LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

Runner up in the student award 2009: How have you been inspired by studying languages, linguistics or area studies at university?

Deborah Adams, 4th year Humanities with English Language student at the Open University, was a runner up in the Subject Centre's undergraduate student essay competition 2009.

The teaching of stylistics
Stylistics is the study of linguistic style, whereas (theoretical) Linguistics is the study of linguistic form. The term 'style' is used in linguistics to describe the choices which language makes available to a user, above and beyond the choices necessary for the simple expression of a meaning. Linguistic form can be interpreted as a set of possibilities for the production of texts, and thereby linguistic form makes possible linguistic style.

WWW-based stylistics teaching
This paper describes the development of an interactive, learning should be fun, WWW-based introductory undergraduate course in stylistics and a pedagogical experiment to be undertaken involving the course. The WWW-based course is itself derived from a more traditional lecture-seminar course and the aim is to compare student reactions to, and performance on, the two different versions of the course. The pedagogical principles underlying the two versions of the course are discussed, as well as the design of the experiment. Stylistics teachers in other HE institutions are invited to take part in the pedagogical experiment.

Linguistics: Language and style
This is a web-based introductory course in Stylistic Analysis created by Mick Short with funding from the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) prize. Stylistics is a systematic way of exploring (primarily literary) texts. It looks at the language of texts and tries to explain how that language creates meaning, style and effect. Language and Style covers all three major literary genres (poetry, prose and drama), and also other text-types e.g. advertisments.

Linguistics: Linguistic description: Above the sentence - weekly task sheets
At the University of Portsmouth, first year modern languages students have a course in Linguistic Description. The materials here are a complementary set to those we use in phonetics/phonology/prosody, morphology, semantics and syntax, and cover above the sentence phenomena, such as text, discourse and conversation analysis, as well as stylistics and pragmatics. The lectures are built on the analysis of English and in the tutorials students carry out comparative analyses of other languages. The assessment for the unit consists of a portfolio of weekly tasks. Students are required to find out about a language of their choice from a native speaker informant. Students have traditionally investigated their chosen language of study (French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian), but some students have done their projects on more exotic languages such as Thai, Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese, Finnish, Swedish, Malay, Korean or Greek. We have found that the project encourages initiative, a strong sense of involvement, an attitude of enquiry, and a scholarly approach to linguistic analysis in the students. It prepares them for independent and systematic study of languages in the knowledge of the principles of organisation and use underlying them.

French: Difficultés de la langue française
This 2-semester grammar course is essentially geared towards English Learners of French and is intended to improve students' writing skills. Its main aim is to improve writing accuracy at noun phrase and sentence level; nevertheless, it also aims to strengthen students writing techniques and text-production/text-transformation skills through a review of linguistic processes of pronominalisation. It originated from the observation (i.e. via several error analyses conducted between 1997 and 1999) that foreign learners of French recurrently make particular mistakes when they write and that this is often due to a lack of grammatical knowledge. Thus, it is hypothesised that these mistakes can be avoided thanks to an introduction to/a revision of basic grammatical concepts (i.e. What is a Part of Speech? What is a Grammatical Function? What do Gender and Number mean? Etc). Further, though the course mainly focuses on writing skills, register differences, and in particular stylistic differences between written and oral expression, will also be underlined. Finally, this programme also reviews central difficulties linked to the choice and use of tenses in French (second semester).