Introducing Applied Linguistics

Concepts and Skills

Susan Hunston, David Oakey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134061846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

Introducing Applied Linguistics provides in-depth coverage of key areas in the subject, as well as introducing the essential study skills needed for academic success in the field.

Introducing Applied Linguistics:

• is organised into two Sections: the first introducing Key Concepts in Applied Linguistics; and the second devoted to the Study Skills students need to succeed.

• features specially commissioned chapters from key authorities who address core areas of Applied Linguistics, including both traditional and more cutting edge topics, such as: grammar, vocabulary, language in the media, forensic linguistics, and much more.

• contains a study skills section offering guidance on a range of skills, such as: how to structure and organise an essay, the conventions of referencing, how to design research projects, plus many more.

• is supported by a lively Companion Website, which includes interactive exercises, information about the contributors and why they've written the book, and annotated weblinks to help facilitate further independent learning.

Ideal for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Applied Linguistics and TEFL/TESOL, Introducing Applied Linguistics not only presents selected key concepts in depth, but also initiates the student into the discourse of Applied Linguistics.

Susan Hunston is Professor of English Language and Head of the School of English, Drama, and American & Canadian Studies, at the University of Birmingham, UK.

David Oakey is an Assistant Professor in the Applied Linguistics Program at Iowa State University, USA.

Contributing authors: Svenja Adolphs, Aileen Bloomer, Zoltán Dörnyei, Adrian Holliday, Alison Johnson, Chris Kennedy, Almut Koester, Ruby Macksoud, Kirsten Malmkjaer, Kieran O'Halloran, David Oakey. Juup Stelma, Joan Swann, Geoff Thompson, Dave Willis, Jane Willis and David Woolls.

SECTION 1
KEY CONCEPTS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

I Describing English

Introduction to chapter 1

This chapter takes us into the area of pedagogic grammar, a field that concerns how the grammar of a language might best be described for learners, and how it might best be taught to learners. In this chapter, Dave Willis considers both these questions and also how they relate to what is known about how learners learn. The key concepts introduced in this chapter are: the link between grammar and context (the grammar of orientation); the link between grammar and meaning (pattern grammar); and the relationship between what is taught and what is learnt.

The background to this chapter

In other publications, Willis has talked about three aspects of English grammar. The first aspect – the grammar of structure – is very familiar. It deals with aspects of grammar such as how questions are formed, or the fact that in English adjectives usually come before nouns, not the other way round. If a learner writes What time you went home? instead of What time did you go home?, we could say that the learner has not mastered the grammar of structure. Most grammar coursebooks deal very fully with the grammar of structure.

The second aspect – the grammar of class – is less familiar and most coursebooks pay little or no attention to it. It deals with the fact that whether a structure is correct or not often depends on a particular choice of word. So if a learner writes He advised me to go to the dentist, this is correct, whereas He suggested me to go to the dentist is not. This is because advise is used with the pattern ‘verb + noun + to-infinitive’ but suggest is not used with this pattern. In Willis’s terms, advise belongs to the class of verbs used in this way and suggest does not. It is very difficult for learners to become familiar with the grammar of class because there is such a lot to learn – each item of vocabulary (such as advise or suggest) belongs to its own class. In this chapter, Willis uses the term ‘pattern grammar’ to talk about the grammar of class, and he makes some suggestions as to how learners may be encouraged to develop their competence in this area.

The third aspect that Willis talks about is what he calls the grammar of orientation. This covers some fairly familiar ground, such as choice of tense, and use of a or the. However, it relates these things to much more than just the sentence the word is used in. A learner may produce what appears to be a perfectly correct sentence, such as Did you go to a conference last year?, that is nonetheless wrong because the speakers have been talking about a specific annual conference, and this speaker is asking about that event. The correct sentence would be Did you go to the conference last year? As Willis points out in this chapter, it is almost impossible for a teacher to give learners all the information they need to make the correct choice in every case, so this is another very difficult area.

In this chapter, Willis links these ideas about grammar to a very different area of research – Second Language Acquisition. Some researchers in this area argue that acquiring a language (that is, being able to speak, write and understand it) is a very different process from learning a language (that is, knowing its rules). There is debate about the exact relationship between acquiring a language and learning it, but most researchers agree that when learners produce language spontaneously, they are drawing on what they have acquired (subconsciously, as it were) rather than on the rules they have consciously learnt. It follows that teachers should spend most of their time making acquisition (of grammar) possible, rather than teaching rules (of grammar). In this chapter, Willis uses his ideas about grammar to suggest an explanation as to why there is no direct link between acquisition and learning.

Focusing on the argument

In this chapter, Willis brings together two ideas: he makes descriptions of English grammar relevant to theories about how languages are learnt. Most of the chapter is about two aspects of the grammar of English – the grammar of orientation and pattern grammar – but these are expressed as answers to a question: Why are teaching and learning not directly linked? Willis then adds a further answer, citing Widdowson, relating to what learners are doing when they speak English. So the three answers to the question are:

• Teaching is not linked directly to learning because some parts of the language system are too complex to be taught explicitly. This applies in particular to the grammar of orientation.
• Teaching is not linked directly to learning because some parts of the language system are too extensive to be taught within a reasonable time limit. This applies particularly to pattern grammar.
• Teaching is not linked directly to learning because we teach how to say things (we teach ‘wordings’ or expression) whereas learners are concerned with what they are saying (with ‘meaning’ or content). This applies to all areas of grammar, but helps to explain why elements of the grammar, which seem relatively simple and straightforward, are still difficult to acquire. Willis cites the formation of do–questions and past tense forms.

The chapter illustrates the importance of finding the right question to answer; identifying a new and interesting question enables Willis to bring together very diverse ideas and to present an original argument.

A language tip

In the section ‘Complexity and the grammar of orientation’, Willis uses one word, article, with two different meanings:

1. the words the and a;
2. a piece of text in a newspaper.

Here are some sentences from that section:

The question is: which is the original article? The answer is that the first article is genuine, the second is doctored. But both are perfectly grammatical – even though the article use is quite different.

In this extract, the first two uses of article are meaning 2 and the third use is meaning 1.

In the same section, Willis also uses another term, determiner, to refer to words such as the and a.

To think about

1. Do you have experience, either as a teacher or as a learner of a language, of knowing a grammatical point in theory but being unable to apply it in practice?
2. Think of a language that you speak other than English. Can the concepts of ‘grammar of class’ and ‘grammar of orientation’ be applied to that language too?
3. Do you agree with Willis that the grammar of English is too complex to be taught directly to learners? Are there any aspects of grammar that can be taught directly, in your opinion?

CHAPTER 1
Three reasons why

Dave Willis

Language teaching and learning aim at practical outcomes in the real world, not simply at classroom outcomes. If we want to show that a feature of language has been taught or learned it is not enough to show that a learner can produce it under artificial conditions, in a grammar test for example, or as a controlled response to a teacher’s question. We need to see that it has become a consistent part of the learner’s language repertoire, that the learner can use it consistently as part of an act of communication. If we take this as the yardstick, then the findings of research into second language acquisition suggest that there is no direct link between teaching and learning (see, for example, Skehan 1998: 94–95). Learners may, for example, have a conceptual understanding of the use of past tense forms when their attention is focused on producing the required form but, at the same time, they may fail to produce these forms when they are using language spontaneously. The conclusion from the research is that we should recognize that the relationship between teaching and learning is indirect. Even if a form is understood and produced under controlled circumstances this does not guarantee that learners will be able to use it.

It is, however, comfortable for teachers and teacher educators, and for the writers and publishers of teaching materials, to maintain that there is a direct relationship between teaching and learning. For teachers and teacher educators this belief offers security. It suggests that we know exactly what we are doing and where we are going. We can plan lessons and recommend methodologies with confidence. For writers and publishers it means that they can make clear, unqualified claims in terms of teaching and learning for the materials they produce. There is, then, built in resistance to the notion that learning is, at best, indirect. The inconvenient arguments from second language acquisition (SLA) are rejected on the grounds that they are unscientific, or that the work on which they rest is carried out under experimental rather than classroom conditions, or that one study often contradicts another with respect to the details, or that they are too diffuse to offer a firm basis for a teaching programme. But the fact that almost all the research points in the same direction casts doubt on these criticisms.

For my part I believe that the overall findings of SLA research are convincing. They reinforce my experience in the classroom. I am horribly familiar with the situation in which learners can produce a language form under controlled conditions, but cannot produce the same form spontaneously. In this chapter I will argue, taking language description as a starting point, that there are two good reasons why we should recognize that the link between teaching and learning is bound to be indirect. I will then go on to cite Widdowson (1979) to suggest a third reason for this phenomenon.

Complexity and the grammar of orientation

There is an important aspect of the grammar of English that shows, among other things, how elements in the message are related to one another in space and time, and whether or not a participant in a text is identifiable by the receiver. I will call this the grammar of orientation (see Willis 2003). In part this is carried by systems often referred to as deictic, in particular the tense system and the determiner system. Beyond this we have grammatical devices and conventions such as the passive voice and cleft forms which enable us to build coherent text. Such devices enable us to mark which elements of a text are given and which are new and how the propositions carried in the clauses and sentences in the text relate to one another logically.

From the teaching and learning point of view the problem with these grammatical devices is that they are extremely complex. Hughes and McCarthy (1998), for example, cite a generally accepted pedagogic generalization ‘that the past perfect tense is used for an event that happened in past time before another past time’. This may or may not be a useful generalization. It is certainly one that most teachers will have used at some stage, but it is most certainly an oversimplification. Hughes and McCarthy point out that the rule will enable learners to produce the well-formed sentences I spoke to Lisa Knox yesterday for the first time. I had met her 10 years ago but had not spoken to her. But they then go on to point out that this rule does not show ‘that the two sentences would be equally well formed if the second were in the past simple’. It does not, in other words, show learners that they often have to choose between the two forms according to subtle differences in the intended meaning.

There is a further complication that Hughes and McCarthy do not point out. A careful application of the rule would lead learners to produce some forms such as I opened the door when the postman had knocked, which are distinctly odd, if not ungrammatical. It is virtually impossible to frame a rule which will enable learners to make an appropriate choice between the past simple and present perfect in all contexts. Hughes and McCarthy go on to draw the conclusion that:

The rule, therefore . . . does not offer sufficiently precise guidelines to generate the choice when appropriate. In situations such as this our proposal is to look at the choices that real speakers and writers have made in real contexts and consider the contextual features that apparently motivated one choice or the other.

(Hughes and McCarthy 1998: 268)

Contextual features and speaker’s choice tend to be rather more subtle than hard and fast rules. Let us look briefly at the use of the definite and indefinite articles for example. The usual pedagogic generalization is that when something is first mentioned it is preceded by the indefinite article. Subsequent mentions are preceded by the definite article. Look at the following texts:

A: Police were last night searching for the eight-year-old who attempted to hold up a sweet sh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• About this book
• Section 1 Key Concepts in Applied Linguistics
• Section 2 Study Skills for Applied Linguistics Students
• Answer key