COURSE GUIDE  xi

COURSE GUIDE DESCRIPTION

You must read this Course Guide carefully from the beginning to the end. It tells
you briefly what the course is about and how you can work your way through
the course material. It also suggests the amount of time you are likely to spend in
order to complete the course successfully. Please keep on referring to the Course
Guide as you go through the course material as it will help you to clarify
important study components or points that you might miss or overlook.

INTRODUCTION
HBEL3303 Linguistics and Language Teaching is one of the courses offered by
the Faculty of Education and Languages at Open University Malaysia (OUM).
This course is worth 3 credit hours and should be covered over 15 weeks.

COURSE AUDIENCE
This course is offered to all learners taking the Bachelor of Teaching majoring in
English Language (with Honours) programme. This module aims to impart
knowledge about human and animal language from the basic language systems
to the more complex human communicational aspects. In addition, the course
inculcates linguistic knowledge with relevant classroom applications.

As an open and distance learner, you should be acquainted with learning

independently and being able to optimise the learning modes and environment
available to you. Before you begin this course, please ensure you have the right
course material, and understand the course requirements as well as how the
course is conducted.

STUDY SCHEDULE
It is a standard OUM practice that learners accumulate 40 study hours for every
credit hour. As such, for a three-credit hour course, you are expected to spend
120 study hours. Table 1 gives an estimation of how the 120 study hours could be
accumulated.

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Table 1: Estimation of Time Accumulation of Study Hours

Study
Study Activities
Hours
Briefly go through the course content and participate in initial
3
discussions
Study the module 60
Attend 3 to 5 tutorial sessions 10
Online participation 12
Revision 15
Assignment(s), Test(s) and Examination(s) 20
TOTAL STUDY HOURS ACCUMULATED 120

COURSE OUTCOMES
By the end of this course, you should be able to:
1. Demonstrate an understanding of the key concepts of linguistics;
2. Develop an awareness of the contribution of linguistics to language
acquisition and learning;
3. Demonstrate an understanding of the fundamental concepts of sociolinguistics
and psychological variables in second language learning; and
4. Make informed professional decisions for language teaching based on the
theoretical background knowledge acquired.

COURSE SYNOPSIS
This course is divided into 10 topics. The synopsis for each topic can be listed as
follows:

Topic 1 begins with a discussion on the nature of language. Language is the

ability to use meaningful language units namely morphemes, words, phrases,
clauses and discourse. It is the ability to put together small language units
together to form larger language units, for example, to build vocabulary from
morphemes, phrases from words, clauses from words and phrases, sentences
from phrases and clauses, paragraphs from sentences and finally, discourses
from paragraphs and sentences. Language differentiates humans from animals.
However, that does not mean animals do not use language to communicate.

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Animals do have their own system of communication, but humans have the most
complex and sophisticated language system for communication. Chomsky (1965)
noted that the possession of language distinguishes humans from other animals.
To understand our humanity, one must understand the nature of language that
makes us human.

Topic 2 introduces phonetics and phonology. Phonetics is the study of the

sounds made in the production of human languages. It has three principal
branches. Articulatory phonetics focuses on the human vocal apparatus and
describes sounds in terms of their articulation in the vocal tract. Acoustic
phonetics uses the tools of physics to study the nature of sound waves produced
in human language, for example, in using machines for interpreting speech
patterns in voice identification. Auditory phonetics studies the perception of
sounds by the brain through the human ear. Phonology is the description of the
systems and patterns of speech sounds in a language. The speaker of a language
unconsciously knows about the sound patterns of the language.

Topic 3 discusses morphology. Morphology is the study of word formation and

the internal structure of words. A word consists of one or more morphemes. Base
morphemes are lexical content morphemes that cannot be analysed into smaller
parts. A stem or word is formed when a base morpheme is combined with affix
morphemes. Other affixes can be added to a stem to form a more complex stem
which may also be a word.

Knowing a language means knowing the words of that language. When you
know a word you know both its form (sound) and its meaning; these are
inseparable parts of the linguistic sign. The relationship between the form and
meaning is arbitrary, that is, by hearing the sounds (form) you cannot know the
meaning of those sounds without having learned it previously.

Morphemes are the most elemental grammatical units in a language. It is the

minimal unit of linguistic meaning or grammatical function. Thus, moralisers are
an English word composed of four morphemes: moral + ise + er + s.

Grammar also includes ways of adding words and morphemes to the lexicon.
Words can be coined outright, limited only by the coiner's imagination and the
phonetic constraints of English word formation. Compounds are also a source of
new words. Morphological rules combine two or more words to form complex
combinations like lamb chop, deep-sea diver and laptop, a word spawned by the
computer industry. Frequently, the meaning of compounds cannot be predicted
from the meanings of their individual morphemes, such as: firefly, butterfly and
dragonfly.

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Topic 4 discusses syntax. All speakers are capable of producing and

understanding an unlimited number of new sentences never before spoken or
heard. Speakers of a language can recognise the grammatical sentences of their
language and know how the words in a sentence must be ordered and grouped
to convey a certain meaning. For example,

Bahasa Malaysia I love to you. Ali eat rice. He go to school.

Tamil I you love. Ali rice eat. He school go.
English I love you. Ali eats rice. He goes to school.

They also recognise ambiguities, know when different sentences mean the same
thing, and correctly perceive the grammatical relations in a sentence such as
subject and direct object. This kind of knowledge comes from their knowledge of
the rules of syntax.

Sentences have structure that can be represented by phrase structure trees

containing syntactic categories. Phrase structure trees reflect the speaker's mental
representation of sentences. Ambiguous sentences may have more than one
phrase structure tree.

Topic 5 discusses semantics. Semantics is the study of the linguistic meaning of

morphemes, words, phrases and sentences. Subfields of semantics are lexical
semantics, which is concerned with the meanings of words and the meaning
relationships among words; and phrasal, or sentential, semantics, which is
concerned with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the word. It is a
conventionalised form of meaning ă as part of our learning of English we come to
recognise that words mean certain things by generally accepted convention. For
example, the word „dog‰ refers to an animal, while the word „hotdog‰ refers to a
type of food. Hence, learning a language includes learning the agreed-upon
meanings of certain strings of sounds and learning how to combine these
meaningful units into larger units that also convey meaning.

Topic 6 describes psycholinguistics. Psycholinguistics refers to a branch of study

which combines the disciplines of psychology and linguistics. This branch of
study emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s. Psycholinguistics studies how people
learn and use language, while linguistics studies language as a formal system.
Hence, psycholinguistics is the study of the mental processes involved in the
acquisition, storage, comprehension and production of language.
Psycholinguistics deals with how real people learn and use language to
communicate. It also researches the relationship between language and thought.
Therefore, the two principal concerns of psycholinguistics are language
performance and language acquisition.

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Topic 7 describes error analysis. Error analysis (EA) consists of a set of

procedures for identifying, describing and explaining learner errors. Technically,
errors can occur in both comprehension and in production but comprehension
errors are difficult to detect as it is often impossible to locate the precise linguistic
source of an error. Thus, EA is the study of the errors that learners make in their
speech and writing. Error evaluation (EE) is a set of procedures for assessing the
relative seriousness of learner errors. Explaining errors involves determining
their sources in order to account for why they occurred. One obvious reason why
learners make errors is the difficulty they experience in accessing their L2
knowledge when communicating. If L2 forms have not yet been automised, they
require controlled processing, which places heavy demand on learnersÊ
information-processing systems.

Topic 8 discusses sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics is a branch of linguistics which

studies the individual and social variation of language. Social variation gives
information about the roles fulfilled by a speaker within one community or
country. The research of sociolinguistics is based on the actual language used by
native speakers or foreigners. Factors like social class, geographical origins,
ethnicity, nationality, gender and age can affect the type of language used by
individuals.

Topic 9 describes pragmatics. Pragmatics concerns aspects of information

conveyed through language which (a) are not encoded by generally accepted
convention in the linguistic forms used, but which (b) nonetheless arise naturally
out of and depend on the meanings conventionally encoded in the linguistics
forms used. This is taken in conjunction with the context in which the forms are
used [emphasis added]. It is the study of how context affects meaning, for
example, how the sentence It's hot in here comes to be interpreted as "Please
switch on the air-cond.‰ Pragmatic meaning is non-conventional in nature. An
utterance produces a certain conversational implicature in a particular context
which can only be obtained by reasoning from the conjunction of an utteranceÊs
conventional meaning and context.

Topic 10 deals with discourse. Basic discourse analysis analyses the relationship
of the discourse between the speakers and hearers, by and for whom it is
produced. It is concerned with how speakers take and relinquish the role of the
speaker, how social roles affect discourse options in terms of who speaks when,
and what they can talk about, how non-verbal signalling works and how the
actual form of utterances is conditioned by the social relationships between the
participants. Discourse analysis shows a characterisation of how, in the context of
negotiation, participants go about the process of interpreting meaning (whether
this is reciprocal as in conversation or non-reciprocal as in reading or writing).

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TEXT ARRANGEMENT GUIDE

Before you go through this module, it is important that you note the text
arrangement. Understanding the text arrangement will help you to organise your
study of this course in a more objective and effective way. Generally, the text
arrangement for each topic is as follows:

Learning Outcomes: This section refers to what you should achieve after
you have completely covered a topic. As you go through each topic, you should
frequently refer to these learning outcomes. By doing this, you can continuously
gauge your understanding of the topic.

Self-Check: This component of the module is inserted at strategic locations

throughout the module. It may be inserted after one sub-section or a few sub-
sections. It usually comes in the form of a question. When you come across this
component, try to reflect on what you have already learnt thus far. By attempting
to answer the question, you should be able to gauge how well you have
understood the sub-section(s). Most of the time, the answers to the questions can
be found directly from the module itself.

Activity: Like Self-Check, the Activity component is also placed at various

locations or junctures throughout the module. This component may require
you to solve questions, explore short case studies, or conduct an observation or
research. It may even require you to evaluate a given scenario. When you come
across an Activity, you should try to reflect on what you have gathered from the
module and apply it to real situations. You should, at the same time, engage
yourself in higher order thinking where you might be required to analyse,
synthesise and evaluate instead of only having to recall and define.

Summary: You will find this component at the end of each topic. This component
helps you to recap the whole topic. By going through the summary, you should
be able to gauge your knowledge retention level. Should you find points in the
summary that you do not fully understand, it would be a good idea for you to
revisit the details in the module.

Key Terms: This component can be found at the end of each topic. You should go
through this component to remind yourself of important terms or jargon used
throughout the module. Should you find terms here that you are not able to
explain, you should look for the terms in the module.

References: The References section is where a list of relevant and useful

textbooks, journals, articles, electronic contents or sources can be found. The list
can appear in a few locations such as in the Course Guide (at the References

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section), at the end of every topic or at the back of the module. You are
encouraged to read or refer to the suggested sources to obtain the additional
information needed and to enhance your overall understanding of the course.

PRIOR KNOWLEDGE
No prior knowledge required.

ASSESSMENT METHOD
Please refer to myINSPIRE.

TAN SRI DR ABDULLAH SANUSI (TSDAS)

DIGITAL LIBRARY
The TSDAS Digital Library has a wide range of print and online resources for the
use of its learners. This comprehensive digital library, which is accessible
through the OUM portal, provides access to more than 30 online databases
comprising e-journals, e-theses, e-books and more. Examples of databases
available are EBSCOhost, ProQuest, SpringerLink, Books24x7, InfoSci Books,
Emerald Management Plus and Ebrary Electronic Books. As an OUM learner,
you are encouraged to make full use of the resources available through this
library.

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Copyright © Open University Malaysia (OUM)