Book: RELEVANT LINGUISTICS

[Christine Sosa]

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the availability of:

RELEVANT LINGUISTICS:AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STRUCTURE AND USE OF
ENGLISH FOR TEACHERS: Paul W. Justice(San Diego State University);
paper ISBN: 1-57586-358-8, $25.00, 229 pages. CSLI Publications 2001.
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , email: pubs at csli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736  (U.S. & Canada only)  or
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search
feature to locate the book, then order).

Book description:
This book addresses the growing need to familiarize classroom
teachers with the structure and use of language. Teacher training
programs around the country are beginning to realize the importance
of linguistics in their curricula, especially as linguistic diversity
in schools continues to rise. The result is that most teacher
trainees find themselves in a linguistics classroom at some point
during their education. Unfortunately, the vast majority of
introductory linguistics texts currently available do not adequately
address the needs of this particular population. These students may
find that such texts provide information beyond the material relevant
to their teacher training, thereby making the texts inaccessible.
This book is written with teachers and future teachers in mind. It
addresses the core areas they will find most relevant to their
purposes, and does so in a way that they will find accessible. It
introduces students to various types of linguistic analysis while
covering the basics of phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax.
There is sufficient terminology to provide students with the
vocabulary they will need for future study and professional growth,
but not so much that they feel overwhelmed. Also appropriate for
classroom teachers is the focus on English, their language of
instruction.
The final chapter brings all the material together in a discussion of
language variation that directly relates to classroom issues.
Nonstandard dialects are analyzed at all levels - phonetic,
phonologic, morphologic and syntactic - to illustrate their
systematicity. The goal is to give students the knowledge needed to
approach the teaching of standard forms from an informed perspective.
This book is designed to provide teachers with a foundation of
linguistic knowledge and, more importantly, the skills to respond to
whatever linguistic situations might arise in their classrooms. Each
chapter includes numerous exercises designed to help students
practice the various types of analysis using a data-driven approach.
Additionally, this text can serve as a basic reference tool for
future use outside of the linguistics classroom.