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The following
is an introduction to the paper and exercise Dr. West presented at the CATESOL (California Teachers of English to Speakers
of Other Languages) annual conference on April 7, 2006. To read the entire paper with a description of the exercise, "The Wozy Briggles," click on: http://catesol.org. Then click on the site's link for "Conferences," then "Proceedings-2006." , LINGUISTICS: CAN'T
LIVE WITH IT, CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT IT The knowledge and understanding of linguistics is essential for all teachers so that they can learn, first, to identify
and to objectify their own knowledge of English, and subsequently, to impart that knowledge effectively to their students. It is as crucial for teachers of native speakers as it is
for teachers of non-native learners of English. Linguistics helps us to acquire “X-ray” vision of our mother tongue by showing us the skeletal framework of language. Just as humans are supported by their rigid skeletons, so too, our language operates by means of skeletal principles without which our sentences would not hold together. We have seen the unfortunate outcome produced by the failure to teach the nuts and bolts of our complex language. By neglecting grammatical structure in favor of the “Whole Language” approach, we have inadvertently led many students into functional illiteracy. As a result, many of our high school graduates are not even able to read their own diplomas. “The Wozy Briggles" In order to illustrate the power of grammatical structure
within a sentence, I have developed a light-hearted exercise for teachers which I call “The Wozy Briggles.” It
can, in turn, be easily adapted by teachers for use with their students. This exercise utilizes principles from all four of the main fields of linguistics: phonology, morphology, semantics and syntax. In one easy exercise students can learn about the: • interaction between the constituents of a sentence
• vast difference between content and function words
• “royal centrality” of verbs • “refugee
status” of prepositional phrases • immense
power of inflectional morphemes • and the combination
of flexibility and rigidity in English word order. “The Wozy Briggles” exercise is effective, in part, because it makes use of nonsense words or lexical gaps to emphasize the powerful grammatical forces that comprise an English sentence.
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