Applied Linguistics

History and Definition

 (AL) is an Anglo-American coinage,

 Founded first at the University of Edinburgh School of Applied Linguistics in 1956.

 In 1957 the Center of Applied Linguistics in Washington D.C.

 The British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) was formally established in 1967.

 aims: “the advancement of education by fostering and promoting, by any lawful charitable means, the study of language
use, language acquisition and language teaching and the fostering of inter-disciplinary collaboration in this study”
(BAAL, 1994).
 History and Definition

 In the 1960s and 1970s, applied linguistics was about language teaching.

 AL covers two main points:

• The study of second and foreign language learning and teaching.

• The study of language and linguistics in relation to practical problems.

 Applied Linguistics uses language-related research in a wide variety of fields (e.g. language acquisition,
language teaching, literacy, gender studies, language policy, speech therapy, discourse analysis, censorship,
workplace communication, media studies, translation, lexicography, forensic linguistics).

Definitions of Applied Linguistics

 -“AL is the utilization of the knowledge about the nature of language achieved by
linguistic research for the improvement of the efficiency of some practical task in which
language is a central component.” (Corder, 1974, p. 24)

 -A branch of linguistics where the primary concern is the application of linguistic

theories, methods and findings to the elucidation of language problems which have arisen
in other areas of experience. (Crystal, 1985)
 -“A multidisciplinary approach to the solution of language-related problems.” (Strevens, 1992)

 “Applied Linguistics is using what we know about (a) language, (b) how it is learned, and (c) how it is
used, in order to achieve some purpose or solve some problem in the real world” (Schmitt & Celce-
Murcia, 2002, p. 1).

 -“The focus of applied linguistics is on trying to resolve language-based problems that people encounter in
the real world, whether they be learners, teachers, supervisors, academics, lawyers, service providers,
those who need social services, test takers, policy developers, dictionary makers, translators, or a whole
range of business clients.” (Grabe, 2002, p. 9).
 •language contact (language & culture),

 •language policy and planning,

 •language assessment,

 •language use,

 •language and technology,

 •translation and interpretation,

 •language pathology
 Defining Characteristics of Applied
Linguistics
 AL is Autonomous, multidisciplinary and problem solving
 •Practical concerns have an important role in shaping the questions that AL will
address.

 -Language related problems concern learners, teachers, academics, lawyers, translators,

test takers, service providers, etc.
 - Problems related to language can also be said as related to:
 •language learning,

 •language teaching,

 •literacy,
The Relationship between AL and Other Language Related Disciplines

 Applied linguistics occupies an intermediary, mediating position between language

related disciplines (linguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics) and professional
practice.

 •It uses theories/principles from language related disciplines in order to understand

language related issues and to solve language related problems. The choice of which
disciplines are involved in applied linguistics matters depends on the circumstances.
 Linguistics and Applied Linguistics

 •Linguistics is primarily concerned with language in itself, and in findings

ways of analyzing language and building theories that describe language.

 •Applied linguistics is concerned with the role of language in peoples’ lives

and problems associated with language use in peoples’ lives.
 Applied Linguistics or Linguistics Applied?

 Widdowson (2000, p. 5) presents the question in terms of linguistics applied and applied linguistics:

 “The difference between these modes of intervention is that in the case of linguistics applied the
assumption is that the problem can be reformulated by the direct and unilateral application of concepts
and terms deriving from linguistic enquiry itself. That is to say, language problems are amenable to
linguistics solutions. In the case of applied linguistics, intervention is crucially a matter of mediation . . .
applied linguistics . . . has to relate and reconcile different representations of reality, including that of
linguistics without excluding others.”
Why Study Applied Linguistics?

 The understanding of how the learners learn will determine the approach method
procedure, classroom techniques and perhaps the philosophy of education.
 “Well, I look at how people acquire languages and how we can teach them better.” Vivian
Cook.

 It seeks to apply all the related fields to foreign language education. It is process-oriented
in the sense that it is interested not only in the product, but also in the process of teaching.
 The emphasis in AL is on language users and the way in
which they use languages, contrary to theoretical
linguistics which studies the language in the abstract not
referring to any particular context.
 First Language Acquisition

 process whereby children become speakers of their native language or languages

 An interesting feature of early language acquisition is that children seem to rely more on semantics than syntax when
speaking.

 •First language acquisition is an area of psycholinguistics which focuses on how children learn their mother tongue.

 Second language acquisition is an area of applied linguistics and studies the processes by which people develop
proficiency in a second or foreign language. These processes are investigated with the expectation that this
information may be of use to language teaching. Theories on second language acquisition stem from different trends
and backgrounds.
 Stages of Language Acquisition

 prelinguistic development: The first year of a child’s life

 children do not normally begin to produce words until they are a year old

 The main reason for studying prelinguistic development a part of the theory of child language acquisition is to try to establish
which links, if any, there are between the prelinguistic period and the period of linguistic development.

 By three months old, the child will have added to these cooing sounds, composed of velar consonants and high vowels,,

 by six months, babbling sounds, composed of repeated syllables (bababa, dadada, mamama..)have usually appeared.
 During the later babbling stage, from around nine to twelve months, intonation patterns and some imitation of
others’ speech are present, and the infant’s sound production at this stage is often referred to as sound play.

 Some people speak to babies and young children in a particular way known as motherese, baby talk, care-taker
talk, or care-giver speech.

 The period between twelve and sixteen months, during which children normally begin to comprehend words and
produce single units utterances is referred to as the one-word stage

 The gap between comprehension and production is usually very great at that time

 the child utterances do not show any structural properties, and their meanings appear to be primarily functional.

 holophrastic stage.
 At around 16-18 months, single words utterances seem to begin to reflect semantic categories such as subject,
action and object.
 difficult to assign precise adult meanings to the child’s utterances, even though the non-linguistic context often
helps.
 What seems obvious is that the child at this stage is doing more than just naming object, actions, etc..,
 the two-word stage, normally lasting from around 18 to 20 months until the child is two years old.
 many children’s speech lack grammatical inflections and function words,
 consists of strings like cat drink milk (Yule, 1985,p 141);
 this kind of language is known as telegraphic speech (Brown and Fraser, 1963).
 Even if children are presented with full sentences to imitate, they tend to repeat the sentences in telegraphic form.
During this time, the child’s vocabulary grows rapidly.
 Children normally begin to acquire grammatical morphemes at the age of around two years.
 The order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in English tends to be that:
 –ing appears first,

 then the regular plural –s,

 then possessive ’s

 and irregular past tense forms before the regular forms (Yule, 1985, pp 143-4).
 Theories of Language Acquisition
Theory Central Idea Individual with
Theory

Behaviourist Children imitate adults. Their correct Skinner

utterances are reinforced when they get what
they want or are praised.

Innateness A child's brain contains special language- Chomsky

learning mechanisms at birth.

Cognitive Language is just one aspect of a child's Piaget/

overall intellectual development. Vygotsky

Interaction This theory emphasizes the interaction Bruner,

between children and their care-givers.

Acculturation Language learning depends on the social and Schumann/

 Behaviorism

 The behaviorist psychologists (Ivan Pavlov, B.F. Skinner) developed their theories while carrying out a series of
experiments on animals.

 They observed that rats or birds, for example, could be taught to perform various tasks by encouraging habit-
forming.

 Researchers rewarded desirable behavior.

 This was known as positive reinforcement. Undesirable behavior was punished or simply not rewarded - negative
reinforcement.

 learning is based on conditioning (a process of developing connections between a stimulus and a response), and
habit formation (As the behavior is reinforced, habits are formed).
 Importance of environment: Learning is a result of environmental rather than genetic factors.
 The child is born as a clean slate and the environment writes its messages on this clean slate.

 Limitations of Behaviorism
 While there must be some truth in Skinner's explanation, there are many objections to it.
 Language is based on a set of structures or rules, which could not be worked out simply by imitating individual
utterances.
 The mistakes made by children reveal that they are not simply imitating but actively working out and applying
rules
 The vast majority of children go through the same stages of language acquisition. There
appears to be a definite sequence of steps. We refer to developmental milestones.
 Children are often unable to repeat what an adult says, especially if the adult
utterance contains a structure the child has not yet started to use.
 Few children receive much explicit grammatical correction. Parents are more interested
in politeness and truthfulness
 Behaviorism and Foreign Language Teaching

 •It had a powerful influence on second and foreign language teaching between the 1940s and the 1970s

 it influenced the development of the audiolingual method.

 Instruction is to elicit the desired response from the learner who is presented with a target stimulus, and student as
passive receiver of information memorized dialogues and sentence patterns by heart.
 Stimulus-response-reinforcement:
 Learners are taught the language in small, sequential steps (structures and then sentence
patterns).
 A small part of the language is presented as a stimulus, to which the learner responds by
repeating or by substituting.
 This is followed by reinforcement by the teacher.
 By repeating the learner develops habits Learning a language is seen as acquiring a set of
appropriate mechanical habits and errors are frowned upon because they lead to the
development of “bad” habits.
 The role of the teacher is to develop in learners good language habits.
 Innateness or Mentalism

 Noam Chomsky published a criticism of the behaviorist theory in 1957.

 In addition to some of the arguments listed above, he focused particularly on the impoverished language input
children receive.

 Adults do not typically speak in grammatically complete sentences.

 In addition, what the child hears is only a small sample of language.

 Chomsky concluded that children must have an inborn faculty for language acquisition.

 According to this theory, the process is biologically determined - the human species has evolved a brain whose
neural circuits contain linguistic information at birth.

 The child's natural predisposition to learn language is triggered by hearing speech and the child's brain is
able to interpret what s/he hears according to the underlying principles or structures it already contains.

 This natural faculty has become known as the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) (or black box; later on
Chomsky referred to this as innate knowledge of the principles of Universal Grammar (UG)).

 Children’s minds are not blank slates to be filled in by imitating the language they hear from the environment.
Children are born with an innate capacity for language learning which allows them to discover for themselves
the rules underlying the language.
 Chomsky's ground-breaking theory remains at the centre of the debate about language
acquisition.

 However, it has been modified, both by Chomsky himself and by others. Chomsky's
original position was that the LAD contained specific knowledge about language.


 Dan Isaac Slobin has proposed that it may be more like a mechanism for working out
the rules of language
 It seems to me that the child is born not with a set of linguistic
categories but with some sort of process mechanism - a set of
procedures and inference rules, if you will - that he uses to
process linguistic data. These mechanisms are such that,
applying them to the input data, the child ends up with something
which is a member of the class of human languages. The
linguistic universals, then, are the result of an innate cognitive
competence rather than the content of such a competence.

 (cited in Russell, 2001)

Evidence to Support the Innateness Theory

 Work in several areas of language study has provided support for the idea of an innate
language faculty. Three types of evidence are offered here:

 Human Anatomy
 Creole varieties of English
 The sign languages used by the deaf
1. Slobin has pointed out that human anatomy is peculiarly adapted to the production of
speech. Unlike our nearest relatives, the great apes, we have evolved a vocal tract which
allows the precise articulation of a wide repertoire of vocal sounds. Neuro-science has
also identified specific areas of the brain with distinctly linguistic functions, notably
Broca's area and Wernicke's area.
2. Stroke victims provide valuable data: depending on the site of brain damage, they may
suffer a range of language dysfunction, from problems with finding words to an inability
to interpret syntax.
3. Experiments aimed at teaching chimpanzees to communicate using plastic symbols or
manual gestures have proved controversial. It seems likely that our ape cousins, while
able to learn individual "words", have little or no grammatical competence. Pinker
(1994) offers a good account of this research.
1. The formation of creole varieties of English appears to be the result of the LAD at work.
2. The linguist Derek Bickerton has studied the formation of Dutch-based creoles in Surinam. Escaped slaves,
living together but originally from different language groups, were forced to communicate in their very limited
Dutch. The result was the restricted form of language known as a pidgin.
3. The adult speakers were past the critical age at which they could learn a new language fluently - they had learned
Dutch as a foreign language and under unfavourable conditions. Remarkably, the children of these slaves turned
the pidgin into a full language, known by linguists as a creole.
4. They were presumably unaware of the process but the outcome was a language variety which follows its own
consistent rules and has a full expressive range. Creoles based on English are also found, in the Caribbean and
elsewhere.

1. Studies of the sign languages used by the deaf have shown that, far from being crude
gestures replacing spoken words, these are complex, fully grammatical languages in their
own right.
2. A sign language may exist in several dialects. Children learning to sign as a first
language pass through similar stages to hearing children learning spoken language.
Deprived of speech, the urge to communicate is realised through a manual system which
fulfils the same function.
3. There is even a signing creole, again developed by children, in Nicaragua. For an
account of this, see Pinker, 1994 (pp 36-7).
 (Note: some of this section is derived from the BBC television documentary The Mind
Machine.)
Limitations of Chomsky's Theory

 Chomsky's work on language was theoretical.

 He was interested in grammar and much of his work consists of complex explanations of
grammatical rules.

 He did not study real children.

 The theory relies on children being exposed to language but takes no account of the
interaction between children and their carers. Nor does it recognise the reasons why a
child might want to speak, the functions of language.

 Subsequent theories have placed greater emphasis on the ways in which real children
develop language to fulfill their needs and interact with their environment, including
other people
 Cognitivism

 Cognitive psychology in contrast to behaviorism is interested in the way the human mind thinks and learns. It is
interested in the cognitive processes that are involved in learning and how the learner is involved in the process of
learning
 Cognitive theories look beyond behavior to explain brain-based learning. The learner is
seen as an active participant in the learning process using various kinds of mental
strategies in order to sort out the system of the language being learnt.

 Learning happens as a result of brain processes where knowledge is transferred from

short to long term memory.

 In order for this to happen, new information must be linked to old information and
information and concepts must be logically organized. New ideas or concepts are based
upon the learners’ current/past knowledge
 The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, known as a cognitive constructivist, placed
acquisition of language within the context of a child's mental or cognitive development.
He argued that a child has to understand a concept before s/he can acquire the particular
language form which expresses that concept.
 A good example of this is seriation. There will be a point in a child's intellectual
development when s/he can compare objects with respect to size. This means that if you
gave the child a number of sticks, s/he could arrange them in order of size. Piaget
suggested that a child who had not yet reached this stage would not be able to learn and
use comparative adjectives like "bigger" or "smaller".
 Object permanence is another phenomenon often cited in relation to the cognitive
theory. During the first year of life, children seem unaware of the existence of objects
they cannot see. An object which moves out of sight ceases to exist. By the time they
reach the age of 18 months, children have realized that objects have an existence
independently of their perception.

 The cognitive theory draws attention to the large increase in children's vocabulary at
around this age, suggesting a link between object permanence and the learning of labels
for objects.
Limitations of the Cognitive Theory

 During the first year to 18 months, connections of the type explained above are possible
to trace but, as a child continues to develop, so it becomes harder to find clear links
between language and intellect.

 Some studies have focused on children who have learned to speak fluently despite
abnormal mental development.

 Syntax in particular does not appear to rely on general intellectual growth.

Cognitivism and Foreign Language
Teaching

 •The learner selects and transforms information, constructs hypotheses, and makes
decisions, relying on a cognitive structure to do so.

 The cognitive structure (i.e., schema, mental models) provides meaning and organization
to experiences and allows the individual to "go beyond the information given".

 The instructor should try and encourage students to discover principles by themselves.
The instructor and student should engage in an active dialog (i.e., Socratic learning).

 The task of the instructor is to translate information to be learned into a format appropriate to the
learner's current state of understanding. The curriculum should be organized in a spiral manner so
that the student continually builds upon what they have already learned.