Essential Linguistics: What You Need to Know to Teach Reading, ESL, Spelling, Phonics, and Grammar Book

Well, I finally finished this book, which I read for one of my summer classes.

Sometimes I found myself slogging through it a bit, but only because I was in a hurry sometimes and knew I would be quizzed on the topics in each chapter, so I made sure to read everything really closely. Plus, the 40-page chapter on spelling in this book really tested my focus as a reader--but then again, any 40-page academic chapter would!

But for the most part, this book does have a lot of interesting tidbits about language in general and English in particular that I did find fascinating. It is pretty easy to read if you focus, and there are some excellent activities I think I could try in the future. Plus, I do feel I understand the processes of reading, writing, and learning another language better than I did before. I also think I understand the parts of speech and how to make sentence trees better now, which I always felt shaky on previously, especially when students would ask me more about why specific words were categorized a certain way. I think I can explain them better now, which will hopefully help me help my students more.

However, I did have some critiques. One is that there were several errors in the book--incorrect subject-verb agreements in the text, a couple mistakes in phonemic transcription of the /I/ vowel sound, and two mislabeled words in a sentence tree diagram. While these errors were pretty few and far between, I just thought they were odd to see in a book on language and how to teach it more effectively. But I haven't written a book myself, so I won't pick on this too much. Anyone can make mistakes (we're all human!), and they can always come out with a third edition.

Another critique I had was of the summary section of each chapter. Maybe I read too many chapters too close together, but the summary sections all seemed kind of--not sing-songy, exactly, but repetitive and clipped. The sentences all tended to be like, "This is this, and this is the process of this, which can be used to help this." Reading too many sentences like that in a row kind of makes my mind lose interest. However, once again, I have never written a book, let alone a textbook, so I can't judge too much.

Except the authors did sometimes cite Wikipedia? Those sections kind of made me question them a bit. Like, couldn't they find a better source for their textbook? I kind of judged that. Sorry!

Overall, this book was useful, and not too bad considering that I had to read it for a class. I will probably be spouting odd language trivia to my family and students for a while afterward because of it.