Linguistics Training for Language Teachers

I’ve seriously studied three foreign languages in my life: Spanish, Russian, and Tajiki (Persian).  Studying linguistics has led me to realize that these would have been taught better if the teachers had received basic training in linguistics and applied it to their classes.

Phonetics: Many of my 7 Spanish teachers mentioned that b and v share one sound in Spanish.  Some said to pronounce both like the English b, some said to use the English v, and others said Spanish speakers used a sound in between those two without saying how they did so.  In Ling 1 I learned that the sound is a voiced bilabial fricative, which finally allowed me to pronounce the sound correctly instead of relying on American English phones.  I also learned for the first time that Spanish uses dental, rather than alveolar, stops.  Teaching the jargon of phonetics is not necessary (‘voiced bilabial fricative’ sounds intimidating to most high school students), but explaining the articulation would help reduce the inevitable American accent.

Phonology: There are many sounds that are allophonic in English but not in other languages.  However, native speakers like myself often do not notice that our phonemes have multiple allophones.  When I studied Persian this past summer in Tajikistan, we had to learn the modified form of Cyrillic used there.  It includes ‘ъ,’ representing the glottal stop, which is a phoneme of Persian languages.  My two teachers were Tajiks who had studied English but knew little about casual English speech, and the American leading the program had not studied linguistics, so none of them (and none of us students) realized that glottal stops are allophones of /t/ in casually spoken English.  The only example of the glottal stop in English that anyone could think of was the dash in the word “uh-oh.”  It is easier to produce the sound after realizing it’s a sound you produce frequently in words like mitten and button.

Morphology: Knowing the structure of words can be quite useful in remembering those words.  Knowing the morphemes that make up words helps make foreign languages more logical in appearance and easier to learn for students.  For example, the Persian word for desert, بیابان [bijɒːbɒn] literally means “without waters” (from a process of folk etymology; older variants are derived from separate but similar-sounding Persian roots).  We were taught this word without being taught its morphemes, so it became just another arbitrary combination of sounds to memorize.  Without, water, and plural are all common Persian morphemes, so knowing them would have made words like بیابان much easier to learn.  In general, knowledge of morphemes makes it much easier to guess the meanings of words you have not been explicitly taught.

Historical linguistics: Most American language students study Indo-European languages (Spanish, Russian, and Tajik, in my case).  These languages share common roots.  Knowing English words derived from the same roots can help students make connections to words in their new language.  The English mortal comes from the same root as the Spanish morir, Russian умереть [ʊmʲɪˈrʲetʲ], and Persian مردن [moɾdæn], meaning to die.  The English words juvenile and young come from the same root as Persian جوان [d͡ʒævɒn], Spanish joven, and Russian юный [jʉnɨj].  Similarities like these hold throughout Indo-European languages, and awareness of them makes words like this much easier to learn because they become variants of known (English) words rather than seemingly random clumps of syllables.

Overall, the various fields of linguistics can all provide helpful information to language students.  Teachers should learn about these and use them in class to their advantage.