Teaching Languages

[Bridget Saladino]

Dear Seelangers,
I am a student in Linguistics and am researching the idea that using
linguistics in teaching a second language will make the learning process more
graspable and understandable.  I don't really even know exactly what I'm
looking for, except that I had this idea and I thought I could relate it to
the Croatian language (I have lived there and learned some of the language) as
well as to other languages.  I thought that there could be a systematic way to
look at a language and discover certain aspects of it that would explain what
is happening to the learner.

My thought is that there are universals to language and morphological rules
that can be understood for each individual language that can be used to aid in
the learning of a language.

For language universals, it would be helpful, if you were learning a language
to know if it is SVO,SOV,VOS, and so on.  It would be helpful to know how many
vowel phonemes there are.  It would be helpful to know about the suffixes and
prefixes, the inflextions, singular and plural forms, masculine and feminine
forms, compounds, etc.

If you have any general thoughts or any specific thoughts on Croatian PLEASE
let me know.  I am having a hard time finding info. in books.  I am thinking
there should be some real practical info. floating around out there?

Thanks a lot
Bridget Saladino
Student at George Fox College, Newberg, Oregon


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