Are you looking for some interesting courses to fill your additional breadth or B-Soc requirements, but don't want to travel all the way up to Burnaby mountain? Here are some great courses offered by our department that don't have any prerequisites. You can jump straight into them without ever taking a linguistics course before!

Surrey  

Instructor: Trevor Block
Time: Mondays, 2:30 - 5:20pm
Course Outline: LING 200 - Fall 2018

What is it about? This course introduces you to commonly used terminology and concepts employed in analyzing English grammar. It is a practical course. The materials will help you to develop the analytical skills needed for understanding how sentences are put together. LING 200 takes a descriptive approach: it deals with how we actually use English.

Who would find this course beneficial? This course is aimed particularly at students who plan to teach English as a second language. It is also beneficial for computing science students who ever wish to build parsers, create speech taggers, or plan on taking courses in computational linguistics. Linguistics majors will find that the content in this course prepares them for future linguistics courses like LING 220, LING 322, LING 362, and LING 363.

Why take it in Surrey? Trevor takes a hands-on approach to grammar by treating lectures as if they were large tutorials. This means providing many practice exercises during lecture, demonstrating practical applications, encouraging group discussion, and working through completion-based homework and exercises to provide you with penalty-free practice for quizzes and the final exam. Many additional examples and exercises are provided to aid you with your understanding, and Trevor is always available on Canvas to answer questions as soon as they come up.

Vancouver / Harbour Centre

LING 100 - Communication and Language

Instructor: Dr. Iouri Pankrats
Time: Tuesdays, 5:30 - 8:20pm
Course Outline: LING 100 - Fall 2018

What is it about? This course introduces the study of language and human communication. It includes topics such as the biological basis of human language, relations of language to cognition, culture and thought, structure in language, the neurological basis of language and language disorders, language acquisition, languages of the world, language change, human language vs. animal communication, evolution of human language, language in society, and writing systems.

Who would find this course beneficial? This course is a general course aimed at students who have an interest in language, communication, and how different species have developed ways to communicate with each other. This course is perfect for students who want a light, non-analytical approach to linguistics.

Why take it in Vancouver? Dr. Pankrats' lectures are entertaining and filled with many videos that demonstrate the concepts introduced in class. Without any assignments or homework, students only have to focus on the three non-cumulative midterms that constitute their grade. Dr. Pankrats provides help to students by answering emails in a timely fashion, and releasing large documents filled with students' questions and detailed responses before each midterm.

LING 111 - Introduction to English Vocabulary Analysis

Instructor: Dr. Iouri Pankrats
Time: Wednesdays, 5:30 - 8:20pm
Course Outline: LING 111 - Fall 2018

What is it about? LING 111 Introduction to English Vocabulary Analysis introduces linguistics focusing on vocabulary through the medium of the English language. You’ll learn about where words come from and how and why there meanings and forms change. The majority of the words in English are not native English words but borrowed from Latin, Greek and French - about 80% of the entire English vocabulary! A great deal of the terminology (close to 90 - 95%) of science, business, economics, computer science, health science, criminology, communication, engineering, linguistics, psychology, literature and indeed much of the vocabulary of higher education, is based on Latin and Greek roots. An understanding of the core meaning of each root provides a tool for unlocking the meanings of thousands of Latin and Greek based words in English, opens doors to new knowledge and provides the students with a more powerful and useful vocabulary, especially terminology, whether the students are planning to major in business, economics, sciences, communication, or computer science, linguistics, psychology, literature and others.

Who would find this course beneficial? This course will be beneficial for all of you to enhance your formal and technical vocabulary. By the end of LING 111 you will be able to apply a variety of linguistic principles and analytical tools to determining how words are formed, their origin, how and why they change over time. Your vocabulary and especially terminology will grow tremendously.

Why take it in Vancouver? Dr. Pankrats provides self-assessed quizzes and two assignments in prepartion of exams. He also provides help to students by answering emails in a timely fashion, and releasing large documents filled with students' questions and detailed responses before each midterm.