Dr. Johanna Rubba
English Department (Linguistics)
Cal Poly State University San Luis Obispo
Last updated 3/27/06
© 2005  Johanna Rubba

ENGL 390:
THE LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE OF MODERN ENGLISH
SPRING 2006
Syllabus

This is a plan; it is subject to change. You will be notified of changes via the Assignment Page; consult that page frequently for updates.

Week 1: 3/28-30
  • Introduction to the Course / Introduction to Language: Purpose and nature of language - Component subsystems ("levels" of language) - texts as primary units of language 
  • Begin English Sounds: The general mechanism of speech production - the phoneme inventory of English - introduction to phonetic transcription - English syllable structure & phonological processes - Typical pronunciation difficulties of English learners - Phonology and literature - English spelling - Literacy for children whose native language is not English
Week 2: 4/4-6
  • English Sounds (cont'd)
Week 3: 4/11-13
  • English Sounds (cont'd)
  • English Words: What words are for - word classes ('parts of speech') - word strucuture in English - the general nature of the English morphological system - morphological analysis - kinds of morphemes and words - the inflectional categories of English and how they are marked on English words - word formation using derivational affixes or other means - irregularity in English morphology - morphology & punctuation rules: the apostrophe & hyphen - allomorphy (variation in the pronunciation of morphemes) - lexical items and how the mental lexicon is organized -typical morphology difficulties of English learners - morphology and spelling errors - Facilitating vocabulary expansion in language arts teaching
Week 4: 4/18-20
  • English Words (cont'd)
Week 5: 4/25-27
  • The English verb phrase: Components of verb phrases: lexical and auxiliary verbs - principal parts of verbs - modal auxiliaries - form vs. function - tense and aspect - names and uses of tense/aspect constructions - dialect variation in verb forms
  • Midterm Exam (Thurs., 4/27) Exam will be a one-hour test.
Week 6: 5/2-4
  • The English verb phrase (cont'd)
Week 7: 5/9-11
  • English Grammar: Intuitive ways of determining sentencehood - model exercises for teaching sentencehood - end punctuation and common sentence-punctuation difficulties (fragments, run-on sentences, comma splices)
Week 8: 5/16-18
  • English Grammar: Parsing - subject & predicate - finding smaller sentence constituents - phrase structure - identifying the grammatical roles of sentence constituents - sentence types and their text functions
Week 9: 5/23-25
  • Texts: How text topic and text-level needs such as topic maintenance, coherence, and cohesion determine sentence type and choice of grammatical roles for the constituents of a sentence - given vs. new information and sentence structure - speech/writing differences and how they influence student writing
Week 10: 5/30-6/1
  • Variation within English: Correctness issues - how to treat nonstandard English in the classroom
Exam Wk.: 6/5-90 Final Exam: Friday, 6/9, 1:10-3 pm. Exam is a two-hour comprehensive test.
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