o What struck you about the language being used by the teenagers whom you observed?

 What did you expect going in?

 How did your expectations live up to the results?

Going into this assignment I thought I was going to hear a lot of foul language. Hearing
kids at the park usually there is a lot of cussing. I did here some from the kids on the other
end of the game that were not in my house. The kids in my house, including my son used a
lot of slang words. I was surprised by the amount of slang that was being used and also
when I talk to my son there is little to know slang, around his peers more slang is being
used. I don’t find that uncommon because we are usually more respectful around parents
and can let loose amongst friends.

Why do teenagers have their own set of vocabulary? Be sure to consider the
developmental stages of adolescence, and what is being accomplished intra- and inter-
personally, by creating a shared language.

Teenagers have to pick and choose the way they are talking. When talking with people
that are older there is a more proper way of speaking and amongst friends the dialect
changes. Yule, states in The study of language, a change from one speech style to
another is called style-shifting (Yule, 2017). There is a need for teenagers to do this
because they are at the age where fitting into the right group is everything. Becoming
more independent through language by the use of slang, curse words and word cutting
teenagers can set themselves apart from older people. This leads to covert prestige,
among younger middle-class speakers, there is often a covert prestige attached to
features of pronunciation and grammar. They feel more attachment to their social group if
there is a common language amongst them. (Yule, 2017)

What comparisons/connections can you make to your own adolescent linguistic

practices?

 Did you engage in similar language creation when you were that age?
 Do you see similarities between your development and the development of the teens
whom you observed?

During my time as a teenager or even pre-teen my linguistic behavior was somewhat the
same as what I observed. I just slang back then, I would say that I cussed a lot more
when I was there age. Picking this up from the kids in school it was a mechanism to fit in
with the majority. That kind of language was not used at home, when I was with my
friends at school or meeting up at the park it was. Cuss words or used as slang and just
as adjectives. Slang now I feel as though there needs to be more decoding.
 How do you connect this activity (morphology/semantics in practical application) to your
readings about morphology/semantics from a theoretical perspective?

 What principles of morphology/semantics did you observe?

 What conclusions can you draw about how language changes in real-life, and in real
time?

Semantics played a huge role in this lesson for me. In, semantic analysis, there is always
an attempt to focus on what the words conventionally mean rather than what on what an
individual speaker might think they mean, or want them to mean, on a particular occasion
(Yule, 2017)The use of polysemy words, words that have multiple meanings. Slang words
that were being used could have meant one thing to one person but something else to
another person listening to a conversation. When one of the kids said that a girl was
“thirsty” I wanted to ask him if he got her something to drink? Not the meaning or context
that he was using thirsty for.

How will you apply this information in your future classroom?

Having the beginning knowledge of Morphology and semantics are going to help me
better teach students to read. Being able to breakdown words into morphemes such as
affixes, inflections and root words. Leaning vocabulary, meaning of words leads to an
increase in reading comprehension. I want to teach this method not only on younger
students but also older students if that is where I end up. There is a need for this so that
when they out of school their language skills are up to par with the outside world.

Does this learning change the way that you will approach students from a linguistic
perspective?

Having this knowledge does change my perspective because this is my first time leaning
about this aspect of language acquisition. I remember vaguely learning about this
growing up but never really gave any thought into why. Now learning the why and have a
stronger understanding of how morphemes work in order to acquire new vocabulary is
more of a reason to reach out to future students and show them how blending bound
morphemes will create words they already know about.

Yule, G. (2017). The Study of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.