Applied Linguistics and Language Learning/Teaching

There is a view, held by some linguists and applied linguists, that language teaching
and language-teacher education are the only proper concerns of applied linguistics.

Some linguists and applied linguists believe that language teaching and teacher
education are the sole legitimate issues of applied linguistics.

These two 'issues' are examined from a variety of perspectives, sparking a debate on
what should be considered when an applied linguist encounters a language issue.

Finally, the author analyzes the methods utilized by applied linguists when working
on a problem, citing four key areas in language education as examples: second
language acquisition, proficiency language assessment, language instruction for
specific objectives, and curriculum design.

The Association's mission is to promote applied linguistics research.

The application of language expertise to real-world situations is proudly stated in

Kaplan and Widdowson. We can claim that applied linguistics is being practiced
whenever language knowledge is used to tackle a basic language-related problem.

'Language teachers are continually in pursuit of the flawless approach that will work
for any live language and would make people perfectly at home in their acquired
tongue,' Kaplan says bluntly of the tough challenge of being a language teacher.

You talked about the dead language you saw written down in your own tongue.

The author claimed in Chapter 3 that 'language issues' are the key to comprehending
applied linguistics.

Many of these issues will express themselves in individual contacts, but the applied
linguistics business will only engage with them if they are deemed to be topics of
institutional concern by society.

As a result, applied linguistics as a business is a research and development activity

that aims to employ theoretical insights and collect empirical data to help solve
institutional language difficulties.

Typically, a problem with institutional language is stated as the starting point.

The applied linguist is purposefully eclectic, drawing on any source of knowledge that
can provide illumination on the language issue.

The applied linguist's eclectic approach is justified since language problems involve
more than just language.

Now we'll look at two 'issues,' the optimum age for learning a foreign language and
the validation of a language competence exam, to see what aspects the applied linguist
should consider when presented with a language-learning challenge.
Foreign language teaching in elementary schools in the United States, French in
primary schools in the United Kingdom, and languages other than English in primary
schools in Australia are well-known examples of educational planners' willingness to
extend the length of explicit language learning and take advantage of young children's
greater plasticity in automating new skills and internalizing new knowledge.

French is one of the foreign languages taught in primary school.

English teaching in Nepal Until the early 1960s English was widely available in the
Nepal school system; the basic medium of instruction was Nepali but English was
taught everywhere as a foreign language and there were private schools in which
English was the medium of instruction.

Immersion language teaching Over the last twenty years, immersion language
teaching in Canada has been widely celebrated as a success story in bilingual
education.

The political Quite apart from its role in Australia as still the most prestigious foreign
language taught in schools and therefore potentially advantaged as against other
foreign languages, even those with large numbers of bilingual or 'background'
speakers, French in Australia has in the last three years been under strain because of
the French Government's insistence on carrying out controlled nuclear explosions on
one of its last colonial territories in the South Pacific.

The economic Given the current emphasis in education on marketing products for
customers, it was necessary to investigate whether French was seen as instrumental,
that is vocationally well placed, and what reasons children and their parents might
have in choosing French rather than another language, since the school offered a
choice of six languages in its secondary department.

Thus there are within applied linguistics those who specialise in pedagogic grammar,
curriculum planning, applied sociolinguistics, programme evaluation, language
testing, language-teacher training, second-language acquisition research, applied
stylistics, language planning for education, computer-assisted language learning,
language-teaching methodology, language in the workplace, languages for specific
purposes, bilingualism, crosscultural communication, clinical applied linguistics,
forensic language studies, and so on.

The educational questions that needed investigation were: to what extent the test was
being used at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and for temporary attachment by
senior academics; and whether it was suitable at these different levels; to what extent
it was in use in different faculties, and whether it was being used differentially so that
test scores deemed proficient in one faculty were rated not sufficiently proficient in
any others.

One of these was the analysis of the ELTS test in terms of its relevance to the content
of the specialist areas it purported to test.
For the purposes of understanding the working of any test these skills are all essential
since they provide the necessary evidence about the test's workings, often called its
validity and reliability.

The question for the evaluators was whether such washback from the test was
beneficial in terms of its influence on EFL teaching or whether it was likely to exert a
largelynegative influence, for example by overstressing the practice of multiple-
choice test questions.

The ELTS evaluators needed to analyse how far the test designers had looked at these
different areas of language studies and had incorporated these ideas in the ELTS test.

No proficiency test is likely to take up more than, say, three hours of test time and yet
that test is expected to predict whether a student can cope with a year or three years'
study, including very complex spoken and written material.

Just as the touchstone for the written materials in the test was the standard language,
so the question which raised itself with regard to the spoken components of ELTS was
what sort of norms should be applied to the judgements made of the candidates' own
speech.

Faced with such fundamental problems concerning language learning and teaching,
problems such as how to plan for the optimum starting age for language teaching in a
school or education system, problems such as how to assess language learning success
most validly, and how to know whether or not this is being achieved, applied
linguistics has developed a series of methodological approaches to the collection of
relevant language data.

All language teachers are aware of the fact of error: an error is a gap in a learner's
knowledge of the target language.

More recently corpus linguistics seems to have taken the same route, since it is in
some sense a linguistic formalisation of ideas about genre and different kinds of
language text, as we see below in the discussion of the teaching of LSP. 7.2 Language
proficiency testing Testing is more a normal part of language teaching than of other
curriculum subjects because the language teacher is concerned with skill as well as
with knowledge.

The first is in research in which language testing is used to provide hypotheses in

relation to our understanding of language and language learning.

The basic assumption then behind programmes dedicated to teaching languages for
specific purposes is that language function, purpose, area and so on require the use of
a special variety of the language; this was the argument we referred to in the
discussion on language and gender in Chapter 3.

A major contribution of applied linguistics to language learning and teaching studies

has been to develop materials purposely written for the language teacher.
What a curriculum provides for the language teacher is a plan, based on a view or
philosophy of language and of learning.

Spolsky writes in his editor's Introduction to the 1999 Pergamon Concise Encyclo -
pedia of Educational Linguistics that educational linguistics was: a term modelled on
educational psychology and educational sociology.

Its task is to define the set of knowledge from the many and varied branches of the
scientific study of language that may be relevant to formal or informal education The
term also includes those branches of formal or informal education that have direct
concern with the language and linguistic proficiency of learners.

The distinction Spolsky intends is between a discipline-in-waiting and the

development of 'a responsible new field', that is educational linguistics.

Educational linguistics, accordingly, appears to limit both the source and the target.

It is difficult to understand Spolsky's view that applied linguistics is a hammer in

waiting unless he means that educational linguistics has taken up the earlier definition
of applied linguistics, that it is wholly about language teaching, largely in terms of
source, entirely in terms of target.

The term educational linguistics was also used by Stubbs as the title of his 1986 book
which, he tells us, 'has been influenced by Halliday's work on language in education'.

Educational linguistics to Stubbs appears to be a way of providing teachers with the

education about language that will inform their practice, a very Hallidayan project.

In this chapter the writer first considered the arguments for confining applied
linguistics to a concern with second-language teaching and learning.

Then the writer discussed two 'problems' in the language-teaching field: first, the
optimum-age problem and, second, an investigation into the validity of a large-scale
English-language proficiency test, the English Language Testing Service test.

These two 'problems' were considered from the point of view of a number of relevant
factors, opening up a discussion on what it is that needs to be taken into account when
the applied linguist is faced with a language problem.

The writer then considered the methodology used by the applied linguist in working
with a problem, and to that end he took as examples four areas of importance in
language teaching: second-language acquisition, proficiency language testing, the
teaching of languages for specific purposes and curriculum design.

The chief role of applied linguistics in the field of language teaching and learning is,
as elsewhere, to ask the right questions about the enterprise under discussion in its
own context and at the same time to ensure that in spite of its particularities, the
enterprise is approached as an example of the general system of language teaching to
which it belongs.
Finally, he suggested that the term educational linguistics is best seen as a reduced
version of applied linguistics.