An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

Norbert Schmitt, Michael P.H. Rodgers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429755071
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

An Introduction to Applied Linguistics provides a complete, authoritative and up-to-date overview of the state of the field. Divided into three sections covering: a description of language and language use; essential areas of enquiry; and language skills and assessment, the third edition of this highly successful textbook provides:

• an introductory chapter which familiarises readers with key issues and recurrent themes;

• 17 chapters offering extended surveys of central elements of applied linguistics;

• two brand-new chapters on multilingualism and forensic linguistics;

• re-written chapters on psycholinguistics, language learners, reading and assessment;

• hands-on activities and further reading sections for each chapter, encouraging practical analysis and wider reading;

• revised and updated references for every chapter.

Co-edited by two leading international specialists, with its accessible style, broad coverage and practical focus, this book is ideal for students of applied linguistics, TESOL, and second language pedagogy, as well as practicing teachers and researchers wishing to update their knowledge.

Chapter 1

An overview of applied linguistics

Norbert Schmitt¹ and Marianne Celce-Murcia²

What is applied linguistics?

‘Applied linguistics’ is using what we know about (a) language, (b) how it is learned and (c) how it is used, in order to achieve some purpose or solve some problem in the real world. Those purposes are many and varied, as is evident in a definition given by Wilkins (1999: 7):

In a broad sense, applied linguistics is concerned with increasing understanding of the role of language in human affairs and thereby with providing the knowledge necessary for those who are responsible for taking language-related decisions whether the need for these arises in the classroom, the workplace, the law court, or the laboratory.

The range of these purposes is partly illustrated by the call for papers for the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2010 conference, which lists 16 topic areas:

• analysis of discourse and interaction
• assessment and evaluation
• bilingual, immersion, heritage and language minority education
• language and ideology
• language and learner characteristics
• language and technology
• language cognition and brain research
• language, culture, socialization and pragmatics
• language maintenance and revitalization
• language planning and policy
• reading, writing and literacy
• second and foreign language pedagogy
• second language acquisition, language acquisition and attrition
• sociolinguistics
• text analysis (written discourse)
• translation and interpretation.

The call for papers to the 2011 AILA conference goes even further and lists 28 areas in applied linguistics. Out of these numerous areas, the dominant application has always been the teaching and learning of second or foreign languages (L2). Around the world, a large percentage of people, and a majority in some areas, speak more than one language. For example, a survey published in 1987 found that 83 per cent of 20–24-year-olds in Europe had studied a second language (Cook, 1996: 134), although to varying levels of final proficiency. Also, in some countries, a second language is a necessary ‘common denominator’ (‘lingua franca’) when the population speaks a variety of different L1s (first languages). English is the main second language being studied in the world today, and even two decades before this book was published, an estimated 235 million L2 learners were learning it (Crystal, 1995: 108). So it is perhaps not surprising that this book is written in that language, although the concepts presented here should be appropriate to non-English L2 teaching and learning as well. Figures concerning the numbers of people learning or using second languages can only be rough estimates, but they still give some idea of the impact that applied linguistics can have in the world.

Due to length constraints, this book must inevitably focus on limited facets of applied linguistics. Traditionally, the primary concern of applied linguistics has been second language acquisition theory, second language pedagogy and the interface between the two, and it is these areas which this volume will cover. However, it is also useful to consider briefly some of the areas of applied linguistics which will not be emphasized in this book, in order to further give some sense of the breadth of issues in the field. Carter and Nunan (2001: 2) list the following sub-disciplines in which applied linguists also take an interest: literacy, speech pathology, deaf education, interpreting and translating, communication practices, lexicography and first language acquisition. Of these, L1 acquisition research can be particularly informative concerning L2 contexts, and so will be referred to in several chapters throughout this book (see Chapter 7, Second language acquisition, and Chapter 8, Psycholinguistics, in particular, for more on L1 issues).

Besides mother tongue education, language planning and bilingualism/multilingualism, two other areas that Carter and Nunan (2001) did not list are authorship identification and forensic linguistics. These areas exemplify how applied linguistics knowledge may be utilized in practical ways in non-educational areas. Authorship identification uses a statistical analysis of various linguistic features in anonymous or disputed texts and compares the results with a similar analysis from texts whose authors are known. When a match is made, this gives a strong indication that the matching author wrote the text in question. The search for the anonymous author of the eighteenth-century political letters written under the pseudonym of Junius is an example of this. A linguistic analysis of the vocabulary in the letters (for example, whether on or upon was used) showed that it was very similar to the use of vocabulary in the writings of Sir Philip Francis, who was then identified as the probable author (Crystal, 1987: 68). Similar analyses are carried out in forensic linguistics, often to establish the probability of whether or not a defendant or witness actually produced a specific piece of discourse. Crystal (1987) relates a case where a convicted murderer was pardoned, partially because a linguistic analysis showed that the transcript of his oral statement (written by the police) was very different stylistically from his normal speech patterns. This discrepancy cast strong doubts on the accuracy of the incriminating evidence in the transcript.

In addition to all these areas and purposes, applied linguistics is interested in cases where language goes wrong. Researchers working on language-related disorders study the speech of aphasic, schizophrenic and autistic speakers, as well as hemispherectomy patients, in the belief that we can better understand how the brain functions when we analyse what happens when the speaker’s language system breaks down or does not function properly. Even slips of the tongue and ear committed by normal individuals can give us insights into how the human brain processes language (Fromkin, l973, 1980).

The development of applied linguistics

Early history

Interest in languages and language teaching has a long history, and we can trace this back at least as far as the ancient Greeks, where both ‘Plato and Aristotle contributed to the design of a curriculum beginning with good writing (grammar), then moving on to effective discourse (rhetoric) and culminating in the development of dialectic to promote a philosophical approach to life’ (Howatt, 1999: 618). If we focus on English, major attempts at linguistic description began to occur in the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1755, Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language, which quickly became the unquestioned authority on the meanings of English words. It also had the effect of standardizing English spelling, which until that time had been relatively variable (for example, the printer William Caxton complained in 1490 that eggs could be spelled as ‘eggys’ or ‘egges’ or even ‘eyren’ depending on the local pronunciation). About the same time, Robert Lowth published an influential grammar book, Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), but whereas Johnson sought to describe English vocabulary by collecting thousands of examples of how English words were actually used, Lowth prescribed what ‘correct’ grammar should be. He had no specialized linguistic background to do this, and unfortunately based his English grammar on a classical Latin model, even though the two languages are organized in quite different ways. The result was that English, which is a Germanic language, was described by a linguistic system (parts of speech) which was borrowed from Latin, which had previously borrowed the system from Greek. The process of prescribing, rather than describing, has left us with English grammar rules which are much too rigid to describe actual language usage:

• no multiple negatives (I don’t need no help from nobody!)
• no split infinitives (So we need to really think about all this from scratch.)
• no ending a sentence with a preposition (I don’t know what it is made of.)

These rules made little sense even when Lowth wrote them, but through the ages both teachers and students have generally disliked ambiguity, and so Lowth’s notions of grammar were quickly adopted once in print as the rules of ‘correct English’. (See Chapter 2, Grammar, for more on prescriptive versus descriptive grammars.)

Applied linguistics during the twentieth century

An overview of the century

The real acceleration of change in linguistic description and pedagogy occurred in the twentieth century, during which a number of movements influenced the field only to be replaced or modified by subsequent developments. At the beginning of the century, second languages were usually taught by the ‘Grammar-translation method’, which had been in use since the late eighteenth century, but was fully codified in the nineteenth century by Karl Plötz (1819–1881), (cited in Kelly, 1969: 53, 220). A lesson would typically have one or two new grammar rules, a list of vocabulary items and some practice examples to translate from L1 into L2 or vice versa. The approach was originally reformist in nature, attempting to make language learning easier through the use of example sentences instead of whole texts (Howatt, 1984: 136). However, the method grew into a very controlled system, with a heavy emphasis on accuracy and explicit grammar rules, many of which were quite obscure. The content focused on reading and writing literary materials, which highlighted the archaic vocabulary found in the classics.

As the method became increasingly pedantic, a new pedagogical direction was needed. One of the main problems with Grammar-translation was that it focused on the ability to ‘analyse’ language, and not the ability to ‘use’ it. In addition, the emphasis on reading and writing did little to promote an ability to communicate orally in the target language. By the beginning of the twentieth century, new use-based ideas had coalesced into what became known as the ‘Direct method’. This emphasized exposure to oral language, with listening and speaking as the primary skills. Meaning was related directly to the target language, without the step of translation, while explicit grammar teaching was also downplayed. It imitated how a mother tongue is learnt naturally, with listening first, then speaking, and only later reading and writing. The focus was squarely on use of the second language, with stronger proponents banishing all use of the L1 in the classroom. The Direct method had its own problems, however. It required teachers to be highly proficient in the target language, which was not always possible. Also, it mimicked L1 learning, but did not take into account the differences between L1 and L2 acquisition. One key difference is that L1 learners have abundant exposure to the target language, which the Direct method could not hope to match.

In the UK, Michael West was interested in increasing learners’ exposure to language through reading. His ‘Reading method’ attempted to make this possible by promoting reading skills through vocabulary management. To improve the readability of his textbooks, he ‘substituted low-frequency “literary” words such as isle, nought, and ere with more frequent items such as island, nothing, and before’ (Schmitt and 2000: 17). He also controlled the number of new words which could appear in any text. These steps had the effect of significantly reducing the lexical load for readers. This focus on vocabulary management was part of a greater approach called the ‘Vocabulary Control Movement’, which eventually resulted in a book called the General Service List of English Words (West, 1953), which listed the most useful 2000 words in English. (See Chapter 3, Vocabulary, for more on frequency, the percentage of words known in a text and readability.) The three methods, Grammar-translation, the Direct method and the Reading method, continued to hold sway until World War II.

During the war, the weaknesses of all of the above approaches became obvious, as the American military found itself short of people who were conversationally fluent in foreign languages. It needed a way of training soldiers in oral and aural skills quickly. American structural linguists stepped into the gap and developed a program which borrowed from the Direct method, especially its emphasis on listening and speaking. It drew its rationale from the dominant psychological theory of the time, Behaviourism, that essentially said that language learning was a result of habit formation. Thus the method included activities which were believed to reinforce ‘good’ language habits, such as close attention to pronunciation, intensive oral drilling, a focus on sentence patterns and memorization. In short, students were expected to learn through drills rather than through an analysis of the target language. The students who went through this ‘Army method’ were mostly mature and highly motivated, and their success was dramatic. This success meant that the method naturally continued on after the war, and it came to be known as ‘Audiolingualism’.

Chomsky’s (1959) attack on the behaviourist underpinnings of structural linguistics in the late 1950s proved decisive, and its associated pedagogical approach – Audiolingualism – began to fall out of favour. Supplanting the behaviourist idea of habit-formation, language was now seen as governed by cognitive factors, in particular a set of abstract rules which were assumed to be innate. Chomsky (1959) suggested that children form hypotheses about their language that they tested out in practice. Some would naturally be incorrect, but Chomsky and his followers argued that children do not receive enough negative feedback from other people about these inappropriate language forms (negative evidence) to be able to discard them. Thus, some other mechanism must constrain the type of hypotheses generated. Chomsky (1959) posited that children are born with an understanding of the way languages work, which was referred to as ‘Universal Grammar’. They would know the underlying principles of language (for example, languages usually have pronouns) and their parameters (some languages allow these pronouns to be dropped when in the subject position). Thus, children would need only enough exposure to a language to determine whether their L1 allowed the deletion of pronouns (+pro drop, for example, Japanese) or not (–pro drop, for example, English). This parameter-setting would require much less exposure than a habit-formation route, and so appeared a more convincing argument for how children learned language so quickly. The flurry of research inspired by Chomsky’s ideas did much to stimulate the development of the field of second language acquisition and its psychological counterpart, psycholinguistics.

In the early 1970s, Hymes (1972) added the concept of ‘communicative competence’, which emphasized that language competence consists of more than just being able to ‘form grammatically correct sentences but also to know when and where to use these sentences and to whom’ (Richards, Platt and Weber, 1985: 49). This helped to swing the focus f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1. An overview of applied linguistics
• PART 1: Description of language and language use
• 2. Grammar
• 3. Vocabulary
• 4. Discourse analysis
• 5. Pragmatics
• 6. Corpus linguistics
• PART 2: Essential areas of enquiry in applied linguistics
• 7. Second language acquisition
• 8. Psycholinguistics
• 9. Sociolinguistics
• 10. Focus on the language learner: Styles, strategies and motivation
• 11. Forensic linguistics and language and the law
• 12. Multilingualism
• PART 3: Language skills and assessment
• 13. Listening
• 14. Speaking and pronunciation
• 15. Reading
• 16. Writing
• 17. Assessment
• 18. Suggested solutions
• Bibliography
• Index