having at least some degree of fluency in the language. Tracing its roots, under US occupation, English was introduced into schools and in 1935 English was added to the constitution alongside Spanish as a national language. Since then, English has always been one of the official languages of the Philippines and is spoken by more than 14 million Filipinos. It is the language of commerce and law, as well as the primary medium of instruction in education. Proficiency in the language is also one of the country’s strengths that has helped drive the economy and even made the Philippines the top voice outsourcing destination in the world, surpassing India in 2012. The influx of foreign learners of English is also on the rise due to the relatively more affordable but quality English as a Second Language (ESL) programs being offered locally. However, in a recent roundtable discussion organized by the British Council, key stakeholders from the government, academe, private, and non-government sectors

acknowledged that even if the Philippines is doing fine in terms of English competency, concerns on how much of a competitive advantage it still is for the country were raised. The stakeholders agreed that the country needs to step up its efforts in improving the teaching and learning of English, developing it as a vital skill of the workforce. This is an initiative that could potentially strengthen the Philippines' distinct advantage in this part of the world. English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers like you have an indispensable role in improving the teaching and learning of English in the country. To become a competent ESL teacher, you are required to study the language, use it until it becomes part of you and you are able to teach it. To be acculturated with the langauge, it is imperative that you know its history and make it a springboard in learning its grammar. Therefore, the first part of this module is a history of the English language. It acquaints you of the early beginnings of the language until it evolved to what is now called the global lingua franca.

Lesson 1: History of the English Language

Old English (450-1100 AD) During the 5th Century AD three Germanic tribes (Saxons, Angles, and Jutes) came to the British Isles from various parts of northwest Germany as well as Denmark. These tribes were warlike and pushed out most of the original, Celtic-speaking inhabitants from England into Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. One group migrated to the Brittany Coast of France where their descendants still speak the Celtic Language of Breton today. Through the years, the Saxons, Angles and Jutes mixed their different Germanic dialects. This group of dialects forms what linguists refer to as Old English or AngloSaxon. The word "English" was in Old English "Englisc", and that comes from the name of the Angles. The Angles were named from Engle, their land of origin. Before the Saxons the language spoken in what is now England was a mixture of Latin and various Celtic languages which were spoken before the Romans came to Britain (54-5BC). The Romans brought Latin to Britain, which was part of the Roman Empire for over 400 years. Many of the words passed on from this era are those coined by Roman merchants and soldiers. These include win (wine), candel (candle), belt (belt), weall (wall) ["Language Timeline", The British Library Board]. The influence of Celtic upon Old English was slight. In fact, very few Celtic words have lived on in the English language. But many of place and river names have Celtic origins: Kent, York, Dover, Cumberland, Thames, Avon, Trent, Severn.

The arrival of St. Augustine in 597 and the introduction of Christianity into Saxon England brought more Latin words into the English language. They were mostly concerned with the naming of Church dignitaries, ceremonies, etc. Some, such as church, bishop, baptism, monk, eucharist and presbyter came indirectly through Latin from the Greek. Around 878 AD Danes and Norsemen, also called Vikings, invaded the country and English got many Norse words into the language, particularly in the north of England. The Vikings, being Scandinavian, spoke a language (Old Norse) which, in origin at least, was just as Germanic as Old English. Words derived from Norse include: sky, egg, cake, skin, leg, window (wind eye), husband, fellow, skill, anger, flat, odd, ugly, get, give, take, raise, call, die, they, their, them ["The Origin and History of the English Language", Kryss Katsiavriades] Several written works have survived from the Old English period. The most famous is a heroic epic poem called "Beowulf". It is the oldest known English poem and it is notable for its length - 3,183 lines. Experts say "Beowulf" was written in Britain more than one thousand years ago. The name of the person who wrote it is unknown. Examination of Old English words along with their modern meanings can give you a glimpse of how languages develop through time. The first form of English as a language is termed Old English and came into being during the 5th century. Modern Meanings of Old English Words Many common words and verbs can be found in Old English that hold the same meaning today. For example, the following words all show roots in Old English: Strong, Water, Be, Beam

By reviewing literature written in the period that Old English was used you can see the many Old English words that are very similar to words found in modern English. For example: Eald - means old, Brodor - means brother, Hus - means house, Nett - means net, Riht - means right It can be difficult to determine the modern meaning of some Old English words because there are often multiple words which have similar meanings. For example, three descriptions of females are: Widuwe - stands for widow, Wif - means wife, and Wifmann - the term for woman. Influence of Other Languages on Old English Examination of Old English and modern English seems to indicate that many of the words we use today find their roots in the vocabulary of Old English. Some estimates claim that about half of the words used today have their roots in Old English. This should not be that surprising since English has its roots in the Germanic languages. Many of the Old English words also came from influence of the Romans and Greeks. These words were borrowed by the Germanic conquerors and incorporated into Old English. For example, the following words were adapted from the Romans, Greeks and from Latin: Apostle - came from apostol, Chalk - came from cealc, Wine - came from win, and Monk - came from munuc. While the spelling is different, the meanings all follow the original words and correspond to the modern meanings.

Making Up New Words As the need arose for new words for things that the Germanic conquerors were unfamiliar with, they would make up words rather than take Germanic words as descriptors.

Two examples of this are the words for astronomy and arithmetic. The

invaders made up the words based on the root word "craeft" which meant an art or science. Star-craft or tungolcraeft for stronomy

Number craft or rimcraeft for Arithmetic

Now you know some old English words, their meanings and have a better understanding of the sources of the English language.

Middle English (1100 circa – 1500) After William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered England in 1066 AD with his armies and became king, he brought his nobles, who spoke French, to be the new government. The Old French took over as the language of the court, administration, and culture. Latin was mostly used for written language, especially that of the Church. Meanwhile, The English language, as the language of the now lower class, was considered a vulgar tongue. The Viking invasion: With the Viking invasions (Vikings were a tribe of Nordic people that ransacked their way through Northern and Northwestern Europe 1,000-1,200 years ago), Old English got mixed up with Old Norse, the language of the Viking tribes. Old Norse ended up giving English more than 2,000 new words, including “give” and “take”, “egg”, “knife”, “husband”, “run” and “viking”.

Although English was spoken widely on the British Isles by 1,000 AD, the Norman invasion established French as the language of royals and of power. Old English was left to the peasants, and despite its less glamorous status, it continued to develop and grow by adopting a whole host of Latin and French words, including everyday words such as “beer”,”city”, “fruit” and “people”, as well as half of the months of the year. By adopting and adapting French words, the English language also became more sophisticated through the inclusion of concepts and words like “liberty” and “justice”. By about 1200, England and France had split. English changed a lot, because it was mostly being spoken instead of written for about 300 years. The use of Old English came back, but with many French words added. This language is called Middle English. Most of the words embedded in the English vocabulary are words of power, such as crown, castle, court, parliament, army, mansion, gown, beauty, banquet, art, poet, romance, duke, servant, peasant, traitor and governor. ("Language Timeline", The British Library Board) Because the English underclass cooked for the Norman upper class, the words for most domestic animals are English (ox, cow, calf, sheep, swine, deer) while the words for the meats derived from them are French (beef, veal, mutton, pork, bacon, venison) ["The Origin and History of the English Language", Kryss Katsiavriades]. The Middle English is also characterized for the beginning of the Great Vowel Shift. It was a massive sound change affecting the long vowels of English. Basically, the long vowels shifted upwards; that is, a vowel that used to be pronounced in one place in the mouth would be pronounced in a different place, higher up in the mouth. The Great Vowel Shift occurred during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.

The most famous example of Middle English is Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales", a collection of stories about a group of thirty people who travel as pilgrims to Canterbury, England. The portraits that he paints in his Tales give us an idea of what life was like in fourteenth century England.

Early Modern English (1500-1800) Early Modern English (1500 – 1800) – the tempest ends in a storm: In the 14th15th century, following the Hundred Years War with France that ended French rule of the British Isles, English became the language of power and influence once again. It got a further boost through the development of English literature and English culture, spearheaded by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s influence on the development of the English language and its unique and rich culture is hard to grasp; the man is said to have invented at least 1,700 words, including “alligator”, “puppy dog”, and “fashionable”, in addition to penning classics like Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet! Towards the end of Middle English, a sudden and distinct change in pronunciation (the Great Vowel Shift) started, with vowels being pronounced shorter and shorter. From the 16th century the British had contact with many peoples from around the world. This, and the Renaissance of Classical learning, meant that many new words and phrases entered the language. The invention of printing also meant that there was now a common language in print. Books became cheaper and more people learned to read. Printing also brought standardization to English. Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the dialect

of London, where most publishing houses were, became the standard. In 1604 the first English dictionary was published. Modern English developed after William Caxton established his printing press at Westminster Abbey in 1476. Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in Germany around 1450, but Caxton set up England's first press. The Bible and some valuable manuscripts were printed. The invention of the printing press made books available to more people. The books became cheaper and more people learned to read. Printing also brought standardization to English. By the time of Shakespeare's writings (1592-1616), the language had become clearly recognizable as Modern English. There were three big developments in the world at the beginning of Modern English period: the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the British Colonialism. It was during the English Renaissance that most of the words from Greek and Latin entered English. This period in English cultural history (early 16th century to the early 17th century) is sometimes referred to as "the age of Shakespeare" or "the Elizabethan era", taking the name of the English Renaissance's most famous author and most important monarch, respectively. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I there was an explosion of culture in the form of support of the arts, popularization of the printing press, and massive amounts of sea travel. England began the Industrial Revolution (18th century) and this had also an effect on the development of the language as new words had to be invented or existing ones modified to cope with the rapid changes in technology. New technical words were added to the vocabulary as inventors designed various products and machinery. These

words were named after the inventor or given the name of their choice (trains, engine, pulleys, combustion, electricity, telephone, telegraph, camera, etc). Britain was an Empire for 200 years between the 18th and 20th centuries and English language continued to change as the British Empire moved across the world - to the USA, Australia, New Zealand, India, Asia and Africa. They sent people to settle and live in their conquered places and as settlers interacted with natives, new words were added to the English vocabulary. For example, 'kangaroo' and 'boomerang' are native Australian Aborigine words, 'juggernaut' and 'turban' came from India. (See more borrowings from different languages.) English continues to change and develop, with hundreds of new words arriving every year. But even with all the borrowings from many other languages the heart of the English language remains the Anglo-Saxon of Old English. The grammar of English is also distinctly Germanic - three genders (he, she and it) and a simple set of verb tenses.

Late Modern English (1800 – Present): The main difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern English is vocabulary. Late Modern English has many more words, arising from two principal factors: firstly, the Industrial Revolution and technology created a need for new words; and secondly, the English-speaking world was at the center of a lot of scientific progress, scientific advances went hand-in-hand with the evolution of the language.

Timeline of the Modern English Period (1500 to the Present) Distinctions are commonly drawn between the Early Modern Period (1500-1800) and Late Modern English (1800 to the present). During the period of Modern English, British exploration, colonization, and overseas trade hastened the acquisition of loanwords from countless other languages and fostered the development of new varieties of English (World English), each with its own nuances of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Since the middle of the 20th century, the expansion of North American business and media around the world has led to the emergence of Global English as a lingua franca.

Early 16th century—The first English settlements are made in North America. William Tyndale's English translation of the Bible is published. Many Greek and Latin borrowings enter English. 1542—In his Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, Andrew Boorde illustrates regional dialects. 1549—The first version of the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England is published. 1553—Thomas Wilson publishes The Art of Rhetorique, one of the first works on logic and rhetoric in English. 1577—Henry Peacham publishes The Garden of Eloquence, a treatise on rhetoric. 1586—The first grammar of English—William Bullokar's Pamphlet for Grammar—is published.

1588—Elizabeth I begins her 45-year reign as queen of England. The British defeat the Spanish Armada, boosting national pride and enhancing the legend of Queen Elizabeth. 1589—The Art of English Poesie (attributed to George Puttenham) is published. 1590-1611—William Shakespeare writes his Sonnets and the majority of his plays. 1600—The East India Company is chartered to promote trade with Asia, eventually leading to the establishment of the British Raj in India. 1603—Queen Elizabeth dies and James I (James VI of Scotland) accedes to the throne. 1604—Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, the first English dictionary, is published. 1607—The first permanent English settlement in America is established at Jamestown, Virginia. 1611—The Authorized Version of the English Bible (the "King James" Bible) is published, greatly influencing the development of the written language. 1619—The first African slaves in North America arrive in Virginia. 1622—Weekly News, the first English newspaper, is published in London. 1623—The First Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays is published. 1642—Civil War breaks out in England after King Charles I attempts to arrest his parliamentary critics. The war leads to the execution of Charles I, the dissolution of parliament, and the replacement of the English monarchy with a Protectorate (1653–59) under Oliver Cromwell's rule. 1660—The monarchy is restored; Charles II is proclaimed king. 1662—The Royal Society of London appoints a committee to consider ways of "improving" English as a language of science.

1666—The Great Fire of London destroys most of the City of London inside the old Roman City Wall. 1667—John Milton publishes his epic poem Paradise Lost. 1670—The Hudson's Bay Company is chartered for promoting trade and settlement in Canada. 1688—Aphra Behn, the first woman novelist in England, publishes Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave. 1697—In his Essay Upon Projects, Daniel Defoe calls for the creation of an Academy of 36 "gentlemen" to dictate English usage. 1702—The Daily Courant, the first regular daily newspaper in English, is published in London. 1707—The Act of Union unites the Parliaments of England and Scotland, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain. 1709—The first Copyright Act is enacted in England. 1712—Anglo-Irish satirist and cleric Jonathan Swift proposes the creation of an English Academy to regulate English usage and "ascertain" the language. 1719—Daniel Defoe publishes Robinson Crusoe, considered by some to be the first modern English novel. 1721—Nathaniel Bailey publishes his Universal Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, a pioneer study in English lexicography: the first to feature current usage, etymology, syllabification, clarifying quotations, illustrations, and indications of pronunciation. 1715—Elisabeth Elstob publishes the first grammar of Old English.

1755—Samuel Johnson publishes his two-volume Dictionary of the English Language. 1760-1795—This period marks the rise of the English grammarians (Joseph Priestly, Robert Lowth, James Buchanan, John Ash, Thomas Sheridan, George Campbell, William Ward, and Lindley Murray), whose rule books, primarily based on prescriptive notions of grammar, become increasingly popular. 1762—Robert Lowth publishes his Short Introduction to English Grammar. 1776—The Declaration of Independence is signed, and the American War of Independence begins, leading to the creation of the United States of America, the first country outside the British Isles with English as its principal language. 1776—George Campbell publishes The Philosophy of Rhetoric. 1783—Noah Webster publishes his American Spelling Book. 1785—The Daily Universal Register (renamed The Times in 1788) begins publication in London. 1788—The English first settle in Australia, near present-day Sydney. 1789—Noah Webster publishes Dissertations on the English Language, which advocates an American standard of usage. 1791—The Observer, the oldest national Sunday newspaper in Britain, begins publication. Early 19th century—Grimm's Law (discovered by Friedrich von Schlegel and Rasmus Rask, later elaborated by Jacob Grimm) identifies relationships between certain consonants in Germanic languages (including English) and their originals in IndoEuropean. The formulation of Grimm's Law marks a major advance in the development of linguistics as a scholarly field of study.

1803—The Act of Union incorporates Ireland into Britain, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. 1806—The British occupy Cape Colony in South Africa. 1810—William Hazlitt publishes A New and Improved Grammar of the English Language. 1816—John Pickering compiles the first dictionary of Americanisms. 1828—Noah Webster publishes his American Dictionary of the English Language. Richard Whateley publishes Elements of Rhetoric. 1840—The native Maori in New Zealand cede sovereignty to the British. 1842—The London Philological Society is founded. 1844—The telegraph is invented by Samuel Morse, inaugurating the development of rapid communication, a major influence on the growth and spread of English. Mid 19th century—A standard variety of American English develops. English is established in Australia, South Africa, India, and other British colonial outposts. 1852—The first edition of Roget's Thesaurus is published. 1866—James Russell Lowell champions the use of American regionalisms, helping to end deference to the Received British Standard. Alexander Bain publishes English Composition and Rhetoric. The transatlantic telegraph cable is completed. 1876—Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone, thus modernizing private communication. 1879—James A.H. Murray begins editing the Philological Society's New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (later renamed the Oxford English Dictionary).

1884/1885—Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn introduces a colloquial prose style that significantly influences the writing of fiction in the U.S. 1901—The Commonwealth of Australia is established as a dominion of the British Empire. 1906—Henry and Francis Fowler publish the first edition of The King's English. 1907—New Zealand is established as a dominion of the British Empire. 1919—H.L. Mencken publishes the first edition of The American Language, a pioneer study in the history of a major national version of English. 1920—The first American commercial radio station begins operating in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 1921—Ireland achieves Home Rule, and Gaelic is made an official language in addition to English. 1922—The British Broadcasting Company (later renamed the British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC) is established. 1925—The New Yorker magazine is founded by Harold Ross and Jane Grant. 1925—George P. Krapp publishes his two-volume The English Language in America, the first comprehensive and scholarly treatment of the subject. 1926—Henry Fowler publishes the first edition of his Dictionary of Modern English Usage. 1927—The first "speaking motion picture," The Jazz Singer, is released. 1928—The Oxford English Dictionary is published. 1930—British linguist C.K. Ogden introduces Basic English. 1936—The first television service is established by the BBC.

1939—World War II begins. 1945—World War II ends. The Allied victory contributes to the growth of English as a lingua franca. 1946—The Philippines gains its independence from the U.S. 1947—India is freed from British control and divided into Pakistan and India. The constitution provides that English remain the official language for 15 years. New Zealand gains its independence from the U.K. and joins the Commonwealth. 1949—Hans Kurath publishes A Word Geography of the Eastern United States, a landmark in the scientific study of American regionalisms. 1950—Kenneth Burke publishes A Rhetoric of Motives. 1950s—The number of speakers using English as a second language exceeds the number of native speakers. 1957—Noam Chomsky publishes Syntactic Structures, a key document in the study of generative and transformational grammar. 1961—Webster's Third New International Dictionary is published. 1967—The Welsh Language Act gives the Welsh language equal validity with English in Wales, and Wales is no longer considered a part of England. Henry Kucera and Nelson Francis publish Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English, a landmark in modern corpus linguistics. 1969—Canada officially becomes bilingual (French and English). The first major English dictionary to use corpus linguistics—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language—is published.

1972—A Grammar of Contemporary English (by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik) is published. The first call on a personal cell phone is made. The first email is sent. 1978—The Linguistic Atlas of England is published. 1981—The first issue of the journal World Englishes is published. 1985—A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language is published by Longman. The first edition of M.A.K. Halliday's An Introduction to Functional Grammar is published. 1988—The Internet (under development for more than 20 years) is opened to commercial interests. 1989—The second edition of The Oxford English Dictionary is published. 1993—Mosaic, the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web, is released. (Netscape Navigator becomes available in 1994, Yahoo! in 1995, and Google in 1998.) 1994—Text messaging is introduced, and the first modern blogs go online. 1995—David Crystal publishes The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. 1997—The first social networking site (SixDegrees.com) is launched. (Friendster is introduced in 2002, and both MySpace and Facebook begin operating in 2004.) 2000—The Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) is made available to subscribers. 2002—Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum publish The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Tom McArthur publishes The Oxford Guide to World English. 2006—Twitter, a social networking and microblogging service, is created by Jack Dorsey.

2009—The two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is published by Oxford University Press. 2012—The fifth volume (SI-Z) of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE ) is published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

English goes global From around 1600, the English colonization of North America resulted in the creation of a distinct American variety of English. Some English pronunciations and words “froze” when they reached America. In some ways, American English is more like the English of Shakespeare than modern British English is. Some expressions that the British call “Americanisms” are in fact original British expressions that were preserved in the colonies while lost for a time in Britain (for example trash for rubbish, loan as a verb instead of lend, and fall for autumn; another example, frame-up, was re-imported into Britain through Hollywood gangster movies). Spanish also had an influence on American English (and subsequently British English), with words like canyon, ranch,stampede and vigilante being examples of Spanish words that entered English through the settlement of the American West. French words (through Louisiana) and West African words (through the slave trade) also influenced American English (and so, to an extent, British English). Today, American English is particularly influential, due to the USA’s dominance of cinema, television, popular music, trade and technology (including the Internet). But there are many other varieties of English around the world, including for example Australian English, New Zealand English, Canadian English, South African English,

Indian English, Caribbean English, Filipino English, Singapore English (Singlish), and Malaysian English. They are called world Englishes.

20th Century English By the end of the 19th Century, the USA had overtaken the UK as the world’s fastest growing economy, and America’s “economic imperialism” continued the momentum of the British Industrial Revolution into the 20th Century. The American dominance in economic and military power, as well as its overwhelming influence in the media and popular culture has ensured that English has remained the single most important language in the world and the closest thing to a global language the world has ever seen. Perhaps in reaction to the perceived appropriation or co-option of English by the United States, a certain amount of language snobbery continued to grow in England. In 1917, Daniel Jones introduced the concept of Received Pronunciation (sometimes called the Queen’s English, BBC English or Public School English) to describe the variety of Standard English spoken by the educated middle and upper classes, irrespective of what part of England they may live in. The invention of radio in the 1920s, and then television in the 1930s, disseminated this archetypal English accent to the masses and further entrenched its position, despite the fact that it was only spoken by about 1 in 50 in the general population. At the same time, regional accents were further denigrated and marginalized. However, since the Second World War, a greater permissiveness towards regional English varieties has taken hold in England, both in education and in the media.

There was a mid-century reaction within Britain against what George Orwell described as the “ugly and inaccurate” contemporary English of the time. In Orwell's dystopic novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four", words like doublethink, thoughtcrime, newspeak and blackwhite give a nightmarish vision of where he saw the language going. The “Plain English” movement, which emphased clarity, brevity and the avoidance of technical language, was bolstered by Sir Ernest Gowers’ “The Complete Plain Words”, published in the early 1950s, and the trend towards plainer language, appropriate to the target audience, continued in official and legal communications, and was followed by a similar movement in the United Sates during the 1970s. Gowers himself thought that legal language was a case apart, being more of a science than an art, and could not be subject to Plain English rules, but in more recent years there has been a trend toward plainer language in legal documents too. The 20th Century was, among other things, a century of world wars, technological transformation, and globalization, and each has provided a source of new additions to the lexicon. For example, words like blockbuster, nose-dive, shell-shocked, camouflage, radar, barrage, boondocks, roadblock, snafu, boffin, brainwashing, spearhead, etc, are all military terms which have made their way into standard English during the World Wars. As an interesting aside, in 1941, when Sir Winston Churchill wanted to plumb the depths of the English soul at a particularly crucial and difficult time in the Second World War, almost all of the words in the main part of his famous speech ("we shall fight on the beaches... we shall never surrender") were of Anglo-Saxon origin, with the significant exception of surrender (a French loanword). The speech is also a good example of what was considered Received Pronunciation at the time.

The push for political correctness and inclusiveness in the last third of the 20th Century, particularly by homosexuals, feminists and visible minority groups, led to a reassessment of the popular usage of many words. Feminists called into question the underlying sexism in language (e.g. mankind, chairman, mailman, etc) and some have even gone to the lengths of positing herstory as an alternative to history. For a time, stong objections were voiced at the inherent racism underlying words like blacklist, blackguard, blackmail, even blackboard, and at the supposedly disparaging and dismissive nature of terms like mentally handicapped, disabled, Third World, etc. But there has also been a certain amount of positive re-branding and reclamation (also known as reappropriation) of many pejorative words, such as gay, queer, queen, dyke, bitch, nigger, etc, by those very same marginalized segments of society. The explosion in electronic and computer terminology in the latter part of the 20th Century (e.g. byte, cyberspace, software, hacker, laptop, hard-drive, database, online, hitech, microchip, etc) was just one element driving the dramatic increase in new English terms, particularly due to the dominance of the USA in the development of computer technology, from IBM to Apple to Microsoft. Parallel to this, science fiction literature has contributed it own vocabulary to the common word-stock, including terms such as robotics, hyperspace, warp-speed, cyberpunk, droid, nanotech, nanobot, etc. Later, the Internet it gave rise to (the word Internet itself is derived form Latin, as are audio, video, quantum, etc) generated its own set of neologisms (e.g. online, noob, flamer, spam, phishing, larping, whitelist, download, blog, vblog, blogosphere, emoticon, podcast, warez, trolling, hashtag, wifi, bitcoin, selfie, etc). In addition, a whole body of acronyms, contractions and shorthands for use in email, social networking and cellphone

texting has grown up, particularly among the young, including the relatively well-known lol, ttfn, btw, omg, wtf, plz, thx, ur, l8ter, etc. The debate (db8) continues as to whether texting is killing or enriching the English language. Cellphone texting is increasingly popular, especially among teens The language continues to change and develop and to grow apace, expanding to incorporate new jargons, slangs, technologies, toys, foods and gadgets. In the current digital age, English is going though a new linguistic peak in terms of word acquisition, as it peaked before during Shakespeare’s time, and then again during the Industrial Revolution, and at the height of the British Empire. According to one recent estimate, it is expanding by over 8,500 words a year (other estimates are significantly higher), compared to an estimated annual increase of around 1,000 words at the beginning of the 20th Century, and has almost doubled in size in the last century. Neologisms (new words formed) are being added all the time, including recent inclusions such as fashionista, metrosexual, McJob, McMansion, wussy, bling, nerd, pear-shaped, unplugged, fracking, truthiness, locavore, parkour, sexting, crowdsourcing, regift, meme, selfie, earworm, meh, diss, suss, emo, twerk, schmeat, chav, ladette, punked, vaping, etc, etc. In recent years, there has been an increasing trend towards using an existing words as a different part of speech, especially the “verbification” of nouns (e.g. the word verbify is itself a prime example; others include to thumb, to parrot, to email, to text, to google, to medal, to critique, to leverage, to sequence, to interface, to tase, to speechify, to incentivize, etc), although some modern-sounding verbs have surprisingly been in the language for centuries (e.g. to author, to impact, to message, to parent, to channel, to

monetize, to mentor, etc). "Nounification" also occurs, particularly in business contexts (e.g. an ask, a build, a solve, a fail, an incite, an add like “thanks for the add,” etc). “Adjectification” of nouns is also popular – making nouns adjectives like putting “y” in the end of some nouns to make them adjective (e.g. liquidy from liquid, thingy from thing, ouchy from ouch, etc.) Compound or portmanteau words are an increasingly common source of new vocabulary (e.g. stagflation, edutainment, flexitarian, Disneyfication, frenemy, confuzzle, gastropub, bromance, hacktivist, chillax, infomercial, shareware, dramedy, gaydar, wellderly, techlash, etc). The meanings of words also continue to change, part of a process that has been going on almost as long as the language itself. For instance, to the disgust of many, alternate is now almost universally accepted in North America as a replacement for alternative; momentarily has come to mean "very soon" and not (or as well as) "for a very short period of time"; and the use of the modifier literally to mean its exact opposite has recently found it way into the Oxford English Dictionary (where one of its meanings is shown as "used for emphasis rather than being actually true"). In some walks of life, bad, sick, dope and wicked are all now different varieties of good. In our faddy, disposable, Internet-informed, digital age, there are even word trends that appear to be custom-designed to be short-lived and epehemeral, words and phrases that are considered no longer trendy once they reach anything close to mainstream usage. Examples might be bae, on fleek, YOLO (you only live once), fanute, etc. Resources like the Urban Dictionary exist for the rest of us to keep track of such fleeting phenomena.

English of the 21st century And on that note: the most amazing thing about English is that it is still evolving. From the development of local dialects and slang in countries as far apart as the US, South Africa and New Zealand, and in cities as different as New York, Oxford and Singapore, to the incorporation of tech vocabulary into everyday English. English is in a constant state of flux. Vocabulary alone is increasing at a pace of approximately 1,000 new and approved words per year; and these are just the words that are considered important enough to get added to the online version of the English Dictionary! This dramatic increase in new words is largely due to technology, and how people spontaneously coin new words in their email and text transmissions that spread quickly and efficiently via social media. A large percentage of new words are portmanteau words, also called blended words — a word that combines the meaning of two discrete words; for example, cineplex is formed from cinema and complex, bromance is formed from brother and romance, staycation is formed from stay and vacation.

Learning Activities 1. Using a dictionary, make a list of English words that have Old English. Middle English origins as well as words that were borrowed from other languages and have become part of the English vocabulary. It is encouraged that you put the meaning of the words and use them in a sentence for better understanding. The requirement is a minimum of 50 words. More points are given to those who can give more. Please cite your references properly.

Lesson 2: Language Acquisition

Introduction Language is what makes us human- it is what sets us apart from so much of the animal kingdom. But how do we acquire language? What is a language acquisition theory and what are the stages and neurocognitive research on language acquisition theory? How does language work in the brain? How do our brains develop a second language or sign language? How does artificial intelligence develop a language? How can you help your child’s language acquisition theory?

Language acquisition theory Language acquisition is the process by which we are able to develop and learn a language. This includes (in general but depends on the specific language) speaking, listening, writing, and overall communication. Our ability to acquire language is a uniquely human trait because although bonobos, a species of primate, can produce vocalizations with meaning, birds can produce song, and whales have their own version of a language, no species on Earth that we know of can express never ending infinite ideas (sentences) along with a limited set of symbols (gestures, words, and sounds). The term language acquisition often refers to the first-language acquisition which simply means that it is the first language learned as an infant (unless the child learns two or more language at the same time). It is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. It involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive

vocabulary. However, learning a first language is something that every normal child does successfully without much need for formal lessons. Language development is a complex and unique human quality but yet children seem to acquire language at a very rapid rate with most children's speech being relatively grammatical by age three. Grammar, which is a set of mental rules that characterizes all of the sentences of a language, must be mastered in order to learn a language. Most children in a linguistic community seem to succeed in converging on a grammatical system equivalent to everyone else in the community with few wrong turns, which is quite remarkable considering the pitfalls and complexity of the system. By the time a child utters a first word, according to the Linguistic Society of America, he or she has already spent many months playing around with the sounds and intonations of language, but there is still no one point at which all children learn to talk. Children acquire language in stages and different children reach various stages at different times, although they have one thing in common and that is that typically developing children learning the same language will follow an almost identical pattern in the sequence of stages they go through. The stages usually consist of: cooing- 6 months- use phonemes from every language babbling- 9 months- selectively use phonemes from their native language one word utterances- 12 months- start using single words telegraphic speech- 2 years- multi-word utterances that lack in function normal speech- 5 years- almost normal developed speech Language acquisition is a complex and unique human quality for which there is still no theory that is able to completely explain how language is attained. However most

of the concepts and theories we do have explaining how native languages are acquired go back to the approaches put forward by researchers such as Skinner, Chomsky, Piaget and others. Most of the modern theories we have today have incorporated aspects of these theories into their various findings. There is also the term second-language acquisition which refers to the process in both children and adults when they learn additional languages apart from their native one. Each of these terms has at least one language acquisition theory behind them and the big question of “how do we learn a language?”

A Little History Behind Language Acquisition Theory As with most of history, it all begins with some philosophers in ancient societies who were interested in how humans were able to develop language. Using “armchair psychology” (sitting and thinking about the problem), the large conclusion from these philosophers was that we were able to learn languages as we do due to the subset of a human’s ability to gain knowledge and learn concepts. Easier said they found that language was an innate ability that we were born with. Plato felt that word-meaning mapping was also innate in one way or another. Grammarians who studied Sanskrit debated over 12 centuries on whether or not a humans ability to recognize and use the correct meaning of words in Sanskrit (an ancient Indian language that is over 3,000 years old) was something passed down by generations and learned from pre-established conventions (for example, a child learns the word for horse because he hears older speakers talking about horses) or whether it was innate (“God-given”). A while later, philosophers such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes got in on

the language party and argued that knowledge (and language, in Locke’s case) come from abstracted sense impressions. What does that mean? They argue that language comes from a sensory experience. Behaviorists, people who believe that everything is acquired through conditioning, argued that language is learned through operant conditioning- a form of conditioning that happens through rewards and punishments which makes someone associate between a particular behavior and its consequence. A child learns that a specific combination of words or sounds stands for a specific thing/idea through successfully repeated associations. For example, a child would learn that their house animal, Whiskers, is a cat while their other house animal, Fido, is a dog. He would do so because when the child would call Whiskers his dog, his parents would say that no, Whiskers is a cat, not a dog. The “big face” for this language acquisition theory is B.F. Skinner (Burrhus Frederic Skinner) and he went on to publish this theory. However, Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s greatest linguists to date strongly criticised Skinner’s theory. Chomsky argued that kids often ignore their parents’ corrections and would not likely learn that actual, proper use of the word or phrase and end up using it incorrectly, by means of Skinner’s conditioning theory. Chomsky’s language acquisition theory involved a more mathematical approach to language development based on a syntax (the meaning of a word) study. Now, let us study those theories and decide which theory would best explain how humans acquire language.

Behaviourist Theory In 1957 a piece of literature appeared that would come to affect how we view language, human behaviour and language learning. Burrhus Frederic Skinner, popularly known as B.F. Skinner wrote a book, Verbal Behaviour (1957), which applied a functional analysis approach to analyze language behaviour in terms of their natural occurrence in response to environmental circumstances and the effects they have on human interactions. Skinner's behaviour learning approach relies on the components of classical conditioning, which involves unconditioned and conditioned stimuli, and operant conditioning but particularly the elements of operational conditioning. Operational conditioning refers to a method of learning that occurs through rewards and punishments for behaviour. Behaviour operates on the environment to bring about favorable consequences or avoid adverse ones. These same ideas of operant conditioning can also be applied to language acquisition because Skinner believed that language could be treated like any other kind of cognitive behaviour. According to the behaviourist theory, language learning is a process of habit formation that involves a period of trial and error where the child tries and fails to use correct language until it succeeds. Infants also have human role models in their environment that provide the stimuli and rewards required for operant conditioning. For example, if a child starts babblings, which resembles appropriate words, then his or her babbling will be rewarded by a parent or loved one by positive reinforcement such as a smile or clap. Since the babblings were rewarded, this reward reinforces further articulations of the same sort into groupings of syllables and words in a similar situation (Demirezen, 1988). Children also utter words because they cause adults to give them the things they

want and they will only be given what they want once the adult has trained or shaped the child through reinforcement and rewards speech close to that of adult speech. Before long children will take on the imitation or modeling component of Skinner's theory of language acquisition in which children learn to speak by copying the utterances heard around them and by having their responses strengthened by the repetitions, corrections and other reactions that adults provide. However, before a child can begin to speak, they first start by listening to the sounds in their environment for the first years of their life. Gradually, the child learns to associate certain sounds with certain situations such as the sound of endearment a mother produces when feeding her child. These sounds then become pleasurable for the child on their own without being accompanied by food and eventually the child will attempt to imitate these sounds to invite the attention of his mother or another adult. If these sounds resemble that of adult language the mother will respond with reward and the operant conditioning process begins. This theory also postulates that language happens as a reaction to a stimulus. For example, when a baby is hungry or hurt they would cry, Crying is a response to the stimulus hunger or pain. When you cut your finger, for example, you are ignited to say “ouch,” “aray,” or “aray ko.” For people who are close to you, the sound that you made or the situation you are in serve as the stimulus that ignites their reaction and they would be made to react as well and say something like “oh my God,” “what happened to you,” “are you hurt,” “how can I help you,” and the like. In other words, this theory explains that language is formed or made as a response to a stimulus like events, situations, feelings, ideas, and others.

Innateness Theory Noam Chomsky's innateness theory (or nativist theory) proposes that children have an inborn or innate faculty for language acquisition that is biologically determined. According to Goodluck (1991), nativists view language as a fundamental part of the human genome, as a trait that makes humans human, and its acquisition is a natural part of maturation. It seems that the human species has evolved a brain whose neural circuits contain linguistic information at birth and this natural predisposition to learn language is triggered by hearing speech. The child's brain is then able to interpret what she or he hears according to the underlying principles or structures it already contains (Linden, 2007). Chomsky has determined that being biologically prepared to acquire language regardless of setting is due to the child's language acquisition device (LAD), which is used as a mechanism for working out the rules of language. Chomsky believed that all human languages share common principles, such as all languages have verbs and nouns, and it was the child's task to establish how the specific language she or he hears expresses these underlying principles. For example the LAD already contains the concept of a verb tense and so by listening to word forms such as “worked” or “played,” the child will then form a hypothesis that the past tense of a verbs are formed by adding the sound /d/, /t/, or /id/ to the base form. Yang (2006) also believes that children also initially possess, then subsequently develop, an innate understanding or hypothesis about grammar regardless of where they are raised. According to Chomsky, infants acquire grammar because it is a universal property of language, an inborn development, and has coined these fundamental grammatical ideas that all humans have as universal grammar (UG). Children under the age of three usually don't speak in full sentences and instead

say things like "want cookie" but yet you would still not hear them say things like "want my" or "I cookie" because statements like this would break the syntactic structure of the phrase, a component of universal grammar. Another argument of the nativist or innate theory is that there is a critical period for language acquisition, which is a time frame during which environmental exposure is needed to stimulate an innate trait. Linguist Eric Lenneberg in 1964 postulated that the critical period of language acquisition ends around the age of 12 years. He believed that if no language was learned before then, it could never be learned in a normal and functional sense. It was termed the critical period hypothesis and since then there has been a few case examples of individuals being subject to such circumstances such as the girl known as Genie who raised in an abusive environment to age 13, which didn't allow her to develop language skills. I could relate to Chomsky's theory as I observed Zaynab, my daughter, developed her language. Zaynab is multi-lingual. She speaks three languages, English being her first language, Tagalog, her second, and Ilocano, her third langauge, which she speaks fluently except Ilocano because she is not exposed to that much to Ilocano speakers. She understands and speaks it but not as fluent as English and Tagalog. I did not teach her English words but I communicated with her in English and she was exposed to cartoon movies and Youtube where the language spoken is English. She learned Tagalog because her nanny used to speak Tagalog to her. I did no teach her that run is a verb and it has present form, progresseive form, or past form but she figured them out herself. The first time I figured out that Chomsky's theory of language acquisition must be the most functional theory was when Zaynab a 23 years old started saying “tumago” from the root word “tago”. She was relating a story

in Tagalog about her dog that ran and hid behind the door. “Tumago siya behind the door.” Then I realized she must have figured out the past tense of the verb “tago” herself and she must have associated it from the word “takbo” with a past tense of “tumakbo,” which she often used. Sometimes she would say “magtakbo,” “magkain,” which she must have asscociated with words such as “magdance,” “magsmile,” maghawak,” which ker nanny used to communicate to her. Children have the tendency to generalize grammar. They must think that because this form applies to this particular verb, it it can also apply to other verbs until they will figure out themselves and apply the correct grammar rules as hat this theory talks about, the innateness of learning a language. This was when she was about 2-3 years old. I did not teach her that the past tense of this verb should be this or that. She figured it out herself and now that she is 7 years old she can speak with correct grammar both in English and Tagalog. Just as anyone of us. Just as all children did. You could not use your own experience learning your first language to understand this theory, of course. If you have children around you or if you have your own children especially those who are newborn, you can observe them as they learn their first language and decide which theory is the best that explains how language is learned.

Cognitive Theory Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who was famous for his four stages of cognitive development for children, which included the development of language. However, children do not think like adults and so before they can begin to develop language they must first actively construct their own understanding of the world through their interactions with their environment. A child has to understand a concept before he or

she can acquire the particular language which expresses that concept. For example, a child first becomes aware of a concept such as relative size and only afterward do they acquire the words and patterns to convey that concept. Essentially it is impossible for a young child to voice concepts that are unknown to them; therefore, once a child learns about their environment, then they can map language onto their prior experience. An infant's experience of a cat is that it meows, is furry and eats from a bowl in the kitchen; hence they develop the concept of cat first and then learn to map the word "kitty" onto that concept. Language is only one of the many human mental or cognitive activities, and many cognitivists believe that language emerges within the context of other general cognitive abilities like memory, attention and problem solving because it is a part of their broader intellectual development. However, according to Goodluck (1991), once language does emerge it is usually within certain stages and children go through these stages in a fixed order that is universal in all children. There is a consistent order of mastery of the most common function morphemes in a language and simple ideas are expressed earlier than more complex ones even if they are more grammatically complicated. Piaget's cognitive theory states that children's language reflects the development of their logical thinking and reasoning skills in stages, with each period having a specific name and age reference. There are four stages of Piaget's cognitive development theory, each involving a different aspect of language acquisition:

1) Sensory-Motor Period- (birth to 2 years) Children are born with "action schemas" to "assimilate" information about the world such as sucking or grasping. During the sensory-motor period, children's language is "egocentric" and they talk either

for themselves or for the pleasure of associating anyone who happens to be there with the activity of the moment. 2) Pre-Operational Period- (2 years to 7) Children's language makes rapid progress and the development of their "mental schema" lets them quickly "accommodate" new words and situations. Children's language becomes "symbolic" allowing them to talk beyond the "here and now" and to talk about things such as the past, future and feelings. 3) Egocentrism- Involves "animism" which refers to young children's tendency to consider everything, including inanimate objects, as being alive. Language is considered egocentric because they see things purely from their own perspective. 4) Operational Period- (7 to 11 years) and (11 years to adulthood) Piaget divides this period into two parts: the period of concrete operations and the period of formal operations. Language at this stage reveals the movement of their thinking from immature to mature and from illogical to logical. They are also able to "de-center" or view things from a perspective other than their own. It is at this point that children's language becomes "socialized" and includes things such as questions, answers, commands and criticisms. Piaget's theory emphasizes that language learning is gradual. Children learn new words as they grow older and they develop the capacity to use words and their understanding of those words to solve problems.

He concluded that through their

interactions with their environment, children actively construct their own understanding of the world. Piaget's theory purports that children’s language reflects the development of their logical thinking and reasoning skills in "periods" or stages, with each period having a specific name and age reference.

Social Interactionist Theory Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, popularly known by his last name Vygotsky, postulated that social interaction theory incorporates nurture arguments. This theory explains that children can be influenced by their environment as well as the language input children receive from their care-givers. Although the theories of Skinner, Chomsky and Piaget are all very different and very important in their own contexts, they don't necessarily take into account the fact that children don't encounter language in isolation. The child is a little linguist analyzing language from randomly encountered adult utterances. The interaction theory proposes that language exists for the purpose of communication and can only be learned in the context of interaction with adults and older children. It stresses the importance of the environment and culture in which the language is being learned during early childhood development because this social interaction is what first provides the child with the means of making sense of their own behaviour and how they think about the surrounding world. According to Williamson (2008), children can eventually use their own internal speech to direct their own behaviour in much the same way that their parents' speech once directed their behaviour. Speech to infants is marked by a slower rate, exaggerated intonation, high frequency, repetition, simple syntax and concrete vocabulary. This tailored articulation used by care-givers to young children to maximize phonemic contrasts and pronunciation of correct forms is known as child-directed speech (CDS). Vygotsky also developed the concepts of private speech which is when children must speak to themselves in a self guiding and directing wayinitially out loud and later internally and the zone of proximal development which refers to the tasks a child is unable to complete alone but is able to complete with the assistance

of an adult. The attention and time that a mother spends talking about topics that the child is already focused on highly correlates with early vocabulary size. In the early stages of a child`s life this is usually done through motherese or “baby talk” which may allow children to “bootstrap” their progress in language acquisition (Williamson, 2008). The mother and father also provide ritualized scenarios, such as having a bath or getting dressed, in which the phases of interaction are rapidly recognized and predicted by the infant. The utterances of the mother and father during the activities are ritualized and predictable so that the child is gradually moved to an active position where they take over the movements of the care-taker and eventually the ritualized language as well. Basically the care-giver is providing comprehensible contexts in which the child can acquire language (Mason, 2002). Another influential researcher of the interaction theory is Jerome Bruner who elaborated and revised the details of the theory over a number of years and also introduced the term Language Acquisition Support System (LASS), which refers to the child`s immediate adult entourage but in the fuller sense points to the child`s culture as a whole in which they are born. Adults adapt their behaviour towards children to construct a protected world in which the child is gradually inclined to take part in a growing number of scenarios and scripts and in this way the child is led gradually further and further into language. However, one must remember that although our social context provides support for language acquisition, it does not directly provide the knowledge that is necessary to acquire language; and this, perhaps, is where a child’s innate abilities come into play. This theory, I can say is a combination of the nativist theory and behaviorist theory as it postulates that a child learns a language through their innate biological

capabilities with exposure to their environment, most specifically the people closest to them like their family and cargivers. Piaget's theory of cognitive development is also present in this theory because the capacity of the child to learn new words and the rules of conjugation, syntax and vocabulary depends on their age. Basically, a seven-yearl olf child knows more words than a three-year old. The child's innate intelligence also influences his or her language development. This explains why there are children whp speak a little faster and earlier than others. The kind of environment (people) where the child grows also dictates what kind of language he or she learns. For example, a child who grew up in the slums learn the words of the slums like the “f” word while child who grew up in a decent and educated family speaks intelligent language. During one of our outreach programs, I was able to go to the homes of drop-outs and out-of-school youths. I observed how parents talked to their children. There was a one mother who was calling her son and she was shouting loudly. May I write here the words for the purpose of example only. Please do not mind it. The mother said, “Gorio, Gorio (not the child's real name) agawidkan adda mamaestra umaydaka kano interviewen! Uk_ _ nam ayanmo manen?” Then Gorio was coming closer and was also shouting as he was booed by other children who were there curiously staring at us. Gorio was shouting, “Uk_ nayo met! G_go kayo met, napanak la nagala bayabas!” Of course, this was in Ilocano. But since we are learning about language acquisition and the theories are applied to any language learning, this is a concerete example about what kind of language a child learns with respect to his innate abilities and the environenment he is in. My example is actually similar to the language of the Black people. They say the “f” word as part of their daily expression. This is similar to President Rodrigo Duterte who

uses language to express himself and not to degrade other people.

Learning Activity: 1.

Write a synthesis of the theories of language acquisition. Elaborate the

relatedness, similarity and interplay of the different theories.

Lesson 3: Second Language Acquisition

Second-language acquisition (SLA), second-language (L2) learning or L2 acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process. The field of second-language acquisition is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics, but also receives research attention from a variety of other disciplines, such as psychology and education. The main purpose of theories of second-language acquisition (SLA) is to shed light on how people who already know one language learn a second language. The field of second-language acquisition involves various contributions, such as linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, and education. These multiple fields in second-language acquisition can be grouped as four major research strands: (a) linguistic dimensions of SLA, (b) cognitive (but not linguistic) dimensions of SLA, (c) socio-cultural dimensions of SLA, and (d) instructional dimensions of SLA. While the orientation of each research strand is distinct, they are in common in that they can guide us to find helpful condition to facilitate successful language learning. Acknowledging the contributions of each perspective and the interdisciplinarity between each field, more and more second language researchers are now trying to have a bigger lens on examining the complexities of second language acquisition. A central theme in SLA research is that of interlanguage, the idea that the language that learners use is not simply the result of differences between the languages

that they already know and the language that they are learning, but that it is a complete language system in its own right, with its own systematic rules. This interlanguage gradually develops as learners are exposed to the targeted language. The order in which learners acquire features of their new language stays remarkably constant, even for learners with different native languages and regardless of whether they have had language instruction. However, languages that learners already know can have a significant influence on the process of learning a new one. This influence is known as language transfer. The primary factor driving SLA appears to be the language input that learners receive. Learners become more advanced the longer they are immersed in the language they are learning and the more time they spend doing free voluntary reading. The input hypothesis developed by linguist Stephen Krashen theorizes that comprehensible input alone is necessary for second language acquisition. Krashen makes a distinction between language acquisition and language learning (the acquisition– learning distinction), claiming that acquisition is a subconscious process, whereas learning is a conscious one. According to this hypothesis, the acquisition process in L2 is the same as L1 acquisition. Learning, on the other hand, refers to conscious learning and analysis of the language being learned. Krashen argues that consciously learned language rules play a limited role in language use, serving as a monitor that could check second language output for form assuming the learner has time, sufficient knowledge and inclination (the monitor hypothesis). Subsequent work, by other researchers, on the interaction hypothesis and the comprehensible output hypothesis, has suggested that opportunities for output and for interaction may also be necessary for

learners to reach more advanced levels. Research on how exactly learners acquire a new language spans a number of different areas. Focus is directed toward providing proof of whether basic linguistic skills are innate (nature), acquired (nurture) or a combination of the two attributes. Cognitive approaches to SLA research deal with the processes in the brain that underpin language acquisition, for example how paying attention to language affects the ability to learn it, or how language acquisition is related to short-term and long-term memory. Sociocultural approaches reject the notion that SLA is a purely psychological phenomenon, and attempt to explain it in a social context. Some key social factors that influence SLA are the level of immersion, connection to the L2 community and gender. Linguistic approaches consider language separately from other kinds of knowledge and attempt to use findings from the wider study of linguistics to explain SLA. There is also a considerable body of research about how SLA can be affected by individual factors such as age and learning strategies. A commonly discussed topic regarding age in SLA is the critical period hypothesis, which suggests that individuals lose the ability to fully learn a language after a particular age in childhood. Another topic of interest in SLA is the differences between adult and child learners. Learning strategies are commonly categorized as learning or communicative strategies and are developed to improve their respective acquisition skills. Affective factors are emotional factors that influence an individual's ability to learn a new language. Common affective factors that influence acquisition are anxiety, personality, social attitudes and motivation. Individuals may also lose a language through a process called second-language

attrition. This is often caused by lack of use or exposure to a language over time. The severity of attrition depends on a variety of factors including level of proficiency, age, social factors, and motivation at the time of acquisition. Finally, classroom research deals with the effect that language instruction has on acquisition.

Second Language Learning and Teaching: Learning Styles & Strategies Strategies in language learning, or the steps that one take to learn a language, is very important in ultimate language performance. It is defined as “specific actions, behaviors, steps, or techniques — such as seeking out conversation partners or giving oneself encouragement to tackle a difficult language task — used by students to enhance their own learning” (Scarcella & Oxford, 1992, p. 63). There are six strategies that learners use when learning a language. The strategies include: 1) Memory 2) Cognitive 3) Comprehension 4) Metacognitive 5) Affective 6) Social

Memory Strategy People who adopt the memory strategy depend on their memorizing ability. They find ways to remember better to aid in entering information into long-term memory, by creating a word-meaning map in their brain (mental linkages), and then being able to

retrieve that information. Adopting this strategy will allow the learning and retrieval via sounds (e.g., rhyming), images (e.g., a mental picture of the word itself or the meaning of the word), a combination of sounds and images (e.g., the keyword method), body movement (e.g., total physical response), mechanical means (e.g., flashcards), or location (e.g., on a page or blackboard). ◆ Things they do: Do a lot of exercises on English grammar. Create a word bank from your reading materials or TV shows and memorize the meaning of the words and try to use them.

Cognitive strategy People who adopt the cognitive strategy tend to analyse and reason. They form internal mental codes and revise them to receive and produce the message in the target language. Adopting this strategy will enable you to internalize the language in direct ways such as through reasoning, analysis, note-taking, summarizing, synthesizing, outlining, practicing in naturalistic settings, and practicing structures and sounds formally. ◆ Things they do: Watch Korean dramas and try to replicate how the characters pronounce Korean words. Watch Korean dramas and try to replicate how the characters use certain words in a sentence. Write emails or letters in SL. Read SL reading materials such as magazines and newspapers.

Comprehension strategy People who adopt the comprehension strategy find themselves guessing unknown

words when listening and reading. They also try to replace words they do not know with longer phrases or other words that they know when speaking and writing to overcome gaps in knowledge. ◆ Things they do: Try to guess the meaning of words they don’t know. Try to understand the meaning through looking at the word in context. Guess the meaning of some words by reading the whole passage. Try to look for cues or nonverbal signs when in conversation.

Metacognitive strategy People who adopt the metacognitive strategy plan, arrange, focus, evaluate on their own learning process. They identify and monitor their own learning style preferences and needs, such as gathering and organizing L2 materials, arranging a study space and a schedule for L2 revision and learning, monitoring mistakes made in L2, and evaluating task success, and evaluating the success of any type of learning strategy. ◆ Things they do: Observe how the SL teacher speaks in the SL. Observe how they themselves speak in the SL. Practice speaking in SL in front of the mirror. Crosscheck with Google to find out if their pronunciation is correct, and correct it. Doing crossword puzzles and play word games like scrabble. Take note of how other people communicate in SL, especially natives.

Social/Affective strategy People who adopt the social/affective strategy control their feelings, motivations and attitudes when in social situations such as asking questions, communicating with

others, facilitate conversation and interaction. ◆ Things they do: They encourage themselves to speak in SL even when they are afraid of making a mistake. They reward themselves for good performance. They remind themselves that it is okay to make mistakes. They tell themselves to be confident and not be afraid to make mistakes. They try to speak in SL to others. They ask for clarifications of a confusing point of the L2, or when communicating. They are people to correct their speech when communicating.

Lesson 4: Systematic Survey of English Syntax In linguistics, syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences (sentence structure) in a given language, usually including word order. These rules govern the ways in which words combine to form phrases, clauses, and sentences. The term "syntax" comes from the Greek, meaning "arrange together." The term is also used to mean the study of the syntactic properties of a language. In computer contexts, the term refers to the proper ordering of symbols and codes so that the computer can understand what instructions are telling it to do. The term syntax is also used to refer to the study of such principles and processes.

The goal of many

syntacticians is to discover the syntactic rules common to all languages.

Hearing and Speaking Syntax Syntax is one of the major components of grammar. It's the concept that enables people to know how to start a question with a question word ("What is that?"), or that adjectives generally come before the nouns they describe ("blue dress"), subjects often come before verbs in non-question sentences ("Juna shouted"), prepositional phrases start with prepositions ("in the garden"), helping verbs come before main verbs ("can dance" or "will sing"), and so on. For native speakers, using correct syntax is something that comes naturally, as word order is learned as soon as an infant starts absorbing the language. Native speakers and those who speak English as a second language but with competence like English teachers can tell something isn't said quite right because it "sounds weird," even if they

can't detail the exact grammar rule that makes something sound "off" to the ear. That is your mental grammar working, a set of rules that you know instinctively, as a result of years of use of your particular language. "It is syntax that gives the words the power to relate to each other in a sequence...to carry meaning—of whatever kind—as well as glow individually in just the right place" (Burgess ,1968).

Syntactic Rules English parts of speech often follow ordering patterns in sentences and clauses, such as compound sentences are joined by conjunctions (and, but, or) or that multiple adjectives modifying the same noun follow a particular order according to their class (such as number-size-color, as in "six small green chairs"). The rules of how to order words help the language parts make sense. Sentences often start with a subject, followed by a predicate (or just a verb in the simplest sentences) and contain an object or a complement (or both), which shows, for example, what's being acted upon. Take the sentence "Beth slowly ran the race in wild, multicolored flip-flops." The sentence follows a subject-verb-object pattern ("Beth ran the race"). Adverbs and adjectives take their places in front of what they're modifying ("slowly ran"; "wild, multicolored flip-flops"). The object ("the race") follows the verb "ran", and the prepositional phrase ("in wild, multicolored flip-flops") starts with the preposition "in".

Syntax vs. Diction and Formal vs. Informal

Diction refers to the style of writing or speaking that someone uses, brought about by their choice of words, whereas syntax is the order in which they're arranged in the spoken or written sentence. Something written using a very high level of diction, like a paper published in an academic journal or a lecture given in a college classroom, is written very formally. Speaking to friends or texting are informal, meaning they have a low level of diction. "It is essential to understand that the differences exist not because spoken language is a degradation of written language but because any written language, whether English or Chinese, results from centuries of development and elaboration by a small number of users” (Miller, 2008). Formal written works or presentations would likely also have more complex sentences or industry-specific jargon. They are directed to a more narrow audience than something meant to be read or heard by the general public, where the audience members' backgrounds will be more diverse. Precision in word choice is less exacting in informal contexts than formal ones, and grammar rules are more flexible in spoken language than in formal written language. Understandable English syntax is more flexible than most. "...the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge” (Copeland, 2009).

Types of Sentence Structures Types of sentences and their syntax modes include simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences, and compound-complex sentences. Compound sentences are two simple sentences joined by a conjunction. Complex sentences have dependent clauses, and compound-complex sentences have both types included.

Subject/predicate: All sentences are about something or someone. The something or someone that the sentence is about is called the subject of the sentence. In the following sentences the subjects are shown in green. Note how the subject is often, but not always, the first thing in the sentence.

John often comes late to class. My friend and I both have a dog named Spot. Many parts of the Asian coastline were destroyed by a tsunami in 2004. The old hotel at the end of the street is going to be knocked down to make way for a new supermarket. Sitting in a tree at the bottom of the garden was a huge black bird with long blue tail feathers. The grade 7 Korean boy who has just started at FIS speaks excellent English. On Saturdays I never get up before 9 o'clock. Before giving a test the teacher should make sure that the students are wellprepared.

Lying on the sofa watching old films is my favourite hobby.

The predicate contains information about the someone or something that is the subject. The example sentences above are shown again, this time with the predicate marked in blue.

John often comes late to class. My friend and I both have a dog named Spot. Many parts of the Asian coastline were destroyed by a tsunami in 2004. The old hotel at the end of the street is going to be knocked down to make way for a new supermarket. Sitting in a tree at the bottom of the garden was a huge black bird with long blue tail feathers. The grade 7 Korean boy who has just started at FIS speaks excellent English. On Saturdays I never get up before 9 o'clock. Before giving a test the teacher should make sure that the students are wellprepared. Lying on the sofa watching old films is my favourite hobby.

Sentence types: One way to categorize sentences is by the clauses they contain. A clause is a part of a sentence containing a subject and a predicate. Here are the 4 sentence types:

Simple: Contains a single, independent clause.

I don't like dogs. Our school basketball team lost their last game of the season 75-68. The old hotel opposite the bus station in the center of the town is probably going to be knocked down at the end of next year.

Compound: Contains two independent clauses that are joined by a coordinating conjunction. (The most common coordinating conjunctions are: but, or, and, so. Remember: boas.) I don't like dogs, and my sister doesn't like cats. You can write on paper, or you can use a computer. A tree fell onto the school roof in a storm, but none of the students was injured.

Complex: Contains an independent clause plus one or more dependent clauses. (A dependent clause starts with a subordinating conjunction. Examples: that, because, while, although, where, if.) I don't like dogs that bark at me when I go past. She did my homework, while her father cooked dinner. You can write on paper, although a computer is better if you want to correct mistakes easily. Note: A dependent clause standing alone without an independent clause is called a sentence fragment – see below. Here is a glaring example of a sentence fragment: Because of the rain.

On its own, because of the rain doesn’t form a complete thought. It leaves us wondering what happened because of the rain. To complete it, we need further explanation: Because of the rain, the party was cancelled. Now the fragment has become a dependent clause attached to a sentence that has a subject (the party) and a verb (was canceled). Our thought is complete. In that example, making the sentence longer was the solution. But that doesn’t mean that short sentences can’t be complete. This short sentence is complete: I left.

Compound-complex: Contains 3 or more clauses (of which at least two are independent and one is dependent). I don't like dogs, and my sister doesn't like cats because they make her sneeze. You can write on paper, but using a computer is better as you can easily correct your mistakes. A tree fell onto the school roof in a storm, but none of the students was injured, although many of them were in classrooms at the top of the building.

Syntax Variations and Distinctions Syntax has changed some over the development of English through the centuries. Not all people speak English in exactly the same way. Social dialects learned by people with common backgrounds—such as a social class, profession, age group, or ethnic group—also may influence the speakers' syntax. Think of the differences between

teenagers' slang and more fluid word order and grammar vs. research scientists' technical vocabulary and manner of speaking to each other. Social dialects are also called "social varieties."

Beyond Syntax Following proper syntax doesn't guarantee that a sentence will have meaning, though. Linguist Noam Chomsky created the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," which is syntactically and grammatically correct because it has the words in the correct order and verbs that agree with subjects, but it's still nonsense. With it, Chomsky showed that rules governing syntax are distinct from meanings that words convey. The distinction between grammar and syntax has been somewhat disrupted by recent research in lexicogrammar, which takes the words into account in grammar rules: For example, some verbs (transitive ones, that perform an action on something) always take direct objects. A transitive (action) verb example: "She extracted her tooth." The verb is "extracted" and the object is "tooth."

Another example includes a transitive phrasal verb: "Please look over my report before I turn it in." "Look over" is the phrasal verb and "report" is the direct object. To be a complete thought, you need to include what's being looked over. Thus, it has to have a direct

object. Module 2 Lesson 5: Sentence Patterns Lesson 6: The Structure of Phrases Lesson 7: Usage Issues in Modern English Grammar Lesson 8: World Englishes