Linguistics for ESL Teachers -Synthesis Paper

INTRODUCTION This synthesis paper addresses my knowledge, understandings, analysis, and assessment of my experiences in this course, Linguistics for ESL Teachers. I am glad that we were given this task as by writing this synthesis paper, I can share and write out what I have learned in this course. In other word, I get a chance to share my experiences taking this course. For me, Linguistics for ESL Teachers is a very fun course. I get to learn so many things about languages, such as the nature of language and phonology. Plus, Dr. Azman has done a very great job in teaching us this subject. To make it short, we need to learn linguistics and languages because whatever else people do when they come together, whether they play or fight, they talk.

NEW KNOWLEDGE GAINED As a result of this class, I learned that language is important in human’s life. Language is a system that uses some physical sign (sound, gesture, mark) to express meaning. In this topic, I learned that we are uniquely language users. We can separate our vocalization from a given situation, while animals like cats only arch their back in the appropriate situation. We can lie, while animals can only report. For example, bees tell each other when they found food. Besides that, we can speculate while animals are bad at counterfactuals. Parts of the lectures that I find interesting are in Chapter 1 of An Introduction to Language by Fromkin. They were Animal Languages and Sign Languages. In Animal Languages, I learned that when animals vocally imitate human utterances, it does not mean they possess language. Talking birds such as parrots are capable of faithfully reproducing words and phrases of human language that they have heard, but their utterances carry no meaning. They are speaking neither English nor their own language when they sound like us. Generally, a parrot says what it is taught, or what it hears, and no more. Another topic which I find interesting is Sign Languages. The sign languages of deaf communities provide some of the best evidence to support the notion that humans are born with the ability to acquire language. Because deaf children are unable to hear speech, they do not acquire spoken languages as hearing children do. However, I learned that deaf children who are exposed to sign language learn it in stages parallel to those of hearing children learning spoken languages. Sign languages are human languages that do not use sounds to express meanings. Instead, sign languages are visual-gestural systems that use hand, body, and facial gestures as the forms used to represent words. In this topic, I get to learn that it is nearly impossible for those who are unable to hear language to learn to speak naturally as normal speech depends largely on auditory feedback. A deaf child will not to speak without extensive training in special schools or programs designed especially for deaf people. Based on what I have learned in this chapter, I discovered a few interesting facts about language. Firstly, the number of sentences is infinite. Next, we are able to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences. Plus, we are able to recognize truncated sentences such as “Stop it!” that are missing nouns.

CONCLUSION Finally, what can I conclude from this synthesis paper is languages is fun. We get to learn so many things that we might never heard before. There is a quotation by Noam Chomsky, saying that when we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the “human essence,” the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man. To understand our humanity, one must understand the nature of language that makes us human. I learned that language is the source of human life and power.