1 st year courses
Introduction to Linguistics
The course is designed to be a pleasurable introduction to the discipline of linguistics. It will provide students with an overview of this field of learning by exposing them to the key branches of the discipline: Linguistics, Phonetics, Phonology, Grammar, Semantics and Social Linguistics.
Phonetics
Phonetics is the study of the articulation, classification, discrimination, transcription and production of speech sounds. There are many hundreds of different sounds spoken in the languages of the world. Each language has a different inventory of sounds from any other language, though obviously closely related languages have more similar sounds than distantly related ones (and therefore we find it easier to learn the sounds of a closely related language at first).
Contextualization and Discipleship
After the initial efforts of winning people to Christ and planting churches, we must focus on discipling the believers to become mature. In this course, we will learn to apply appropriate contents and methods of disciple-making in various contexts. As a concrete outcome of the course, the students will learn to develop discipleship lessons, which is biblically faithful and contextually relevant to their ministry settings.
Phonology
This course introduces students to the study of sound systems of human language, including initial principles of phonological analysis. Students gain extensive practice applying these principles to a wide range of natural language data. Topics covered include the distinction between phonetic and phonemic representations of speech, distinctive features, complementary distribution, free variation and contrast, syllable structure, and various common phonological processes and conditioning environments.
Biblical Hebrew
The course starts with an introduction of the Biblical Hebrew alphabet and aims to eventually have students reading and translating Biblical Hebrew texts. The grammar, vocabulary and syntax of Biblical Hebrew are reinforced through conversation, Hebrew songs and the reading of Biblical Hebrew texts. This is a prerequisite for the next course, Biblical Hebrew Discourse Analysis.
Language and Society
This course is an introduction to language as it is used in social interaction. The goal is to give a picture of what the world is like today in terms of the varieties of languages and the social factors that influence language attitudes and use. The emphasis of much of the course is on the concepts and issues of Socialinguistics so that towards the end of the course the student will have gained a sensitivity to and an idea for appropriate applications where needed in language programs.
Language and Culture Acquisition (LACA)
Students will discover how to engage in life-long language and culture learning. They will begin by identifying and learning to apply their own learning styles to plan and manage language learning. They will be able to use appropriate techniques and activities to develop second language competence at the novice level and at more advanced levels while working with a native speaker in language learning sessions. They will gain an awareness of the rich cultural differences that exist in the world, and develop the skills needed to work effectively on a multicultural team. They will leave the course with a detailed plan for continuing to learn languages they will need for life and work.
Cultural Anthropology
This course provides the basic concepts of cross-cultural anthropology within an interactive classroom experience that facilitates cultural self-discovery, the necessary pre-requisite for learning about other cultures and healthy multicultural teamwork. It uses the ethnographic tools of the house floor plan and kinship chart along with observation, questioning, and reflective skills. The process of cultural self-discovery occurs through revisiting everyday practices in the childhood home (visiting, eating, working, resting, and cleaning) as well as the functioning of the family.
Literacy Principles
Students will understand the principles and processes of supporting language communities in developing their community-centered literacy and education programs with respect to relationships with people within and outside the language communities they serve. Students will understand the importance of being advocates, capacity-builders and resource-linkers.
Translation 1
This course is designed to equip the students with the correct mindset to start a translation work. Up to this point, the course was geared to give a list of guidelines in order to tackle the specific translation problems, but now the course is newly designed to accommodate the new communication theory (Relevance Theory) and thus the text book is still being revised. After this course, the students will have the essential philosophical framework, which will enable them to approach all the translation problems from the proper perspective. The focus will be on communication, not on translation itself.
Grammar
By the end of this course, students will be able to analyze a word into its morphemes and to identify constituent structure, syntactic categories and grammatical relations within a sentence, distinguishing different types of objects and oblique. They will be able to describe phrase and sentence patterns in terms of a set of phrase structure rules and a lexicon. They will also be able to use standard terminology to describe case, agreement, and tense/aspect systems. Students should be able to distinguish between inflectional and derivational morphemes, identify passive and other valence-changing constructions, describe non-verbal and subordinate clauses and distinguish between indicative, imperative and interrogative sentences. They should also be able to deal with allomorphs, non-linear morphology and clitics.
Advanced Grammar
This course introduces the rich variety of morphosyntactic constructions found in human language, and their functions as tools for communication. Students will explore features such as grammatical categories, constituent structure, grammatical relations, and multi-clause constructions. The emphasis of the course is on understanding how language is used, and seeking to explain how language forms are shaped by themselves according to their usage.
* Prerequisite: Grammar1
Computer Data Management (CDM) & Field Methods (FM)
CDM
After completing this course, students will be able to use computational tools for managing and presenting phonological, grammatical, textual and lexical data collected in linguistic field research.
FM
By the end of Field Methods and Linguistic Analysis, students will be able to elicit, record and transcribe linguistic data by working with a speaker of a non- Altaic/ western language; use external sources plus the elicited data to formulate explanatory hypotheses; test those hypotheses against available data and refine them [and write up the results].
Scripture in Use
Upon completion of this course, students will be able to identify barriers to the use of Scripture and help communities develop appropriate Scripture products. They will be able to show from Scripture that the diversity of languages and cultures is an inherent part of Christianity and the church and will know how to encourage Scripture engagement in multilingual settings. They will be able to work with local people to help them identify the questions their culture is asking, and to find biblical responses to those questions. They will be equipped to help special groups engage with Scripture, including youth and traumatized people. They will be equipped to share Scripture in a variety of forms, including storying, music, drama, and art. They will have some awareness of distribution and marketing challenges, as well as how to work with communities to bring about change in the use of Scripture.
Language and Program Planning (LPP)
The course will highlight fundamental management skills crucial for partnering with any regional, national, or international sponsoring agencies and the local community with attention given to training local citizens for greater involvement in language development program activities. Students will demonstrate mastery of the Results Based Management planning procedures taught during the class including inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact statements. They will be able to design and manage a language development program and interpret social linguistic research in order to identify the key national and local factors most likely to influence a language development program for a linguistic community.
2 nd year courses
Koine Greek
The course starts with an introduction of the Koine Greek for interpreting and translating Koine Greek texts of the New Testament with the skills of parsing vocabularies and analyzing phrases and sentences. The course is a prerequisite for the next course, Koine Greek Discourse Analysis.
New Testament Exegesis
By the end of this course, the students will be able to explain principles of exegesis and use the principles to study biblical texts from various books of the New Testament. They will be able to describe the basic critical points of biblical language research, and eventually they will know how to handle exegetical problems. They will practice translating and interpreting texts of the New Testament.
* Prerequisites: Discourse Analysis, Koine Greek
Discourse Analysis
Many errors arise in translation because different language types construct discourses in distinct ways. So this course compares a variety of discourse features in texts from languages that represent the three major types, such as Korean (verb final), English (verb medial) and New Testament Greek (verb initial). Topics covered from a comparative perspective include the significance of variations in word order, the function of the different conjunctions used, backgrounding and highlighting devices, strategies for reporting conversation, indicators of the theme of a passage, and different types of reasoning.
* Prerequisite: Grammar1
Koine Greek Discourse Analysis
A basic premise of this course is that 'Choice implies meaning'. So students learn how the Greek conjunctions or word orders chosen influence the exegesis of a passage and reveal the intentions of the Biblical author. Students also learn (among other things) about backgrounding and highlighting devices, strategies for reporting conversation and referring to participants, and the types of reasoning employed in the epistles and the sermons of Acts.
Biblical Text and Context
This course is to study the geographical, historical and cultural background of the Bible - both the Old and New Testaments. Students will familiarize with the various aspects of Biblical backgrounds that may shed light on the understanding of the Biblical text. The topics treated in the course include the topography and climate of the land of the Bible, Biblical archaeology, religions in the Acient Near East, flora and fauna in the Bible, passages of life, economy and industries in ancient Israel, political systems and warfare, and the Second Temple Period and the Gospel.
Seminar 1
This is to study some useful topics that are conductive to the training purposes of ARILAC. The topics are not fixed but many include such as specific linguistic models, Development Studies, and Scripture use. The topics actually studeid vary each year.
Translation Theory
This course will introduce the advanced students in Applied Linguistics and Translation to a broad understanding and a comprehensive overview of translation theories that have affected Bible Translation.
Biblical Hebrew Reading & Discourse Analysis
This course is to study the linguistic features of the various types of text in the Hebrew Bible at the discourse level. The topics include segmentation and boundary features, grounding and the verbal system, participant referencing, word order changes and prominence features. Narrative text will be studied first, and then other text types such as legal, prophetic and poetry will follow. As for poetry, linguistic and literary, i.e. poetic, features will be studied. Understanding these features will set a foundation for sound exegesis of the Old Testament text. Another aim of the course is to increase the level of reading the Masoretic Text.
* Prerequisites: Discourse Analysis, Biblical Hebrew
Semantics & Pragmatics
Semantics and Pragmatics is an introduction to the nature of meaning in language. The course will investigate how language encodes meaning (semantics), how language users depend on context to interpret the meaning of a communication (pragmatics), and the ways in which these two aspects of meaning interact with each other. After completing this course, students will be able to explain and discuss relationships between form and meaning at various levels of language. They will be able to define basic technical terms used in semantics and pragmatics. They will be able to explain the difference between sense and reference; describe and identify homonymy, polysemy, and ambiguity; analyze and describe word meanings, sentence meanings, utterance meanings, and speech act functions; identify and describe presuppositions, entailments, and implicatures; identify and describe prototypes, image schema, mental space and conceptual blending; etc.
* Prerequisite: Grammar
Old Testament Exegesis
This course seeks to provide the tools and to set the groundwork for the students to build a bridge over what is called the gap' which separates our time from that of the Bible. It does not only aim to learn about the Biblical world from the outside, but to journey into its thought world and belief system, to explore it, and to come to understand individual texts in relation to the conceptual world of the Hebrew Bible. This course is a very practical one that brings together all the Hebrew knowledge and skills. Most of the time will be given over to practicing the skills and using the tools needed to discover different alternative understandings of the text and then to evaluate them and to choose the best option.
* Prerequisites: Discourse Analysis, Biblical Hebrew
Translation 2
This is the last course to review the things that students have learned, using translation material from the Bible. Pre-requisites for this course are linguistics (Grammar, Phonology), Greek (NT Greek, NT Exegesis, NT Discourse), Hebrew (Biblical Hebrew, Hebrew Exegesis, Hebrew Discourse), Semantics, Translation 1, and so on. Students will acquire the methods of approaching translation problems of narrative and poetry, semantic relationships and literary translation.
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