What should my students learn about Phonology?

A response to the WIIFM Activity
created by Ivan Chow (@chowivan)

Number of views: 278


Although Linguistics students are enthusiastic to learn about the science between languages, they often find the topics very theoretical and lack ing in practicality. As part of an Introductory Linguistics course, students find Phonology to be the most abstract. I try to motivate students by explaining how phonological processes work in different languages and, demonstrate how foreign accents can be demonstrated by the application of phonological processes that operate in someone’s native language but are not applicable/applied different in a different language. Since a good proportion of students in my class are non-native speakers, making this connection also helped them improve their mastery of English by acquiring a more native-like accent.

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