The role of linguistics in language teaching: the case of two, less widely taught languages - Finnish and Hungarian Eszter Tarsoly and Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, London, United Kingdom The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom;
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[email protected] (Received xxx; final version received xxx) This paper discusses the role of various linguistic sub-disciplines in teaching Finnish and Hungarian. We explain the status of Finnish and Hungarian at University College London and in the UK, and present the principle difficulties in learning and teaching these two languages. We also introduce our courses and student profiles. With the support of examples from our own teaching, we argue that a linguistically oriented approach is well suited for less widely used and less taught languages as it enables students to draw comparative and historical parallels, question terminologies and raise their sociolinguistic and pragmatic awareness. A linguistic approach also provides students with skills for further language learning. Keywords: language teaching; less taught languages; LWUTL; Finnish; Hungarian; linguistic terminology; historical linguistics; phonology; typology; cognitive linguistics; contact linguistics; corpus linguistics; sociolinguistics; pragmatics; language and culture. Introduction The purpose of our paper is to explore the role of different sub-disciplines of linguistics in language teaching, in particular, their role in the teaching of less widely used and less taught (LWULT) languages. More specifically, we argue that a linguistic approach to language teaching is well suited for teaching morphologically complex less widely taught languages, such as Hungarian and Finnish, in the UK context.