The document discusses the linguistic approach to teaching, which uses a child's native language as an associative tool to help learn new words and spelling patterns. It then provides a high-level overview of the field of linguistics, including the scientific study of language form, meaning, and context. Some key areas covered include phonetics, semantics, pragmatics, grammar, and sociolinguistics.

1. LINGUISTIC APPROACH
A teaching method which assume children in the class who participate have
a strong grasp of their mother tongue (oral language) which is then used as an
associative learning tool for words and spelling patterns.
LINGUISTIC APPROACH: "Most teaching is described as taking a linguistic
approach where the lesson is taught in the mother tongue."
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. There are broadly three aspects to the
study, which include language form, language meaning, and language in context. The earliest
known activities in the description of language have been attributed to Pāṇini around 500 BCE,
with his analysis of Sanskrit in Ashtadhyayi.
Language can be understood as interplay of sound and meaning. The discipline that
studies linguistic sound is termed as phonetics, which is concerned with the actual properties of
speech sounds and non-speech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived. The study of
language meaning, on the other hand, is concerned with how languages employ logic and real-
world references to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as to manage and resolve
ambiguity. This in turn includes the study of semantics (how meaning is inferred from words and
concepts) and pragmatics (how meaning is inferred from context).
There is a system of rules (known as grammar) which govern the communication
between members of a particular speech community. Grammar is influenced by both sound and
meaning, and includes morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the
formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words), and phonology (sound
systems). Through corpus linguistics, large chunks of text can be analyzed for possible
occurrences of certain linguistic features, and for stylistic patterns within a written or spoken
discourse.
The study of such cultural discourses and dialects is the domain of sociolinguistics, which
looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures, as well as that of discourse
analysis, which involves the structure of texts and conversations. Research on language through
historical and evolutionary linguistics focuses on how languages change, and the origin and
growth of languages, particularly over an extended period of time.

2. The study of grammar led to fields like psycholinguistics, which explores the
representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which studies language
processing in the brain; and language acquisition, which investigates how children and adults
acquire a particular language. During the 1970s and 1980s, research developments also took
shape in the field of cognitive linguistics through theorists such as George Lakoff, who view
language as a conceptual function of the mind, as opposed to a pre-defined grammatical
template.
Language is also influenced by social, cultural, historical and political factors, and
linguistics can be applied to semiotics, for instance, which is the general study of signs and
symbols both within language and without. Literary critics study the use of language in literature.
Translation entails the conversion of a text from one language to another. Speech language
pathologists work on corrective measures to remove communication disorders largely at the
phonetic level, employing a combination of cognitive and phonological devices.
Language documentation combines anthropological inquiry with linguistic inquiry to
describe languages and their grammars. Lexicographers map vocabularies in languages to write
dictionaries and encyclopedias and edit other such educational material for publishing houses. In
the age of digital technology, linguists, translators, and lexicographers work on computer
language to facilitate and create web entities and digital dictionaries on both mobile as well as
desktop machines, and create software through technical and human language that enables a
large number of social functions, from designing to even machine-based translation itself. Actual
knowledge of a language can be applied in the teaching of it as a second or foreign language.
Research experiments in linguistics have in the recent years; seen communities of linguists build
new constructed languages like Esperanto, to test the theories of language in an abstract and
artificial setting. Policy makers work with the government to implement new plans in education
and teaching which are based on certain linguistic factors.
Approach
One major debate in linguistics concerns how language should be defined and
understood. Some linguists use the term "language" primarily to refer to a hypothesized, innate
module in the human brain that allows people to undertake linguistic behavior, which is part of
the formalist approach. This "universal grammar" is considered to guide children when they
learn languages and to constrain what sentences are considered grammatical in any language.
Proponents of this view, which is predominant in those schools of linguistics that are based on
the generative theory of Noam Chomsky, do not necessarily consider that language evolved for
communication in particular. They consider instead that it has more to do with the process of
structuring human thought (see also formal grammar).
Another group of linguists, by contrast, use the term "language" to refer to a
communication system that developed to support cooperative activity and extend cooperative
networks. Such functional theories of grammar view language as a tool that emerged and is
adapted to the communicative needs of its users, and the role of cultural evolutionary processes
are often emphasised over that of biological evolution.[30]

3. Methodology
Linguistics is primarily descriptive. Linguists describe and explain features of language
without making subjective judgments on whether a particular feature or usage is "good" or "bad".
This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a zoologist studies the animal kingdom without
making subjective judgments on whether a particular animal is more evolved or less evolved
than another.
Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over
others, often favouring a particular dialect or "acrolect". This may have the aim of establishing a
linguistic standard, which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also,
however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of
other languages or dialects (see Linguistic imperialism). An extreme version of prescriptivism
can be found among censors, who attempt to eradicate words and structures that they consider to
be destructive to society. Prescription, however, is practiced in the teaching of language, where
certain fundamental grammatical rules and lexical terms need to be introduced to a second-
language speaker who is attempting to acquire the language.
Sources
Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken data and signed data is
more fundamental than written data. This is because:
 Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of producing and perceiving
it, while there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written
communication;
 Features appear in speech which aren't always recorded in writing, including
phonological rules, sound changes, and speech errors;
 All natural writing system reflect a spoken language they are being used to write, with
even pictographic languages like Dongba writing Naxi homophones with the same
pictogram, and text in writing systems used for two languages changing to fit the spoken
language being recorded;
 Speech evolved before human beings invented writing;
 People learnt to speak and process spoken language more easily and earlier than they did
with writing.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics#Approach