APPLIED LINGUISTICS

UNIT 1

APPLIED LINGUISTICS

A.     The Need for Applied Linguistics

Language is the heart of human life. Without it, many of our most important activities are inconceivable. Almost all of our activities use language for interaction to each other. And the other important activities don’t use language, for example sexual relations, preparing and eating food, manual labour, etc.

Throughout history and across the world, people have used language for gossip and chat, flirt and seduce, play games, sing songs, tell stories, etc. Such activities seem to be intrinsic to human life, as natural to us as flight is to birds. People do them without concious analysis. It does not seem that we need to know about language to use it effectively.

B.     The Scope of Applied Linguistics

Since language is implicated in so much of our daily lives, there is clearly a large and open-ended number of quite disparate activities to which applied linguistics is relevant. So even with these example, the scope of applied linguistics remain rather vegue. To get at a more precise definition of the field we need to classify to be more specific. These are can be identified under three headings as follows:

1.      Language and Education

This area includes:

ü      First-language education, when a child studies their home language or languages.

ü      Additional – language education, often divided into second - language education, when someone studies their society’s majority or official language which is not their home language, and foreign-language education, when someone studies the language of another country.

ü      Clinical linguistic : the study and treatment of speech and communication impairments, whether hereditary, developmental, or acquired (through injury, stroke, illness, or age).

ü      Language testing: the assessment and evaluation of language achievement and proficiency, both in first and additional languages, and for both general and specific purposes.

2.      Language, Work, and Law

This area includes:

ü      Workplace communication: the study of how language is used in the workplace, and how it contributes to the nature and power relations of different types of work.

ü      Language planning: the making of decisions, often supported by legislation, about the official status of languages and their institutional use, including their use in education.

ü      Forensic language: the deployment of linguistic evidence in criminal and other legal investigations, for example, to establish the authorship of a document, or a profile of a speaker from a tape-recording.

3.      Language, Information, and Effect

This area includes:

ü      Literary stylistics: the study of the relationship between linguistic choices and effects in literature.

ü      Critical discourse analysis (CDA) : the study of the relationship between linguistic choices and effects in persuasive uses of language, of how these indoctrinate or manipulate (for example, in marketing and politics) and the counteracting of this through analysis.

ü      Translation and interpretation: the formulation of principles underlying the perceived equivalence between a stretch of language and its translation, and the practices of translating written text and interpreting spoken language.

ü      Information design: the argument and presentation of written language, including issues relating to typography and layout, choices of medium, and effective combinations of language with other means of communication such as pictures and diagrams.

ü      Lexicography: the planning and compiling of both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, and other language reference works such as thesauri.

C.     Linguistics and Applied Linguistics: A Different Relationship

The academic discipline concerned with the study of language in general. Like any discipline, linguistics look for generalities underlying actual appearances, and so in some degree is bound to represent an abstract idealization of language rather than the way it is experienced in the real world.

One particularly influential type of idealization is that used in the generative linguistics introduced by Noam Chomsky from the late 1950s onward. In his view, the proper subject matter of linguistics should be the representation of language in the mind (competence), rather than the way in which people actually use language in everyday life (performance). Chomsky’s claim is that this internal language is essentially biological rather than social and is separate from, and relatively uninfluenced by, outside experience. The relationship between this highly abstract model and ordinary experience of language is very remote.

Chomsky’s linguistics, however, is not the only kind. In sociolinguistics, the focus is as the name suggest – very much upon the relation between language and society. Sociolinguistics endeavours to find systematic relationships between social groupings and contexts , and the variable ways in which languages are used. In functional linguistics the concern is with language as a means of communication, the purposes it fulfils, and how people actually use their language. In recent years a particularly important development in the investigation of language use has been corpus linguistics.

These approach to linguistic study seem much closer to the reality of experience than Chomsky’s, and therefore more relevant to the concerns of applied linguistics. Their purpose moreover is to describe and explain and not, as it in applied linguistics, to engage with decision making. What is needed in all cases and perhaps particularly in those approaches where the relevance of linguistics seems self-evident is constant medlatlon between two discourses or orders of reality, that of everyday life and language experience. They are very different and difficult to reconcile, but the attempt to make each relevant to the other is the main challenge for applied linguistics and the justification for its existence.

Linguistic theory and description cannot, then, be deployed directly to solve the problems with which applied linguistics is concerned. One important reason is the nature of the problems themselves. They, too, like models of linguistics is not simply a matter of matching up findings about language with pre-existing problems might be changed. It may be that when problems are reformulated from a different point of view they become more amenable to solution. This changed perception may then, in turn, have implications for linguistics.

The methodology of applied linguistics must therefore be complex. It must refer to the findings and theories of linguistics, and making these theories relevant to the problem in hand. Conceived of in this way, applied linguistics is a quest for common ground. It establishes a reciprocal relationship between experience and expertise, between professional concern with language problems and linguistics.

Cook, Guy. 2003. Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press: New york.