Lexical Analysis of the English Language

Teacher: Hector Vega Pinochet.

    This course familiarises students with history of the English language, various word formation precesses, as well as the use and origin of idiomatic expressions and proverbs used in real communicative contexts.

Not only will the course concentrate on the lexical analysis of the language, but it will also promote reflection and critical thinking about the teaching of lexis in the classroom.

Course Objectives

Section 1: History of the English Language

    In this assignment presented, I chose two texts “Origins of the English language” and “English as an Indo-European language”. Both contain ppt, summarize and maps, in order to understand them in detail.

 ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Personal Reflection

    In my opinion, it is important to my development as a student and as a future teacher to learn where English, the language we are going to teach, comes from; because we can teach a little of what we know in order to bring and involve our future students to learn English as a foreign language.

    This assignment helped me to learn and understand the different period of History of English and how it was developed throughout the years and find out the richness that was created behind these periods, such as language and culture, also working in this power point I could realize the importance of the history in the development of the language that we used nowadays, and how the people who invaded The British Isles influenced not only in social or cultural aspects but also in linguistic aspects of the English language growth.

    From my point of view, the text was complex to understand and summarize, but for complementing my reading I used other book called “An Illustrated History of Britain, David McDowall”, which helped me to understand clearly and briefly what was on the other text.

    Personally, I am not keen on history, but it is interesting to read because the history of English language is complex, for it has a lot of period which are related to each other, but personally it is a great experience to deal with this text and analyze it because I am able to understand and organize my ideas which at the beginning they are not very clear.

    On the other hand, I realized that reading this text had relation to other subjects I am taking, for example “Culture and Civilization of the English-speaking Peoples” which has helped me to learn easily and to link up events of history.

    To conclude, even though it was tiring to read and summarize the document, it was a useful assignment from I could learn on my own work, which was much more rewarding that any other task. I would like to add that with this kind of assignments our knowledge and vision of this culture increases and also motivates us to learn more about English language; furthermore, this paper is useful since you can understand how English has become what it is nowadays; the most dominant international language in communications, science, business and entertainment.

1_Origin_and_History_of_the_English_Language.pdf (325,2 kB)

The origin of the English Language.pptx (379,5 kB)

ENGLISH AS AN INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE

Personal reflection

    To start I am pretty conformed with this assignment, because as I said in the text above, It is important for my development as a student and future teacher to learn where the English and Languages come from, and it helpful to complement my knowledge, for to learn and teach a language is not only know how pronouncing the word well or know the majority of the word, and can communicate, but also it is can to understand the whole language features.

    Firstly, I would like to say that this assignment was not hard to read and understand, I could complement the contents seen in class, besides I must admit that I was a little confused, because I did not know which was the direct ancestor of English, I had a mixed with German and Latin; however, after reading the text I could understand that Latin had big influences in many languages that exist in nowadays even English, but it was not the direct ancestor of it.  I could realize that a group of languages shared a common accentor, and also might contain features of vocabulary, phonology, morphology, and syntax. It was referred to the ancient people that spoken a language, as a result of the contact between of them led to mutual influences in their languages and formed what is called a family of languages, which English belonged is called Indo-European language family (IE) which I could answer the question above, because the subgroup within Indo-European to which English belonged was Germanic. Also each family tree that appeared on the text represented the more important and recognizable member of the IE family, such as Baltic, Slavic, Greek, italic (which Spanish belonged), Germanic and more and subdivided in geographical subdivision.

    This text is related to the text origins of the English language, both are telling us how English is formed and where it comes from, and I associated to the first and the second objective, because it has similarities between the origins of English language, for both explain how English language was created.

Text_-_English_as_an_Indo_European_Language_in_History_of_the_English_Language.pdf (245,6 kB)

English as an.pptx (283,8 kB)

Section 2: Language Varieties

    This second assignment dealed with two texts, as the first one. I chose “varieties of English” and “Language, Society and culture” I upload ppt and mind maps, in order to complement the text and comprehend better.

VARIETIES OF ENGLISH

Personal reflection

    This ppt is about the types of variation of the English language, the text is focus on five major types of variation, according to the user (region and social group) and according to the language user (field of discourse, medium, attitude) and the national standard English which exist in the world, mainly American (AmE) and British English (BrE) and other national English standards, such as Canadian English, Scots English, Australian English, between others.

    First I would like to say that assignment was rather rewarding, because I realized that I was wrong in many issues for example, I do not know that exist differences between accent and dialect, besides do I neither know that everybody have accent, dialect, and also idiolect; moreover, before I read the text, my previous knowledge about varieties of English was the differences between American and British speakers and after read the text I realized that I was completely wrong, because varieties of English involved region, social group, field of discourse, medium and attitude and how these factors  had influences in how people speak, also I learn that everybody in the world have an accent (phonological features), dialect (variety of the language, phonological and imply syntactic, morphological and semantic properties)

    Moreover, reading this text is useful as a future teachers, because we know that there are many accent of English around the world and the differences that they have (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and orthography), so we can show them that standard language like received pronunciation (RP) is used by educating community and we have to teach them that language is important in life; they must be aware of communicative situation, besides we must to be concern about that English is the language of political negotiation and international business, it has become the international language of science, and medicine. English is the major foreign language taught in most schools in South America and Europe, also it is often used as an official language to help people communicate, so to learn English is a powerful tool that we must to teach to our student to appreciated

16_Text_Varieties_of_English.pdf (2 MB)

VARIETIES OF ENGLISH.pptx (94,3 kB)

LANGUAGE SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Personal reflexion

    This assignment has concepts that I understand, because it is not differ much for the previous one “varieties of the language” and it has interesting concepts like sociolinguistics that investigates the individual and social variation of language, and how these varieties of language are defined according to class, education, age, sex, and number of other society parameters, and how these concepts can identify communities or groups when communicating them and member of other cultures.

    In addiction, reading this text I could realize concept that I had understood, but not deeply, for example people always think that upper class always pronounces all the words and the lower class do not, nevertheless, In Reading, England, Trudgill found the opposite to these variables, so that is how social classes use the language in different way.  Anther aspect that called my attention is the variation according to age and gender, because I find that is the same what happen in Chile, adults and teenagers use different expression for say the same things as English language does; according to gender, women use more prestigious form than men, the pronunciation and intonation to speak are different among the sexes.

    In personal reflection we must known as future teachers of English how language work, for us personal goal we must know all the elements that a second language contain, and that we are able to reflect on the linguistic features of the language we are going to teach, because language is powerful, so we have to learn it properly. Furthermore, sometimes learning a foreign language helps you understand your own language and culture better through comparison, or through the relationship between the foreign language and your mother tongue.

    In spite of, I knew some topics which appeared on the text and it was short it was not easy to read, because each concept had to be analyzed and read deeply one by one, but it was a great experience dealing with this text that also it was related to Chilean society. Reading this text I was able to achieve the objectives " Identify different registers and pragmatic contexts" and "use vocabulary, jargon and expressions appropiately"

14_Text_Language_Society_and_Culture.pdf (1,8 MB)

LANGUAGE, SOCIETY AND CULTURE.pptx (138,8 kB)The origin of the English Language.pptx (354,9 kB)

Section 3: Online Resources

This section, I upload four links related to the assingments above, in order to comprehend the topics seen.

This is a video that shows the History of English language, that complements the text Origins of the English language. Here you can learn in a didactic way, and it is especially for visual people.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fJiHmR85cU

This pdf is a summary of the text English as an Indo-European Language, It complements the text and ppt, it is brief and concise, and it helpful to achive onde of the objective of the course  "Characterise different periods in the history of the English Language"

gracenotes.info/documents/TOPICS_DOC/English.pdf

This is a video about different accent of English, It is nice and you can learn and realized the phonologicla features the accents have.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-en-iDeZEE&feature=related

I picked this link, in order to undertand briefly the text "Language, Society and Culture", here you can deal with the whole concepts seen in the ppt and the text. I related this link to the objective "Use vocabulary, jargon and expressions appropiately"

www.eliterarysociety.com/language-society-and-culture/

Extra material

11_Texto_Language_History.pdf (2,3 MB)
15_Text_Language_Varieties.pdf (2,3 MB)
Text_-_English_as_a_Germanic_Language_in_History_of_the_English_Language.pdf (201,3 kB)