Reflection 6-8

Reflection
The last subtopic in the topic of “Introduction to Phonology” was consonant sounds. Our lecturer had taught us the way in identifying and analyzing the consonant sounds. We were also going to find and compare the minimal pairs with initial, medial and final phoneme differences. For example, a minimal pair is pin /pin/ and bin /bin/.

The next topic was “Morphology”. Morphology was the study of the internal structure of words and rules by which the words were formed. In this topic, we had learnt about free and bound morphemes, inflectional morpheme, derivational morpheme, and allomorphs. We had discussed and listed out the examples for each of them in order to make sure we were clear about the morphemes that we had learnt in the class.

Inflectional morpheme, derivational morpheme, and allomorphs were the new items for me in learning the morphology. An inflectional morpheme was an affix used to change form and function only without changing the meaning of the original morpheme. The part of speech would remain the same. For example, walk (the root) walk[s].

For derivational morpheme, it was an affix used to change form and meaning from a lexical point with a change in part of speech. For example, “mis” (wrong) + judge (free morpheme) “misjudge”. Allomorph was a term which referred to a variant of a morpheme. For instance, the [ed] morpheme had three allomorphs of /t/, /d/ and /zd/. The other type of allomorph was due to the result of lexical conditional where “take” (present tense) ”took” (past tense). However, zero allomorphs were given when there was no overt change in an item [“sheep” (singular) “sheep” (plural)] or there was shown no change in a masculine or feminine gender (“doctor”, “clerk”, “lawyer”). Well, it was great to learn all these and I am really grateful about it.

Reflection 1

In this new semester, we had taken ELE3103 – English for Language Teachers as our course in Elektif 2. I am wondering whether it was same with the one that we had learnt in semester 4. We all breathed a sigh of relief when our lecturer, Madam Ira told us that the topics in ELE3103 did not include any theories or techniques in learning the English.

First of all, we had gone through two topics. They were “Language and Communication”, and “Introduction to Phonology”. For “Language and Communication”, we learnt the definition of language, language and culture, function of language, non-verbal communication and so on.

We had carried out activities such as group discussion, role play dialogue and the preparation for a 3 minutes mime (non-verbal communication) of a situation of each group’s choice. Every group had put their own efforts and the mime activity was really fun and interesting.

For the topic of “Introduction to Phonology”, we could identify speech organs used in producing different English sounds. Undoubtedly, each speech organs had their important roles in producing the sounds. We also had learnt how to identify and analyze vowel/diphthong sounds with Madam Ira’s instruction and guidance. In relating to this topic, we need to access information from the Internet for at least 3 tongue twisters for our pronunciation practice. Each group had contributed several interesting tongue twisters and we really enjoyed it very much.

Well, we still have to learn a lot in ELE3103 and I am really looking forward about it.