THE INTRA AND INTER FOCUS OF LANGUAGE

The intra focus of language

The intra components in the study of language include some specific subjects:

• the study of sounds includes phonetics and phonology,
• the study of order is the study of grammar, and at the same time the study of syntax,
• the study of meaning is the study of semantics, which includes synonymy, homographs, homonyms and hyperonymy.

The material compiled in the portfolio regarding the intra focus of language is organized in the following order:

1. Reading Chapter: Sounds and Suprasegmentals.
2. Reading Chapter: Word Meaning.
3. Worksheet: Semantics.
4. Examples of Ambiguity and other Semantic Phenomena.
5. Worksheet: Referential, Social and Affective Meaning.
6. Worksheet: Semantics and Pragmatics (English Lexical Semantics).
7. Worksheet: Questions on Semantics.
8. Class Activity based on the text "History of the Library of Congress".
9. Power Point Presentation: "What do we know when we know a language?"

The inter focus of language

The inter components of language are studied by different sciences that focus on human development. These are:

• sociolinguistics,
• psycholinguistics,
• neurolinguistics, and
• developmental linguistics.

I have decided to organize the material related to the inter components of language as is shown below:

1. Reading Chapter: Introduction to Linguistics.
2. Video Notes: "The human brain".
3. Video Summary Assignment: "The human brain".
4. Power Point Presentation: "Language and the brain".
5. Assigment: Neurolinguistics Summary.

The first assignment done in this course answered two questions which I think summarizes the topics studied in this section:

• What does it mean that the study of language can be approached from an intra and an inter linguistic perspectives?
• What are the contributions that the scientific study of language can provide to the field of language teaching and learning?

The first question has somewhat been answered in the lines below. The answer for the second question is provided next:

I think that the different sciences that study language can contribute in many different ways to language teaching and learning. For example, sociolinguistics can help language teaching because it will give to the teacher a more specific knowledge of how language varies from one society to another. With that information, teachers can have background information related to their students and their language, information that will help them perform a more contextualized teaching which will make it easier for students to learn.
The psychological study of language, known as psycholinguistics, deals with human mental processes and behavior related to language. Teachers can be aided from this science because it will give them a general understanding on how their students represent grammar in their minds and how the brain helps to produce speech and language in general.
Neurolinguistics can contribute language teachers’ performance with its study on how the brain organizes to represent language in different ways (listening, speaking, etc.).
And last but not least, developmental linguistics gives teachers information related with how human development influences its mental representation of language.
If all of these sciences help teachers do a better job in language teaching, they will certainly help students on their learning, because teachers will be giving improved language training.