Linguistics in Aid of Teachers of English
The Language Research Center organized a seminar on December 06, 2017 that included a presentation by Dr. Emad Al-Tamari titled "Linguistics in Aid of Teachers of English." His presentation attempted to focus on how “fixing” and “developing” students’ linguistics competence will lead to improving students’ linguistic performance.
His session began with some questions about whether our teachers have ever tried to assess their own English, whether they evaluate their students’ English and whether they have thought of linguistics as a tool to help improve their students’ English.
Dr. Al-Tamari successfully pinpointed significant problem areas our students have, which he thought our teachers should focus on when teaching English. Dr. Al-Tamari, while defining linguistics, highlighted some pedagogical implications linguistics could have. He quoted Chomsky while focusing on the nature of language and how communication works. He explained Chomsky’s three models namely that of linguistic competence, performance, and language acquisition. Finally, he focused on major areas of linguistics such as phonetics, phonology, syntax, morphology, and semantics.
Dr. Al-Tamari recommended that our teachers should assess their students’ English regularly. A teacher, he added, should be a role model for the students when it comes to language use.
The Al-Samer girls’ campus also participated in this seminar online.
The presentation was worthwhile, interactive and overall a great success.
Date: 12/6/2017
Source: Mohammad Adil Siddique
Multimedia Contribution: Mohammad Sherajul Islam
