Instruction is offered online through video lectures, study guides, required and supplemental readings, quizzes, homework, and final exams.  Major topics include: language and thought, oral and written language, Objectivism, linguistic relativity, linguistic determinism, The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, domains of language, learning to speak versus learning to read, phonological awareness, print awareness, The Great Divide theories, the literacy myth, techniques for assessing print exposure, The Matthew Effects in reading, branches of phonetics, physiology of speech production, describing consonants, describing vowels, phonology, phonotactics, phonemes and allophones, minimal pairs, vowel nasalization, consonant aspiration, vowel lengthening, flapping, affrication, syllables, six syllable structures in English, phonological and phonemic awareness, development of phonological awareness in children, phonological awareness and reading disabilities, reading level match design, morphology, morphemes and words, classes of morphology, inflectional and derivational morphology, morphological awareness versus phonological awareness, word creation, shortening vs. modifying existing words and morphemes, acronymy, alphabetism, clippings, blending and backformation, generification, shifting, reduplication and combination of two free morphemes, historic levels of English, early morphological development, orphological development in the primary grades, developing and promoting morphological awareness, activities to build morphological awareness, orthography, graphemes, writing systems, ideography, logography, syllabary and alphabetic orthographies, shallow versus deep orthographies, English graphemes, Orthographic regularity and consistency, stages of spelling development. Promoting spelling development: Emergent stage, letter name stage, within word stage, syllable and affixes stage, derivational stage, semantics, lexical semantics and sentential semantics, linguistic meaning, literal versus nonliteral meaning, lexical fields, types of semantic relationships, three dimensions of vocabulary knowledge, levels of vocabulary knowledge, vocabulary acquisition before school entry, how children learn words, direct vocabulary instruction, Beck, McKeown and Kucan’s types of words, strategies for promoting word consciousness, syntactic categories, lexical categories, distributional criteria for identifying nouns, verbs adjectives, and adverbs. Functional categories, simple, compound and complex sentences, clauses, phrase structure, hierarchical structure and tree diagrams, basic principles in teaching grammar, discourse analysis and function, conversation intent, speech acts, conversational goals, acquisition of discourse skills, language choices and social appropriateness, sociolinguistic variation, attitudes toward dialect differences, language and gender, gender patterns within standard English, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), phonological, grammatical and stylistic and discourse features of AAVE, code-switching, approaches to code switching, correctionist and contrastive approach, and ways educators can integrate home languages and dialects in the classroom.