Final Exam Essay Example

Thank you to Marina for allowing me to share her final exam essay on this blog.  The final exam essay prompt in Linguistics is very open-ended, essentially what have you learned in this class.   The first time I assigned such a broad question I was nervous about what kind of response I would get, but students have impressed me with their insights. 

Marina J.

Linguistics

Ms. Loosen

1 June 2013

In Linguistics

            It is rare in high school walk away from a class knowing what you have learned will stick with you and be applicable in the real world.  The knowledge I gained in linguistics extended beyond the classroom.  With the school year drawing to a close, I plan to seek other means of studying parts of linguistics, but just in this year I learned about the history of the English language, the acquisition of language, how body language is used, and sociolinguistics.  I also learned that I'm a bit of a descriptivist.  This class is proof that students can learn a lot from stepping back and analyzing what makes someone alive; their ability to understand and use language.     

            In the average English class, a student does not find the history of the language.  Linguists map out English as a branch of the Germanic language.  Developed in Britain, Germanic tribes brought with them what is now considered to be Old English.  Circa the 13th century, Britain was conquered by the Normans who spoke a sort of French.  This added many French words into the English language, such as bouquet and clique. Then, circa the 15th-16th century, began what is known as the Great Vowel Shift.  We saw that the long vowels shifted upwards.  Listening around, we know that language does not change much overnight but the English language is expanding and evolving constantly.  Here we are with what is called Late Modern English.  As young, creative thinkers, we were excited to learn, or more so, realize, that we have all the power to change the language we speak.  Seeing slang, throughout history, transitioning into common language was interesting because students are so often told that their language is "wrong".  I have learned that kids these days are not destroying the language.  It is simply evolving.  Linguistics taught me to appreciate English in its complexity and insanity.  

            This year I was fascinated by how a person acquires language.  A child listening to and learning language while still in the womb is almost frightening but it is truly amazing how children pick up on grammar and universal grammar.  A person's knowledge of language grows as fast as they do.  I could see this with Ben.  The first time in class, he spoke in broken sentences and mixed up letters.  Then in his second visit, I could hear him speaking with more confidence and responding in comprehensible sentences.  I learned and have seen outside of the class that young kids do either, over apply grammar rules, or don't use them at all.  The Wug test showed this.  I will likely never forget what a Wug looks like.  I now know the basics of language that maybe teachers should have been teaching to elementary school student.  Knowing a morpheme is a meaningful unit of a word that cannot be further divided, may have helped me on spelling tests.  Knowing that a phoneme is a distinct unit of sound may have helped as well.  Linguistics has made me wish I was bilingual, in the native-speaker sense but MSL has been a wonderful environment for building the bridges of language.  At this age, my classmates and I have little time to waste if we really wish to fully understand the mental structure of our foreign languages.

            Sociolinguistics was my favorite part of the year because the material was easiest to observe outside of the class.  I had realized it before, that I code-switch but I had not known before what it was called.  I have begun paying more attention to my dialect shifts.  However, I do not agree with what we learned on genderlects.  In my own environment, women and men speak far too familiar for them to claim different dialects.  Each person, rather, has their own way of communicating with their own dialect.  Learning to recognize the differences in the body language of men vs. women, was interesting though.  I agree, women are more personal in a conversation and men pose to face the room.  Walking with power makes a person appear to have authority and speaking sharply and confidently gives a person power as well.  I may take a class in college that further explores body language or sociolinguistics as a broader subject.  I have taken the time to read articles by Noam Chomsky and I wish I had more time in the day to study what he proposes.          

            A great class offers students more than lists of  facts, notes, and names.  Linguistics offers new perspectives on the way people work together in a society and gives a person an understanding of how and why people think differently from one another.  One of my favorite new words that I can remember off the top of my head is "aware".  In Japanese, "aware" is the word used for the bittersweet decline of something beautiful experienced in a brief moment.  I experienced a moment to use "aware" this week when I picked the last branch of lilacs from my yard and watched them wilt on my nightstand.  I am driven to learn new words and ways to express thoughts and feelings.  I have learned to appreciate all languages and recognize that no language is, or ever was, primitive.  I am increasingly aware of my language in all of its forms and the languages used around me by classmates compared to friends compared to people in other communities.  Linguistics opened up a new kind of learning, one which takes place in everyday life.  I have learned to love a high school class.