WHAT IS APPLIED LINGUISTICS?
Applied linguistics, at least in north America, was first officially recognized as an independent course at the university of Michigan in 1946. During the second world war there were a lot of money spent on learning languages, especially for the army and the government, they tried to speak foreign languages without accent, that´s why they spent all that money
The term was used both in the US and in Great Britain to refer to applying a so-called “scientific approach” to teaching foreign languages, including English for nonnative speakers.
In Europe, the emergence of applied linguistics as an academic discipline was closely connected to the foundation of AILA, (the association international de linguistique appliquée). The creation of AILA was agreed upon at the international colloquium of applied linguistics at the university of Nancy (France) in 1964.
Traditionally, applied linguistics is concerned with the teaching in mother tongue education or with the teaching and learning of foreign second languages the narrow definition: Wilkiss, 1972; Kaplan, 1990; Sridhar, 1993).
At present, applied linguistics refers to the application of linguistic research to the solution of practical, educational and social problems of all types The Broad (Definition (Trudgill, 1984). Other definitions:
“Applied linguistics is essentially a problem-driven discipline, rather than a theory-driven one” (McCarthy, 2001:4).
Applied linguistics is also defined as an activity. “The application of linguistic knowledge to some object, situation or problem”. (Corder, 1973:15).
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ALLIED LINGUISTICS
• The founding of other national associations of applied linguistics.
• The british association of applied linguistics (BAAL) in 1967.
• The American Association (AAAL) in 1979.
• The Spanish association in 1982 (AESLA).
• The Cameroon Association (CAMAILA).
Some examples of applied linguistics studies:
In communities with more than one language, which ones should be used at school?
Should everyone learn foreign languages, and if so, which one or which ones? Which is the best method to do so?
Should deaf children learn a sign language, or a combination of lip reading and speaking?
Success in the applied linguistics enterprise depends on:
• Identifying and defining problems.
• Contextualizing those problems within linguistic study and developing a theorical stance.
• Employing appropriate resources for the exploration of possible solutions.
• Evaluating the proposed solutions.
THE INTERRELATION OF THE DISCIPLINES
At present, applied linguistics s regarded as an interdisciplinary discipline, that is, one that uses or cuts across several established disciplines or traditional fields of study.
Interdisciplinary approaches typically focus on problems felt by the investigators to be too complex or vast to be dealt with the knowledge and tools of a single discipline.
FUNCTIONAL APRROACHES
• Aim at accounting for the contextual aspects of language: participants, situation, time, topic, means of communication, etc.
• Innatism and Chomsky’s views of L1 learning cannot explain adequately the complex nature of human language learning and its dependence on context.
• The phonological, grammatical and semantic structure of languages is determined by the functions that they have to perform in the societies in which they operate.
• Key notion: the importance of social context.
The child needs to be flexible in order to deal with a changing environment
Piaget´s theory of cognitive development
• Swiss psychologist (1986-1980)
• Reasons why his work is important:
• It is an impressive body of facts (parental diaries) about the child’s early development. (clinical method: experimentation, observation, hypotheses...)
• His studies go beyond description and attempt to explain early development.
It offers an explanation of language acquisition proposing that it is the result of general symbolic growth.
• According to Piaget, there is a relationship between cognitive development and L1 acquisition. Linguistic structures will emerge only if there is an already established cognitive foundation.
For example, before children can use structures of comparison (e.g. My car is bigger than yours), they need to make relative judgments of size.
• Piaget claimed that cognitive development is at the very centre of the human organism and that language is dependent on cognitive development.
Four stages can be identified in his model:
1) Sensorimotor stage (birth-2 years): infants mainly make use of senses and motor capabilities to experience the environment. The characteristic limitation of this stage is ‘thinking only by doing’. The sensorimotor infant gains physical knowledge.
2) Preoperational stage (2-7 years): children start to use symbols such as language to represent objects. For instance, the child understands the word “apple” although a real apple is not seen. They also exhibit egocentric thought and language.
3) Concrete operational stage (7-11 years): child begins to think logically. Concrete operations allow children to classify several classes into a bigger group or to combine a number of classes.
e.g. daisy, rose, begonia… → flowers
cat, tiger and leopard… → mammals but also felines
4) Formal operational stage (11 and beyond): learners have the ability to consider many possibilities for a given condition. They are able to deal with propositions that explain concrete facts. They have the ability to use planning to think ahead and they can think abstractly.
Functional approaches and social interaction:
• Pays special attention to the communicative and pragmatic function of language.
• Berko-berko-gleason (1982: 20) emphasises the role of interaction in language acquisition and describes this functional perspective in the following terms:
• Pays special attention to the communicative and pragmatic function of language.
• Berko-berko-gleason (1982: 20) emphasises the role of interaction in language acquisition and describes this functional perspective in the following terms:
• While conversation is a universal human activity performed routinely in the course of daily living, the means by which children learn to take part in conversation appear to be very complex.
• The child learns not only how to initiate a conversation but how to respond to another’ s initiating utterance. Questions are recognized functionally as requests for information, for action, or for help.
• At a relatively young age, children learn that utterances have both a literal and an intended meaning.
LINGUISTIC THEORIES OF FOREING/SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION (SLA)
SLA refers to the learning of another language after the native language has been learned. Sometimes the term refers to the learning of a third or fourth language.
Foreign language Learning refers to the learning of a nonnative language in the environment of one´s native language.
A general overview:
1959s – 1960s: Behaviourist view Contrastive Analysis. Chomsky´s view (Cognitivism).
1970s: Krashen´s input hypothesis (refined and expanded in the early 1980s) Selinker: the concept of interlanguage.
Disillusionment with Contrastive Analysis. Focus on “Error Analysis”.
1989s: Swain: The Output hypothesis. Long: interaction hypothesis.
Innatist models: Krashen´s input hypothesis
Acquisition/Learning Hypothesis:
a. Adults have two distinctive ways of developing competences in second languages. b. Acquisition, that is by using languages for real communication.
c. Learning knowing about language.
ACQUISITION LEARNING
Implicit subconscious Explicitit, conscious
Informal situations Formal situations
Uses Grammatical “feel” Uses grammatical rules
Depends on attitude Depends on aptitude
Stable order of acquisition Simple to complex order of learning
Natural order Hypothesis:
• L2 Acquisition (primarily morphemes) takes place in a predictable order. This order seems to be independent of the learner´s age, the conditions of exposure, and the background of the L1 development.
• Natural order patterns of second language acquisition do not follow those of the first language acquisition patterns. Nonetheless, there are patterns to L2 development.
The Monitor Hypothesis:
• The monitor, or editor, focuses on form and knows the rules (such as on a grammar test in a language classroom or when carefully writing a composition).
• The language that one has subconsciously acquired “initiates our utterances in a second language and is responsible for our fluency,” whereas the language that we have consciously learned acts as an editor in situations where the learner has enough time to edit.
Krashen (1994) explains that in order to use a monitor well, three factors must be met: 1. Time: not available n normal conversation (or un planned linguistic exchanges). 2. Focus on form: awareness of form, correctness.
3. Knowledge of the rules only partially known (not internalized).
Comprehensible input hypothesis:
Affective filter hypothesis:
• Affect is defined as “the effect of personality, motivation and other affective variables on second language acquisition” (Krashen, a994, pg.57).
• Krashen applies this theory to language learning and looks at its influences on the rate of second language acquisition in three areas: anxiety, motivation and self-confidence.
a. Anxiety: Anxiety +Acquisition.
b. Motivation: Motivation + Acquisition.
c. Self-confidence: +Self-confidence +Acquisition.
The output hypothesis: Swain More input = More output
• Output hypothesis: Comprehensible second language input is insufficient to ensure all-round interlanguage development.
• Research: Evidence from Canadian school.
• The immersion students exposed to French-medium instruction (for extended periods of time) achieved comprehension abilities in French close to native speakers.
• However their productive ability was lower.
• Swain´s claim: only second language production (i.e. output) really forces learners to undertake complete grammatical processing, and thus drives forward most effectively the development of second language syntax and morphology.
• Most language learning researchers agree that output is necessary to increase fluency, that is, learners must practice producing second language utterances if they are to learn to use their interlanguage system.
• Swain (1995:128) proposes three further functions for learner output:
• The “noticing/triggering” functions or what might be referred to as the consciousness-raising role. The activity od producing the target language may push learners to become aware of gaps and problems in their current second language system.
• The hypothesis-testing function: the activity of producing the target language provides learners with opportunities to experiment with new structures and forms.
Production then “may force the learner to move from semantic processing to syntactic processing” (Swain, 1985:249).
• The metalinguistic function, or what might be referred to as its “reflective” role; the activity of producing the target language provides learners with opportunities to reflect on, discuss and analyse problems explicitly.
Several studies on the role of output in second language development show clear benefits: esp, vocabulary. However, regarding grammar development, the benefits of “pushed output” remain somewhat elusive and hard to demonstrate.
Vygostky´s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
Scaffolding
• The mature and skilled individual is capable of autonomous functioning, that is of self-regulation. However, the child or the unskilled individual learns by carrying out tasks and activities under the guidance of other more skilled individuals (such as caregivers or teachers).
• The child or the learner is inducted into a shared understanding of how to do things through collaborative talk, until eventually they take over (or appropriate) new knowledge or skills into their own individual consciousness.
• So, successful learning involves a shift from collaborative inter-mental activity to autonomous intra-mental activity.
• The process os supportive dialogue which directs the attention of the learner to key features of the environment, and which prompts them through successive steps of a problem, has come to be known as scaffolding.
Scaffolding in the classroom-how?
• Building on what students know. This is sometimes called the “spiral curriculum”. • Reintroducing ideas at different stages and at different levels so there is a continuous
building of ideas.
• Helping students develop what they have previously learned.
• Encouraging students to use their previous knowledge and experiences to solve problems to explore and to question.
• Providing plenty of support as students grasp new ideas and slowly removing that support as the students learn and become more confident.
• Using:
o Discussion and questioning. o Word banks.
o Writing frames.
o Concrete materials to scaffold learning.
ZPD
• The domain where learning can most productively take place is known as the Zone of Proximal Development, that is, the domain of knowledge or skill where the learner is not yet capable of independent functioning, but can achieve the desired outcome given the relevant scaffolded help.
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS:
What is a Discourse?
• There are two types of definitions traditionally given for the tem “discourse”.
• Formal definitions that characterize it as a unit of coherent language consisting of more than one sentence.
• Functional definitions that characterize it as language in use. • Taken alone, both definitions are deficient.
• Alternatively, a piece of discourse can consist of hundreds or thousands of words: • A novel
• The most satisfying definition of discourse is the one that combines these two perspectives:
• A piece of discourse is an instance of spoken or written language that has describable internal relationships of form and meaning (e.g. words, structures, cohesion) that relate coherently to an external communicative function or purpose and a given audience/interlocutor” (Celce-Murcia and Olshatain, 2000:4).
• The external function or purpose can only be properly determined if one takes into account the context and the participants in which the piece of discourse occurs.
• Types of context:
o The term context is ambiguous since it can refer to either the real world setting or the linguistic setting.
Context of situation: (Firth) the real-world circumstances in which the linguistic item is uttered (place, time, people, activity…).
Co-text: (Catford) the immediate linguistic environment of the item in question (i.e. in respect to the rest of the text).
(Esquema página 60, Reading 6)
• There are different ways to classify discourse: o Register criteria: field, mode and tenor.
o Genre criteria: communicative purpose, audience and conventionalized style and format.
• Register:
o Field: the topic of the text (science, snooker, law or cooking..). o Mode: the medium or channel (spoken/written).
o Tenor: the relations between participants (close friends, acquaintances, total strangers…).
• How are these features realized linguistically?
o Field: for example, lexicon related to the discipline, structures, processes (in the form of verbs), participants: who and what, etc.
o Mode: for example, cohesive relations, information structuring (theme and rheme) etc.
o Tenor: mood (declarative, interrogative, imperative), modality, person, address forms, etc.
• Genre
o According to Swales (1981, 1985, 1990) and Bhatia (1993) “a genre is a recognizable communicative event characterized by a set of communicative purposes identified and mutually understood by the members of the professional or academic community in which it regularly occurs” (Bhatia 1993:13).
o The communicative purpose of the rest is the most important feature related to genre.
