Text 4. Why we study foreign languages

Task: read the text and say how studying foreign languages enriches the native language of the speaker.

Many people in our country study foreign languages. School pupils are required to learn one foreign language. This is most Commonly English, German, French or Spanish.

They study foreign languages to read and understand books in the original and to be able to speak. Speaking is considered by many as the main objective of language learning. The knowledge of spoken language will help you to express your opinions and feelings, to give and receive information, to say what you want to say, to listen and understand recorded tapes.

Studying foreign languages enriches the native language, makes it clearer, more flexible and expressive. It gives great opportunity to compare two languages, to understand the mentality of another nation.

Knowledge of a foreign language is truly something that opens up a whole new world to the one who possesses it. It is like the ship bearing explorers to new continents. And it is not surprising that a lot of intellectuals all over the world want to know as many foreign languages as possible.

But study of foreign languages is not only the sign of intellectual vitality. Nowadays it becomes an absolute necessity for any good specialist — an engineer, an artist, a doctor or an architect. He must read much of a special scientific literature in foreign languages to be well informed in his field of knowledge.

Text 5 aspects of language

Task : read the text, translate it in written and answer the questions below.

1. In its most general sense, the term «language» may be defined as «a system of communication». Different languages are ­the principal means of communication used by particular groups of human beings within the particular society (linguistic community) of which they are members. English, Chinese, Russian are languages in this sense.

2. Any language is the system, phonological, lexical and grammatical. Each language has a specific set of sounds, a peculiar set of words, and its own set of grammatical patterns different from those of other languages. If we compile a list of all the words in a language, we shall get what is called its vocabulary: and if we draw a list of all the different sounds used in that language we shall get what is called its sound system.

3. Phonetics is the name we give to the branch of knowledge that is concerned with speech sounds: vowels, consonants and their classification. It also deals with such important phonetic phenomena as stress and intonation.

4. Grammar is traditionally divided into morphology, which is the description of the meaningful forms and syntax, which is the ordering of the sentence elements. In other words morphology is concerned with discovering, by the technique of substitution, the smallest meaningful parts of a sentence or utterance. Using the same technique syntax discovers the structure of larger segments of the language, such as the sentence, the paragraph or the entire discourse.

5. The area of linguistics which is studied under the heading of lexicology and semantics is concerned with words and their meanings. Some of the phenomena which must be accounted for in this area are these: 1) a word can have more than one meaning (polysemy); 2) different words can have the same meaning (synonymy); 3) some pairs of words have similar and opposite meanings (synonymy and antonymy); 4) the meanings of some words can be analyzed into the components (male-female); 5) the meanings of some words are included into the meanings of others (oak-tree).

1. How can you define the term «language»?

2. What are the main aspects of language?

3. What is phonetics concerned with?

4. Is there any difference between morphology and syntax?

5. How do we call a branch of linguistics which studies words and their meaning?