Post 3: The Islamization of Psycholinguistics in IIUM

            When Dr. Rozina asked us to choose one linguistic subject for our topic to be discussed in the blog, Psycholinguistics immediately came to our mind. The uniqueness of human being in having a special machine that leads everything that we do every day in ourselves which to be known as brain brought us to choose this subject as our main topic in our blog.

 

In our university; International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), Psycholinguistics is one of the subjects that has been thought under the Department of English Language and Literature. It is one of the subject that offer for student who specializing in Linguistics other that Error and Contrastive analysis, Introduction to Pragmatics and so on. A book entitled “An Introduction to Psycholinguistics” written by Danny D. Steinberg and Natalia V. Sciarini is use as the text book. Basically, this subject covers 3 major parts which are first-language learning, second-language learning and language, mind and brain. How children learn language, the deaf and language, the methods of second-language teaching, bilingualism, where does language come from is part of the topics cover in learning Psycholinguistics in IIUM.

Psycholinguistics is one interesting field to be learned by students. All the topics cover as we mentioned earlier are so appealing for us the students to know more about it. We found that all the theories and ideologies came from non Muslim people like Noam Chomsky. It cannot be doubt that Chomsky’s theories are so great but as the university carry the “Islamic” name, the subject that students in IIUM learn have to have the Islamic gist in it. Muslim scholars such as Al-Farabi, Ali ibn Abbas al-Majusi, Ibn Zuhr and so on are the examples of so many scholars that can be related to this subject specifically. It is good for us to have this scholars and it is disappointing if we did not take this advantage in quoting or learning their theories and ideologies.

By inserting the Islamic side of the subject, it can open the student’s eyes that Islam has produced great scholars that we can learn from inline with other scholars. Moreover, learning things that reflect back to Islam is one way for us to remind ourselves that Allah s.w.t is the greatest creator.