An Essential Introduction to Language and Linguistics for Teachers

In order to teach the National Curriculum for English effectively, teachers often lack one of the most vital key skills required: a high level of expertise in the technicalities of the English language. Without assuming any prior knowledge of the subject, this textbook offers students on initial teacher education and PGCE courses all they ever need to know about the four main area of language and linguistics: *phonology - the sounds of words, how speech sounds are produced, how they can be classified, stress and intonation * lexical semantics - a beginner's guide to the most useful concepts for teachers in terms of the development of children's vocabularly and writing skills * morphology - the structure of words, definitions of basic concepts like morpheme and root affix and the tools we use for forming new words in English * grammar - nouns, pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, and how words are expanded into phrases, sentence structure and meaning, punctuation and an introduction to the notion of the clause, subordinate clause and compound sentences.