The primary goal of this handbook is to familiarize adult English as a second language (adult ESL) instructors with the most important grammatical concepts and difficulties encountered by students in and out of the classroom while providing both novice and experienced instructors with the tools necessary to exemplify and explain, when necessary, such concepts in a clear and effective manner. By carefully reviewing the examples, explanations, and notes contained in this handbook, instructors will learn to employ the “natural” method (sometimes also referred to as the “direct” method) in their presentations of several of the most essential points of English grammar. While this handbook is not intended to provide an exhaustive review of English grammar, it does aim to address the most common sources of grammatical difficulty encountered by teachers and students in typical adult ESL settings. The examples presented throughout this handbook use Standard American English and cover a wide range of grammatical concepts at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced proficiency levels. This handbook emphasizes practical grammatical concepts, that is, issues mainly involving English morphology and syntax, along with some important lexical points. Upon completing their review of the material presented in this handbook, ESL instructors should be able to apply the natural method to their presentations of the most fundamental grammatical topics encountered in the classroom, across the proficiency levels and independent of theme-specific lesson content. Although this handbook does not presuppose any specific linguistic training on the part of the reader and technical linguistic jargon has been intentionally kept to a minimum, some basic linguistic terminology has been used out of necessity given the content of this work. Readers who are unfamiliar with basic linguistic concepts (such as morphology, syntax, lexicon, aspect, grammaticality, etc.) should be able to consult standard reference materials in order to resolve their uncertainties with a minimum of difficulty. The author has developed and revised this handbook over the course of many years of training novice and experienced instructors to teach a broad range of ESL curricula (including general, academic, and business English at all proficiency levels) to adult learners in diverse educational settings and instructional formats (such as private, one-on-one tutorials and multi-level intensive English programs taught in small and medium-sized groups). Each grammatical concept presented in this handbook is accompanied by numerous examples of realistic usage to aid the reader in understanding those concepts and to assist the instructor with his or her presentation of those grammatical concepts in the classroom. Finally, the reader should keep in mind that this handbook is practical rather than theoretical in nature and has been specifically designed to serve as a useful addition to the ESL instructor’s professional “tool kit.” It is the author’s hope that the reader will find this handbook to be easily approachable and highly relevant to the issues encountered during his or her daily instructional responsibilities.
The renowned historical linguist Hans Henrich Hock once commented that, for reasons that are not well understood, there sometimes appear "curious gaps" in the bilabial slot of languages' series of obstruent phonemes. Hock based his comment on the observation that if a language lacks a voiceless stop at one of the cardinal points of articulation, the missing segment is almost always /p/. Labial Instability in Sound Change (Explanations for the loss of /p/) explains the driving force behind this phenomenon. The theory advanced by the book accounts for why, over time, languages lose the /p/ sound more often than any other voiceless stop (sounds of a similar class). The book describes the phenomenon of "labial instability" in articulatory and acoustic terms. Labial Instability in Sound Change argues for a particular school of sound change (John Ohala's phonetic theory) while clarifying the complex relationships among speech perception, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, language typology, and sound change.
Language and Ancient Greeks This historical essay reviews the development of the art and science of grammar and philosophical views toward language among the Ancient Greeks. Although the early Greek writers, including Homer and Hesiod, commented on language (for example, in the Iliad Homer referred to the Miletians and other Ionians as "barbarophonoi," literally, “foreign speaking”), it was not until the fifth century B.C. that the explicit study of language emerged in Ancient Greece when rhetoric arose as a profession. In the classical period, philosophers, sophists, and rhetoricians studied language mainly only insofar as it related to their understanding of reality and knowledge. Among the Greeks, it was not until the Hellenistic era (the period following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. and lasting until the death of Cleopatra VII and the fall of the Ptolemaic kingdom in 30 B.C.) that significant developments took place in the study of grammar and linguistics developed as a discipline in its own right. In this essay, the author provides a sketch of early and classical Greek philosophies of language, the study of language in Hellenistic and Alexandrian scholarship (including Stoic views on language), and commentary on the relationship between language and Greek identity. On the Decipherment of Linear B A thousand years before the beginning of classical Greek civilization and the second period of Greek literacy that was launched with the arrival of the Phoenician alphabet on Greek’s ancient shores sometime during the late ninth century B.C. arose what would eventually become continental Europe’s first literate society. During the Late Bronze Age in southern Greece, the Mycenaean civilization flourished, spreading its culture and its writing system to the nearby island of Crete, where writing had already developed several hundred years earlier among the Minoans. This earliest Greek writing system, which died out with the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization and the start of the Greek Dark Age around 1200 B.C., was thence unknown until the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans unearthed a cache of clay tablets inscribed with a curious script, which he coined “linear script of class B,” during his excavation of Knossos on the island of Crete in the year 1900. For years, Evans tried in vain to decipher the ancient script whose discovery made him famous. It was instead the keen insight of the American classicist and archaeologist Alice Kober, and the persistence and genius of a young British architect named Michael Ventris, that were required to crack the Linear B code. In 1953, Michael Ventris succeeded in deciphering most of Linear B’s 87 syllabic signs and a significant number of the script’s logographic signs—a stunning achievement considering that no bilingual inscription was available to aid Ventris’ efforts. Unfortunately, Ventris died in an automobile accident just three years after his remarkable achievement, which stands to this day as one of the most extraordinary displays of cryptographic legerdemain ever seen. This critical-historical essay looks at the missteps and flawed approach of Arthur Evans that opened the door to Ventris’ eventual decipherment while shining a bright light on Kober’s invaluable contributions, which are often understated or even ignored by scholars in the field. Throughout the essay, the author approaches the history of the script’s decipherment with fairness and realism, highlighting Evans’ successes and failures, acknowledging the impact of Kober’s work, and recognizing the enormity and historical significance of Ventris’ profound achievement.
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