Sunday, October 26, 2008

The intersting and the useless

English language and linguistics was a subject that was sold so well to me during orientation week. I believed I loved sentences and sentence construction until the third term of this course. Let’s just say that I know now that it was my high school English teacher Mrs Murphy that I liked.

This department has undertaken to teach two modules at the same time. “There are only two lectures a week,” they said. Sounded like it would be easy, but it only meant one had to learn twice as much.

For me, the Thursday modules were the easiest. They related to people and people are my passion. One learns how children acquire languages as well as how second languages are attained. The more recent module dealt with texts and the ideology imbedded in texts. The Tuesday modules concentrated on syntax, phonetics and phonology and the type of useless information one picks up from speaking to people passionate about those kinds of things.
I wish they would separate these modules and give us the choice of just studying the Thursday modules. I guess I can’t always have it my way. Yet, if Rhodes University had 10 students and I had to reward this department with some, I would send 4 brave hearted students with my sincerest apologies.

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