Linguistics is the scientific study of language. In 1A03, you will deal with 3 main branches of linguistics: phonetics (sounds of human language), phonology (how sounds are systematically used in a language), and morphology (structure and content of words).
For the first half of the course, you will familiarize yourself with the phonetic alphabet. You will learn about how different sounds are produced and also translate English words into phonetic symbols. Later on in the course, you will learn about speech phenomena (such as why people say "pusghetti" instead of spaghetti). Then, near the end of the course you will do phonology and morphology problems, where you're given a set of data to analyze and draw conclusions from.
There is a midterm exam, weekly assignments, and sometimes quizzes in tutorial. I'd definitely recommend the course. An outline can be located at
http://www.humanities.mcmast er.ca/....php?cno =547