I absolutely loved this class. Although it was definitely a step up in difficulty from ling 102, my experience was nothing but positive.

Like Ling 102, this class used a skills mastery system. However, there are 50 skills, and you only need to master a skill once to get the point for it. There are many opportunities to demonstrate the skills, mostly through weekly open-note quizzes and homework assignments. Also, mastering all 50 skills will only get you an 85% for your skills mastery grade. To get the other 15%, you need to master 18 of the 50 skills to an advanced level, which you can do by doing the Advanced sections of the homework assignments. If you want to get an A in the class, you'll definitely have to get Advanced points, as skills mastery is 65% of the grade. The Advanced sections of the homeworks can be tough, so I'd recommend going to office hours to get help. I went to Lily's office hours and she was a lifesaver! At first I didn't know that we need to get Advanced points for skills mastery (my bad for not reading the skills mastery explanation closely enough) so I had to scramble to get them towards the end of the course. Do yourself a favor and try to get them at the beginning, so that you don't end up like me having a mental breakdown trying to shove all 18 Advanced skills into a 4500 word HW writeup 😂

There were eight homeworks. The lowest homework gets dropped and Professor Bell has an extremely generous late policy where you can still get full points if you submit a homework up to one week late. Each HW involves writing a phonological analysis paper about some given data. The HWs can be tough and take a long time but working with others or going to office hours really helps.

There were two open-note asynchronous online exams, a midterm and a final. The midterm was pretty tough but still doable, and it was curved. To compensate for the difficult midterm, the final was easy. Fortunately, each exam is only worth 10% of the grade, so you don't need to stress much about exams. Prioritize the skills mastery, as that's 65% of the grade. There are also opportunities to get 2% extra credit.

Overall, I really enjoyed the course and I'd highly recommend it, as long as you're prepared to put in a lot more work than ling 102.

Dr.Bell's class was a joy to take. She's very accommodating to her students, offering a generous late policy and her grading policy is fair and consistent throughout the quarter. She is fantastic at explaining difficult concepts and she provides quality instruction from just the lectures alone to be able to tackle the homework. Homeworks were different than in her LING 102 class, these homeworks were must more involved requiring you to recognize which skills from her skills mastery applied. However, though more involved, I felt as though I learned much more from these homeworks than from her LING 102 skills mastery quizzes. The class workload is manageable and the take-home exams were very fair and we were given plenty of time to write the exam. I highly recommend taking LING 119A with Dr. Bell!

The homeworks were pretty difficult, so I recommend going into office hours as the TA is very helpful with explaining the material