Sandy's schooldays (II)

How different is life as an overseas student? You may wonder if I've been doing my studies or I'm a lazy student!

The course:

Well, it's exactly been two months already (need a two-month celebration? No...) and tons of readings are piling up on my desk. In the first semester, I'm doing four course units.

Here are the two elementary compulsory course units:

1. An Introduction to Grammatical Theory:

Lots of technical terms in Linguistics like P-marker, specifier, PRO subject, complementizer and different theories. I did study some of them before during my undergraduate study but I've already forgotten all of what I learnt and I'm just like a student with little knowledge of Linguistics, working hard on analyzing a sentence in terms of a tree diagram like this:

Not understand it? It doesn't matter, cos it's me who has to study it!

2. Phonetics and Phonology

- Phonetics: It's really interesting to know how we produce a sound. You know what, when you're producing a sound like [p], the air comes out of your lung, with your velum being raised to prevent the air coming through nasal cavity, and your mouth is closed. In words like "sport", you can feel a puff of air when you pronounce the [p] sound in "sport" (you can try it if you like). More interestingly, we have to transcribe a sound or sound sequences produced by the lecturer. Let's say, "lazy". It will be transcribed as ['leizi], just like what you find in the dictionary. This is what I didn't do during my phonetics course in my previous university.

- Phonology: Maybe you don't know the difference between phonetics and phonology. Phonology is a study about things like the organization of sounds in our speech. Sometimes we need to write a rule for the data we find in a language, which we may or may not know.

Faculty Research Training course

Since this year, all the MA students are required to take research training courses, paving the way for them to the writing of their dissertation. In this semester, I had to take it with all the other MA students from the Faculty of Arts. Just five sessions in the evenings. Not much has been learnt. But at least I have some rough ideas of what it'd be like to prepare for my dissertation...

Child Language

- Well, this course is funny. We study how a child learns his/her first language from different perspectives - phonology, syntax, semantics... You'll find how amazing child language acquisition is. They start noticing their surroundings since just two months old. This really broadens my view of our next generations. For a non-native speaker of English like me, second language acquisition may be more worth studying but it's also interesting to get an idea of how first language acquistion will be like. This subject involves things like psycholinguistics.

Classmates:

- Between 10 and 20 of them

- most of us are international students with a first degree not in Linguistics.

- For optional course units like "Child Language", I have to take the classes with undergraduates. The differences between undergraduates and postgraduates are:

1. Undergraduates are usually younger

2. Undergraduates have to sit the exam while we are assessed through an essay of 6000 - 7000 words (half a dissertation!)

3. Undergraduates may know more about different aspects of Linguistics than postgraduates since most of them have been studying here for 2 or 3 years.

Lecturers:

What can I say about them? Can I speak ill of any of them here? Of course I can (if they won't happen to read this web page!), but fortunately they're really very nice and helpful.

It was last updated onWednesday, 15 October 2003.

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