Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Enforced requisites: courses 20, and 102 or 103. Not open for credit to students with credit for course 120A. Sound structures and sound patterns in world's languages. Rules, rule ordering, features, syllable, and higher structure. Comparison of sound patterns of different languages. Tools of phonology as applicable to other fields. P/NP or letter grading.

Review Summary

Clarity
10.0 / 10
Organization
10.0 / 10
Time
0-5 hrs/week
Overall
10.0 / 10

Reviews

    Quarter Taken: Spring 2023 In-Person
    Grade: A+

    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.

    Quarter Taken: Spring 2023 In-Person
    Grade: A+

    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!

Course

Instructor
Elise Bell
Previously taught
23S 22F 22S 21F 21S 20F
Formerly offered as
LING 119A

Grading Information

  • No group projects

  • Attendance not required

  • 1 midterm

  • 10th week final

  • 50% recommend the textbook

Previous Grades

Grade distributions not available.