Linguistics, Anyone?

If there was one class in college that I should have failed, it would probably be Advanced French Linguistics. Thankfully I did not, but that is not to say it was any cakewalk. Not even regarding the fact of how complex the study of linguistics is, imagine taking it in a foreign language. Playing devil's advocate here, having a background in linguistics can really help someone to understand nuances and idioms in a foreign language. Meaning, it's important, no matter how ridiculous it is.

Since yesterday's lesson was pretty laid back, and I seemed to have found my tutoring nitch, I decided to hit the hard stuff. Plus, my lessons generally get more intense as the week progresses. Happy Wednesday class. Aren't you glad you came?

9:00 am: pop quiz time. I copied a quiz that I came across on strange expressions in English. I didn't expect anyone to ace the quiz I administered, in fact, I expected them to do just the opposite. That is because the expressions on this quiz were ones that have no sensical entymological history ... they just exist. I wasn't exactly trying to stump them, but I was trying to start the linguistics lesson off by making it clear that a lot of the English language has no rhyme or reason. Something that they hear constantly...one more time wouldn't hurt.

Some students surprised me with their conclusions of using context clues to figure out expression meanings. The amount of illogical expressions that we have adopted into common English is astronomical. Did you know that the definition of something being "the bomb" made its way into Webster's? As in, you da bomb. Well, those are the expressions that my students knew. Older ones, like "up a creek" and "live and let live" proved more difficult.

After (what seemed like) some agonizing exercises we took our break half way through class. After the break we read a very advanced article entitled, "Hue and Cries". This article described the so-called discovery of the earliest version of the photograph by Levi Hill, accusing Daguerre, the original inventor, to be fraudulent. This is by far the most advanced piece of literature we have read in class, but I thought the challenge was appropriate for the type of lesson. Plus, stylistically there are more idioms and foreign expressions in more sophisticated writings, so I had to dig deep if I wanted to show them real examples of this stuff. Even the title itself was used as a homonym for another meaning in the article - fancy!

Several reading comprehensive activities later, we moved on to a preview of next week's lesson for a mental break. We looked at comic strips illustrating real life problems such as what to do when you don't understand your doctor, or how to choose healthy foods over processed foods at the grocery store.

Needless to say the students were grateful to look at some pictures:]