SUMMARY
INTRODUCTION: APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE TEACHING
IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
General Background
Applied linguistics is an interdiciplinary field of research and practice dealing with practical problems of language and communication that can be identified, analysed or solved by applying available theories, methods or results of Linguistics or by developing new theorical and methodological frameworks in Linguistics to work on these problems.
The board definition of applied linguistics as problem-solving was certainly true in its early days. The AILA congress in 2008 has 9 papers on first language acquisition compared with 161 on second language acquisition and 138 on foreign language teaching; computational linguistics and forensic linguistics were no longer on the programme, though news areas like multilingualism have been introduced.
Applied linguists have explored psychological models such as declarative/ procedural memory and emergentism, mathematical models such as dynamic systems theory or chaos theory, early Soviet theories of child development such as Vygotsky, French thinkers such as Foucault and Bourdieu- nothing seems excluded. Contemporary applied linguists feel free to draw on almost any field of human knowledge.
Linguistics nowadays plays a minimal role in applied linguistics whether in terms of current linguistic theories or descriptive tools. Linguistic theories of the past twenty years are barely mentioned by applied linguists. There are three implications from applied linguistics solve: a)The applied linguist is a jack of all trade, b) the applied linguist is a go-between, not an enforcer, no a master, c)sheer description of any area of language is not applied linguistics as such but descriptive linguistic.
The applied linguistics of Language Teaching
This is not say that language element has to dominate or that linguistics itself has to feature at all but that it does not count as applied linguistics of language teaching:
If there is no language element
If the language elements are handled without any theories of language
If the research base is neither directly concerned with language teaching nor related to it in a demonstrable way.
Over the years the applied linguistics of language teaching has had its most important relationship with linguistics and psychology. Applied linguistics still tends to impose theory-based solutions that ignore the reality that teachers face in the classroom and that are unsubstantiated by an adequate body of pertinent research evidence. Applied linguistics has concerned itself with the analysis and frequency of vocabulary but has seldom described the teaching techniques through which new vocabulary can be taught. Applied linguistics is becoming too rarefied for language teaching.
This volume: Individuals looking to the future
This volume is the intended to show the importance of the contribution that applied linguistics can make to language teaching. The volume starts with three chapters that try to base twenty-first century language teaching on sound ideas about how people learn a second language. The next three chapters (4-6) are concerned more with the classroom. Two chapters (7-8) look at the nature of the second language user. The final four chapters (9-12) adopt more theoretical perspective.
APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE LEARNING/TEACHING
Introduction
There is a view, held by some linguists and applied linguists, that language teaching and language-teacher education are the only proper concern of applied linguistics. The chapter begins with a presentation of the arguments for and against confining applied linguists to a concern with second-language teaching and learning.
Claims
In spite of the widening range of activities undertaken by applied linguistics and in spite of the general agreement about the reach of its provenance claimed in the status of International Association of Applied linguistic:
The Association's purpose is to promote research in the areas of applied linguistics, for example language learning, language teaching, language use and language planning, to publish the results of this research and to promote international and interdiciplinary cooperation in these areas.
And proudly asserted in Kaplan and Widdowson (1992):
The application of linguistic knowledge to real-world problems...whenever knowledge about language is used to solve a basic language-related problem, we may say that applied linguistics is being practiced. Applied is a technology which makes abstract ideas and research findings accessible and relevant to the real world; it mediates between theory and practice.
A Personal Account
Alice Kaplan's 1993 evocative account of her own love story with learning and teaching French reminds us that not all language learning is doomed. Kaplan is blunt about the difficult task of being a language teacher.
Noam Chomsky argued that children acquire language more or less automatically by the time they are five and whatever makes it happen can't be duplicated by adult- it has nothing to do with situation.
Kaplan suggests is that: 'Language teaching methods make for a tale of enthusiasm and scepticism, hope and hope dashed. Language learning and language teaching are problems because they are so often ineffectual. The temptation is always to seek new and therefore better methods of teaching, better methods of learning. What applied linguistics offers, where its coherence lies is in its recognition that the question to ask is not how to improve the learning, but what is it that is not being improved, in other words what it is that is supposed to be being learned. Some of the content of a course in applied linguistics which will be of benefit to second language teachers will offer linguistics.
Applied Linguistics and Institutional Problems
Language problems are the key to undestanding applied linguistics. Many of these problems will manifest themselves in individual interactions but the applied linguistics enterprise engages itself with such problems only when they are considered by society to be matters of institutional concern.
Applied linguistics as an enterprise is therefore a research and development activity that sets out to make use of theoritical insights and collect empirical data which can be use in dealing with institutional language problems. Proceeding electicaly is legitimate because for the applied linguist language problems involve more than language. They involve these factors:
The educational
The social
The psychological
The anthropological
The political
Religious
The business
The planning and policy aspect
And, of course, the linguistic, including the phonetic
Optimum Age
Presbyterian ladies's College
English Teaching in Nepal
Immersion language teaching
Factors relevant to the optimum-age problem
Doing applied linguistics: the process
Factors relevant to the ELTS Evaluating
Background
Educational (including the psychometric) factor
Social (and its interface with the linguistic and sociolinguistic) factors
Psychological (and its interface, the psycholinguistic) factors
Anthropological factors (for insights on cultural matters)
Political factors
Religious factors
Economic factors
Business factors
Planning/policy (including the ethical) factors
Linguistic and phonetic factors
Investigating the problems: the methodology of applied linguistics
Applied linguistic has developed a series of methodological approaches to collection of relevant language data. Several of these have been referred to in earlier discussions. Consider four areas of applied linguistics that have very direct relevance to language learning and language teaching. The four areas are:
Second-language acquisition research: what are the stages of second-language learning?
Language proficiency testing: what are the markers of successful languagelearning?
Teaching of LSP: what does the learner need to know?
Curriculum design: what does the teacher need to know?
Educational Linguistics
A term modeled on educational psychology and educational sociology. It describes the commingling of an academic discipline (linguistics) with a practical academic profession (education). If educational linguistic was modeled on educational psychology and educational sociology, applied linguistics, again according to Spolsky, was modeled on applied mathematics winning out in competition with equally logical term language engineering to cover a wide range of interests in practical applications of the knowledge that is being developed through the growth of the modern discipline of linguistic.
