Applied Linguistics in Language Education

Steven McDonough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351576277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

'Applied Linguistics for Language Education' covers those areas of applied language study that are most directly relevant to language teaching, testing, and teacher education. It focuses on the fundamental questions raised for research by the practice of language teaching and research. The reader is thus introduced to the current research climate through consideration of germane controversial issues. If any conclusion about applied linguistic research in the last twenty years is possible, it is that we cannot take anything for granted!Steven McDonough opens with examples of language teaching, teaching materials, and learning a foreign language, which teachers and language learners will recognise, drawing out questions from these which are addressed throughout the rest of the text. Arguments and data from research of all kinds are brought to bear on these and other background issues that are raised, for example: the nature and effects of classroom discourse; the challenges and utility of linguistic theory and linguistic descriptions; what knowing a second language means for proficiency and for processing; nature and nurture in second language learning; how people process language in classrooms and beyond; the role of instruction and the roles of teachers; and measuring achievement.Complex issues are laid out in a clear and accessible style, and many examples are used, mainly, but not exclusively, from English and learning English as a second language. However, the principles apply to learning or teaching any language as a second or foreign language, and 'Applied Linguistics for Language Education' is the most concise overview of current linguistics presently available.

Section 1
What is applied linguistics?

The first section consists of only two chapters: together they present a view of what applied linguistics is about, what applied linguists do, how applied linguistics constructs its theories and understandings, and how the academic subject relates to professional questions in language education. The subject may be traced back many years (for example, to the nineteenth-century language teaching innovators Vietor in Germany and Gouin in France) but an obvious recent point for purposes of comparison through time is the 1969 Congress of the International Association for Applied Linguistics (AILA), which followed the formation of the Association earlier in the 1960s, and the creation of the 40 or so national affiliate bodies including the British Association for Applied Linguistics. The early history of these movements in Britain and Europe is detailed in the papers by Trim and van Els in Grunwell (1988). The huge expansion in numbers attending and the great evolution of topics and subtopics represented at the successive meetings of AILA, comparing, for example, AILA Cambridge 1969 (14 sections, 340 papers with AILA 1996 at Jyväskylä, Finland (160 Symposia, 900–1000 papers and poster presentations) testify to the sustained international interest in the subject. Similar histories of expansion could be told for the national organizations which invite international attendance at their conferences, for example TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) in the US and IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) in the UK. However, attendance at such events implies some obvious restrictions: registration and travel do not come cheap, so participation is less easy for those at the lower-paid end of the profession. Nevertheless, this book intends to demonstrate that the developments are available and interesting to all practitioners and students in the language professions (teaching, research, testing, evaluation, administration).

This expansion has been driven by a variety of factors, of which the most obvious have been:

• the rise of the (mainly, but not solely, English) language teaching industry, lucrative in terms of employment for many teachers in many national contexts and many expatriate teachers in different parts of the world, and valuable in terms of consumption of publishing, and exporting education, to national budgets of several countries;

• the explosion of research in second language learning and acquisition, motivated by some of the same factors, and by theoretical interest;

• the incorporation of more and different areas of research with relevance to language over the years;

• the ever-changing array of language problems in our societies:

• majority and minority languages;

• prestige and low-valued dialects;

• multi-language institutions;

• employment patterns and migration of workers and their families;

• students going abroad for study;

• multinational companies operating in foreign language environments;

• legal rights;

• bilingual education, mother-tongue education;

• access to markets;

• access to the Internet.

1

Applied linguistics and language education: how the one affects the other

Some questions from practice

First of all, we will look at three examples from language education. The first refers to a highly respected piece of teaching material, first published in 1987 and subsequently in two further editions, 1993 and 1996 – Focus on First Certificate (O’Connell 1996). The second is an extract from a real English class, given as part of a course for intending students of a variety of subjects at a British university EFL unit. The third is a stream-of-consciousness record of a learner of Greek practising a writing assignment. In each case, the commentary highlights some of the intriguing questions that each extract suggests about the language teaching/learning process, which applied linguistics has either researched or might be expected to come up with some answers for.

Teaching material

FOCUS ON FIRST CERTIFICATE

First Certificate in English (FCE) is a language qualification which is offered by the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate and taken worldwide by some hundreds of thousands of learners every year. This preparatory material is divided into a number of teaching units, which provide material for a number of actual lessons. Each teaching unit, which gives material for the teacher to use in several actual lessons, has a similar overall structure:

lead-in

text and exercises

communication activity

focus on writing

focus on grammar

text and exercises

focus on listening

focus on grammar

communication activity

focus on listening

focus on writing

language review.

This material shows up a number of assumptions which it is worth spelling out, since they have been the subject of some controversy over the years.

Language exposure is centre stage. Thus, it is assumed to be part of the materials’ job to contain appropriate examples of the language. These materials actually go a little further than that fairly innocuous assumption – they assume that the examples of the language should be genuine, from the culture in which the language is spoken. There is in fact a considerable amount of debate about this issue of authenticity, exactly what it means, and how important it is. Many people argue that it is easier to learn from real examples of the language, because learners can relate to that; others argue that authentic language is often too difficult, and specially written language teaching material is more suitable.

Related to this issue is that of correctness of the language itself. To what extent can the language contained within a 270-page book be a true reflection of the language ‘as she is spoken’? The selection of texts has to be monitored therefore by some kind of editing process which is aware of modern descriptions of up-to-date language, so there is a role here for linguistic description.

Another issue here, but which is not so evident from the first unit, concerns the cultural embeddedness of the language. Many learners do not share the cultural assumptions underlying the examples of the new language they are exposed to, and there is a host of issues here from hindrances to comprehension to cross-cultural offence which need to be addressed. The first unit is built around the idea of young people being able to contemplate exotic holidays as pictured, and this is very foreign in many of the countries in which there are candidates for First Certificate. One might assume that language proficiency is independent both of the topics people wish to use the language for, and the cultural assumptions of the people(s) who speak it as a first language. But can there really be culture-free or culture-fair language teaching materials?

These materials also isolate language features such as grammar rules and vocabulary in language analysis boxes. There is evidently an assumption that isolation of such features enables the learner to concentrate on them and improve their understanding and control of them in their own linguistic repertoire. As such, these materials subscribe to canons of good practice in the profession that have been hallowed for many years. However, research on language learning has been hard put to it to find objective justification for the success of this kind of language teaching. After all, the best language learners of all, children acquiring their first language, get by happily without it. Indeed, it is only relatively recently that researchers have returned to the idea of what is nowadays called consciousness-raising or even more recently focus on form or input enhancement. In Chapter 5, we will trace some of the history of the research involvement with second language acquisition (SLA).

The materials also specify when and how and to whom the learners should talk. Once upon a time, materials presented dialogues for learners to repeat and perhaps learn by rote, assuming that learners should only be allowed to produce correct utterances. These materials, however, in common with many of the period, give guidelines for paired conversations and other kinds of group work, in which the learners are free to invent their own expression in the foreign language. This assumption, that language is learnt by using it, or ‘learning to talk by talking to learn’, is very important to a communicative approach to language learning, as is the use of authentic material; but many people sense there is a contradiction between exposing the learner to only authentic materials while expecting the learner to invent their own language for use with other learners.

Note also that the language examples are embedded in a large amount of language addressed directly to the learner – procedural language. In some kinds of materials, procedural language is often in the language of the learner, to avoid misunderstanding. Here, it is expected that this kind of direct communication with the learner will be in the target language, although the learner may not be expected to respond in it about the procedures or the language, rather, just carry out the instructions. This reveals an assumption here that learners also learn through comprehension and appropriate action. In fact some authorities have argued that it is in these elements of the lesson that true communication occurs and is available to drive the learning process forward, rather than in the pseudo-communication characteristic of doing paired conversations under guidance.

Lastly, it is worth speculating what model of language the textbook assumes: what it is in fact trying to teach. Put simply, a successful learner will be able to control the language they produce, understand written and spoken texts, and command a range of written styles. In the next chapter we shall see that specifying what ‘knowing a foreign language’ actually means is in fact a rather complicated thing to do.

Lesson transcript extract

Teacher: J; Course: August 97 pre-sessional, Essex University

This is a reading lesson, and the teacher has divided the time up between whole-class activities and silent reading for individuals and pairs for various goals. The first activity is scanning for a particular group of words. The second activity involves vocabulary attack strategies, the third, consideration of a whole reading passage about biological effects of stress (conducted in pairs, looking for unknown words), and the last involves working through a test for stress which is ancillary to the reading passage. In between the teacher leads whole-class activities concerned with monitoring their understanding of individual words and other features of the reading. This extract follows the last but one activity in the lesson, in which she checks the students’ understanding of a number of words in the passage prior to having them perform the stress test.

1	T	OK stop there. Let’s look through them because Albert’s desperate to do the stress test so let’s see if we’ve got time to do the stress test. Let’s just go through the words
	T	A urbanized Yoshio
5	Y	from a town
	T	good exactly well done – B eliminate eliminate Hitoshi
	H	get rid of
	T	yes exactly (writes on whiteboard) – modify
	?	make changes
10	T	yes make changes, alter – indicators
	X	things that show you something
	T	things that show you something so for example on a car the little lights that show if you’re turning left – and nutrition, Chen-wei
15	C-W	food, for health
	T	good, well done, and evaluate we did – and highlight Miyuki
	M	focus on
	T	forecast? oh focus yes well done, even better because you
20		gave me focus on which is the right preposition
	T	OK What I’d like you to do next then is not to do this for yourself I’d like you to interview your partner, first of all, and what you have to do when you do the stress test is 1 is almost never [obviously a misreading of always]
25		2 is frequently
		3 is occasionally
		4 is almost never
		5 is never
		So, interview your partner and go through these questions
30		with your partner. So you’ll need to sit next to the same person tomorrow

This example of interaction between teacher (T) and students (M, C-W, X, Y, H – together, S) forms a very small part of this one and a half hour lesson. In this teacher’s style, such sequences are inserted for particular purposes. However, it exhibits some features of structure which are relatively common in EFL classes, but which give rise to a number of interesting questions. It is, once again, the concern of applied linguistics to make sense of, and find answers to, those questions.

This activity is bounded very clearly by boundary markers – OK (lines 1, 18). These separate off different sections of the lesson and are often accompanied, as here with the teacher returning to her chair, by rather definite actions. Of course, the teacher’s division of the lesson time may not coincide with the learners’ perceptions, and it is not infrequent to find that students, especially weaker ones, still believe they are in a previous section with different procedures and demands long after the teacher has moved on. There is no evidence, however, of that happening here.

There is considerably more teacher talk than student talk, and the talk emanating from both parties clearly differs in several ways. To start with, T speaks mostly in syntactically complete sentences, (except, however, in a particular form of interaction, T abandons full sentences and speaks in noun phrases (113–14)), whereas Ss respond in noun and verb phrases, and do not volunteer anything more. In other parts of the lesson, they do: neither side seems to consider that they need to in this section. T talk seems to have at least four different functions here:

Display questions, in which the meaning (in the form of a synonym or two) of a phrase or word in the text is required as the answer. Note the form of the question is in fact a single word announcement, and clearly understood as such (L 4, 6, 8, 10, 14, 16). This section of the extract is a good example of an Initiation/Response/Feedback exchange.

Procedural instructions (lines 21–31) are given to move the lesson along ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Section 1: What is applied linguistics?
• Section 2: Language, linguistics, and teaching
• Section 3: Language learning
• Section 4: Applied linguistics and the teaching profession
• Bibliography
• Index