To examine historical and contemporary approaches to the description of the systems of the English language. To familiarise students with the basic syntactic, semantic and phonological concepts of English.

An introduction to the various approaches to the study of language: structuralism and functionalism, prescriptive and descriptive grammars. Corpus linguistics and the study of language. Basic syntactic concepts: the word, the phrase, the clause, the sentence. Time, tense, aspect, and mood. The English tense system. Articulatory phonetics: speech organs, place and manner of articulation of the English consonant and vowel systems. The International Phonetic Alphabet and transcription of sounds. Suprasegmental aspects of speech: intonation, rhythm, stress.

On successful completion of this module, students should be able to: Define and outline in theoretical terms, the various approaches to the study of language Describe the historical development of these approaches and integrate them into the development of second language acquisition theories Demonstrate the way in which corpus approaches can be applied to the study of language in context Illustrate how language can be analysed in terms of variety, register and genre Identify and analyse language through the application of syntactic categories at the level of word, phrase, sentence and clause Recognise tense, aspect and mood in English and descibe how these operate as independent and integrated concepts in real language use Describe and illustrate the articulation of vowel annd consonant sounds in British and Irish English Identify and produce phonetic and phonemic transcription for the purposes of English Language Teaching

Discuss and challenge the place of English as an international language Acknowledge the place of language varieties and the importance of variable use in context at the level of lexico-grammatical patterning

Demonstrate the necessary computational skills to critically evaluate language in context using corpus-based analytical techniques

Knowledge will be structured in interactive lecture and lab mode where students engage with the social construction of knowledge through individual and group tasks, projects, reviews and presentations. 2 hours per week will be in a language lab and 2 hours in a classroom.