RE: What good is linguistics?

[Lynne Belcher <lrbelcher@saumag.edu>]

Sara,

It was in a descriptive linguistics course where I really learned 
the power of language.  It was in that class that I learned how 
much I really know about language.  Grammar study always makes  
students feel stupid, but that linguistics class made me realize 
how much I know, how much any native speaker of a language knows.  

The TESOL classes I have taken helped me understand a lot about 
second language acquisition, something that has helped me in 
composition classes since standard written English is a foreign 
dialect for many of my students.  I think the most important thing 
I learned from linguistics classes is how to talk to my students 
about language, making use of the knowledge they have about 
language but don't know they have.  Linguistics classes help us 
realize how much we know about language that we didn't know we knew.

Lynne
lrbelcher@saumag.edu