An Inroduction to Applied Linguistics

 Applied linguistics is at the heart of human life without it most of our most important activities are inconcievable . throughout
history and across the world people have used language to gossip and chat , play games , sing songs , teach children ,insult enemies , worship
gods …..language then is natural phenomena.
 The difference between linguistics and applied linguistics is that the first is concerned with language description ( theory )while
the second is concerned with language in situation ( practice ).
 Definition :

*Applied linguistics does not lend itself to an easy definition, perhaps because, as Vivian Cook remarks: ‘Applied Linguistics means many
things to many people’ (Cook 2006).

*Applied Linguistics [is now] a cover term for a sizeable group of semi-autonomous disciplines ((Spolsky 2005).

*‘A working definition of applied linguistics will then be ‘the theoretical and empirical investi - gation of real-world problems in which
language is a central issue’ (Brumfit 1997 ).. These real-world problems involve success and failure, ability and disability, ethical, cultural
and gender issues, technology and lack of resources, the difficult and the simple, and the child and the adult.

* Applied linguistics is the academic field which connects knowledge about language to decisionmaking in the real world.

* It is simply to apply the rules that is found by general linguists in the domain of language teaching and learnning.

 The scope of applied linguistics :

1. the study of second and foreign language learning and teaching;

2. the study of language and linguistics in relation to practical problems.(Richards et al. 2002)

 SOURCE AND TARGET

*The urgent question mark against applied linguistics is this: just what is its source, what exactly is being applied? It is concerned with the
language-related problems in what we call the real world , Applied

linguistics must also draw on psychology, sociology, education, measurement theory and so on.

*Applied linguistics encompasses: Language Acquisition (L1 and L2), Psycho/Neuro - linguistics, Language Teaching, Sociolinguistics,
Humor Studies, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis/Rhetorics, ext/Processing/Translation, Computational Linguistics – Machine Translation,
Corpus Linguistics, Language Control/ Dialectology….

*[T]he majority of work in applied linguistics has been directly concerned with language teaching and learning. (Strevens 1994 )

* The subject matter of applied linguistics is to creat a program for second and forign language learners .how ? :by taking three procedures
into account :

1. Problem- solving : to investigates the natureof learners problems. ( The learners and their social and psychological desstortions , The
teacher experience and competence , The language and whether it is socially regected , The program selection gradation and test ).

2. Need analyses : to gather information about the learners needs ( psychological ,social , linguistic needs )

3. Language teaching operation : application and following up of the program .in term of three levels :

1. The governement intervension (politiciens) :

- whether languages are to be taught.

- which languages are to be taught.

-To whom to teach them.

- For how long , for which purpose.

2. Applied linguistis intervention : ( linguists , sociolinguists )

- what to teach, when to teach , how to teach.

3. Classroom teacher intervention : how to teach.

 The importance of applied linguistics : Mackey « no one who is not trained in the techniques of applied linguistics can
successfully teach a language » .

* learnning and teaching other languages .

* develop accuracy and fluency in the forign language.

* develop critical thinking.

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 An Inroduction to Applied Linguistics

* enhance intellectual thinking.

In essence , the importance of applied linguistics can be summerised in term of two elements :

* acquiring knowldge of theory and practice in language teaching.

* applying this knowldge in practical and proffessional tasks.

*Language ;is a set of signals by which we communicate , its components are phonology , morphology , syntics , semantics .

* Linguistics schools are ; Structuralism , Transformational enerative grammer .

* Linguistic branches : sociolinguistics , psycholinguistics , applied linguistics.

* The role of applied linguistics is to transmit the findings of theoritical linguistics to classroom teachers and the outcome of this
application is normally reflected in the feedback of the learners.

 The term "communicative competence" was coined by Dell Hymes (1967,1972) -a sociolinguist who was convinced that

Chomsky's (1965) notion of competence was too limited.

*In the 1970s, research on communicative competence distinguished between linguistic and communicative competence (Hymes).

* Seminal work on defining communicative competence was carried out by Michael Canale and Merrill Swain in (1980) in which they

suggests four different components, or subcategories, make up the construct of communicative competence ;

 Grammatical competence is that aspect of communicative competence that encompasses "knowledge of lexical items and of

rules of morphology,syntax,sentence-grammar semantics, and phonology".

 The second subcategory is discourse competence, the complement of grammatical competence in many ways. It is the ability we

have to connect sentences in stretches of discourse and to form a meaningful whole out of a series of utterances.

 Sociolinguistic competence is the knowledge of the socio-cultural rules of language and of discourse. This type of competence

"requires an understanding of the social context in which language is used

 The fourth subcategory is strategic competence, a construct that is exceedingly complex. Canale and Swain (1980: 30) described

strategic competence as "the verbal and nonverbal communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in

communication due to performance variables or due to insufficient competence.

Theories of forign and second lge teaching :

1. The Nativist : they focus in the innate – biological mental ability , the representative is the monitor model by Stephen krashen ; he
draw a distinction between acquisition and learning , the acquired system act as an initiator while the learned system act as an editor .the
monitor act under three conditions : knowing the rules, having enough time to apply them , cheking for correction.
2. The Envirnementalist : they focus on external – envirnemental ability , the representative is the acculturation model by Jhon
shumann , acculturation for the mis the process of being adapted to a new culture , it is the social and psychological adaptation of the TL
culture of the host community which compromise the language.

The Interactinalists : they focus on the child and his external world , the representative is the inpute model by Jerom bruner and rod ellis
(LASS ,CDS,scaffolding ,teacher talk , care taker talk , mothers )