Applied linguistics - Apuntes Todos PDF

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1. AN OVERVIEW OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS What is applied linguistics? “Applied linguistics is the academic field that connects knowledge about language to decision making in the real world. The general role of applied linguistics is to make insights drawn from areas of language study relevant to such decision-making. In this sense AL mediates between theory and practice.” Applied linguistics: A branch of linguistics where the primary concern is the application of linguistic theories, methods, and findings to the elucidation of language problems which have arisen in other areas of experience. (Crystal) More AL definitions • • •

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Applied linguistics is concerned with language teaching in the mother tongue education or with the teaching and learning of foreign/second languages (Wilkins; Kaplan; Sridhar) The theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue (Brumfit). Applied linguistics is an academic discipline concerned with the relation of knowledge about language to decision making in the real world. Applied linguistics sets out to investigate problems in the world in which language is implicated, both educational and social problems”. (Cook) ’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 problems in the real world.” (Schmitt & Celce-Murcia )

The origins of AL The origins lie in the mid-20th effort to give academic underpinning to the study of language teaching and learning. Until the 1980s AL was associated with problems and puzzles surrounding language pedagogy, learning & acquisition. Applied linguistics VS theoretical linguistics “It may be a helpful way to distinguish between what linguistics and applied linguistics are concerned with is to distinguish between theory and data.” (Davies & Elder). “AL is essentially a problem-driven discipline, rather than a theory-driven one” (McCarthy) We distinguish linguistics and AP in terms of difference of orientation: • •

Linguistics is primarily concerned with language itself and with language problems. They provide evidence for better language description or for teaching a linguistic theory. Applied linguistics is interested in language problems for what they reveal about the role of language in people’s daily life.

Scope of applied linguistics and approaches AL concerns range from language learning, teaching, testing and teacher education, to language & the law, the language of institutions, communication,

media discourse, translation and interpreting, and language planning. Disciplines included in a broad view of AL: • • • • • •

Applications of methods and theories from linguistics Psycholinguistics: studies the relationship between linguistic behavior and the psychological processes (e.g., memory, attention). Ethnography: studies the forms and functions of communicative behavior, both verbal and non-verbal, in particular social settings. Ethnomethodology studies the techniques used in a linguistic interaction. Sociolinguistics: studies the relationship between language and society. Semiotics studies the properties of signaling systems, natural or artificial.

AL intends to address fundamental issues in language learning, such as: •

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Language acquisition: a term referring to the process or result of learning a particular aspect of a language, and ultimately the language as a whole. First language (mother tongue) is distinguishable from second language (a language other than the mother tongue used for a special purpose, e.g., for education, government) Bilingualism, second and foreign language education

LA encompasses according to Mouton de Gruyter: • • • • • •

Language acquisition, language teaching, sociolinguistics Neurolinguistics: studies the neurological basis of language development and use in human beings, especially of the brain’ s control over the processes of speech and understanding. Pragmatics: studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others. Discourse analysis: The study of stretches of spoken and written language above the sentence; the nature of conversation… Text/processing/translation, computational linguistics-machine translation Corpus linguistics: It uses large collections of both spoken and written natural texts that are stored on computers

Historical observations: The development of applied linguistics Traditionally, the primary concern of AP has been SLA theory, SLA pedagogy and their interface. Currently AP is interested in literacy, speech pathology, deaf education, interpreting and translating, communication practices, L1 acquisition, and lexicography (art and science of dictionary making). Early history •

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Samuel Johnson Dictionary of English language. It became the authority on the meanings of English words. It also has the effect of standardizing English spelling, which until that time had been relatively free. Robert Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar. Lowth prescribed what correct grammar should be. He based his English grammar on a classical Latin model. The result was that English, which is a Germanic language, was described by a linguistic system borrowed from Latin. This left us with rigid grammar rules: no multiple negatives, no split infinitives, and no ending a sentence with a preposition.

The 20th century: an overview •

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The Grammar-translation method was based on the learning of new grammar rules, a list of vocabulary and some practice examples to translate. The Direct method was more focused on the exposure to oral language to being able to use language. Michael West’s Reading method attempted to provide more exposure to the target language by promoting reading skills though vocabulary management (he controlled the number of times words appeared in any text) =>The Vocabulary Control Movement. Army method: Audiolingualism= emphasis on listening & speaking UG: children are born with an understanding of how languages work. Hymes’ communicative competence 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 and to whom. Halliday’s systemic functional grammar: Systemic Functional Grammar does not see language as something exclusively internal to the learner, but rather as means of functioning in society. She identifies 3 types of functions in language: ideational (telling people facts or experiences), interpersonal (maintaining personal relationships with people) and textual (expressing the connections within a text). Communicative language teaching, immersion programs. Impact of computer technology on AL (CALL: Computer-Assisted Language Learning allowed learners to work on individual computers to learn at their own pace.) Use of corpora.

Other definitions •

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Behaviorism was based on the view that all learning occurs through a process of imitation, practice, reinforcement, and habit. Language learning is a result of habit formation; whereas Chomsky’s cognitivism saw language as governed by cognitive factors, in particular a set of abstract rules which were assumed to be innate. CLT (communicative language teaching) is mainly focused on learners' message and fluency rather than their grammatical accuracy. Lexicology studies the history & actual state of a language’s vocabulary. Parole is the concrete use of the language (speech). A synchronic approach describes language at a specific moment, whereas a diachronic approach studies the development and evolution of a language through history. Competence is the knowledge possessed by native speakers of a language. It is distinguished from performance, which is the way a language system is used in communication. In short, competence involves “knowing” the language and performance involves “doing” something with the language The signifier is the mental concept associated with its material for and signified is the concept that a signifier refers to.

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Syntagmatic relation is the relation between words that cooccur in the same sentence or text, for example, the cat sat on the mat. Paradigmatic relation is the relation between words that can be substituted with another word in the same category, such as cat for dog. 2. FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

“First language acquisition is remarkable for the speed with which it takes place. Long before a child starts schools, he or she has become an extremely sophisticated language-user, operating a system for self-expression and communication to the speed of acquisition, the fact that it generally occurs, without over instruction, for all children, regardless of great differences in their circumstances, provides strong support for the idea that there is an innate predisposition in the human infant to acquire language. We can think of this as a special capacity for language with which each newborn child is endowed. By itself, however, this inborn language capacity is not enough.” (Yule) Theories of L1 acquisition 1. The behaviorist perspective: Skinner Language learning is simply a matter of imitation and habit formation. Children imitate the sound and patterns that they hear around them and receive positive reinforcement. They continue to imitate and practice these sounds and patterns until they form habits of correct language use. The behaviorist view imitation and practice as primary processes in language development. • •

Imitation: word for word repetition of someone else’s utterance. Ex: Mother: would you like some bread and peanut butter? Daughter: some bread and peanut butter Practice: repetitive manipulation of form. Ex: I can handle it. We can.

Conclusion: “Imitation and practice alone cannot explain errors in the preceding examples since the forms created by the child were never produced by adults. Rather, children appear to pick out patterns and then generalize them to new contexts. They create new forms or new uses of words until they finally figure out how the forms are used by adults.” “The behaviorist explanations for language acquisition offer a reasonable way of understanding how children learn some of the regular and routine aspects of language. However, their acquisition of the more complex grammatical structures requires a different sort of explanation”. 2. The innatism approach: Chomsky Not only behaviorism, but any approach relying solely on learning from the environment cannot account for language acquisition. The innatist approach is the most broadly influential theory of language acquisition. This was born in reaction to the behaviorist theory of learning based on imitation and habit formation. According to this theory large parts of the human language capacity are not learned from experience but innate:

built into the human brain from birth. Important components of language are not learned from the environment, but rather are innate. Kinds of evidence used to support Chomsky’s innatist position: 1. Virtually all children successfully learn their native language at a time in life when they would not be expected to learn something so complicated. 2. Children successfully master the basic structure of their native language in a variety of conditions, some which would be expected to enhance language development (e.g., caring, attentive parents who focus on the child’s language), and some which might be expected to inhibit it (e.g., abusive or rejecting parents). Children achieve different levels of vocabulary, creativity, social grace, and so on, but virtually all master the structure of the language spoken around them. 3. The language children are exposed to does not contain examples of all the information which they eventually know. 4. Animals even primates receiving intensive training from humans cannot learn to manipulate a symbol system as complicated as the natural language of a 3 or 4-year-old child. 5. Children seem to accomplish the complex task of language acquisition without having someone consistently pointing out to them which of the sentences they hear, and produce are ‘correct’, and which are not. 3. The critical period hypothesis in L1 acquisition Eric Lenneberg: It is difficult to find evidence from the CPH, since all normal children are exposed to language at an early age and consequently acquire language. However, history has documented a few ‘natural experiments’ where children have been deprived of contact with language. Ex: Victor & Genie Case. Universal grammar. Chomsky. In 1959 Chomsky’s attack on the behaviorist approach make it fall out favor. Language was now seen as governed by cognitive factors, in particular a set of abstract rules that were assumed to be innate. Chomsky 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 to be able to discard them. Chomsky posited that children are born with an understanding of the way languages work, 'Universal Grammar'. Children would know the underlying principles of language (e.g., languages have pronouns) and their parameters (some languages allow pronouns to be dropped in the subject position). Thus, they would need only enough exposure to a language to determine if their L1 allowed the deletion of pronouns or not. This parameter-setting would require less exposure than habit formation route. Universal grammar is a set of principles which are common to all languages. Children seem to develop language in similar schedule, and similarly to the way all children learn to walk. In learning the complex language system, young children, whose abilities are fairly limited in many ways, accomplish it with apparent ease, something adult 2nd language learners may envy. The linguistic knowledge contained in the UG is split into :

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Principles: universal elements that are te same in all languages. Parameters: like “switches” which can be set to either on or off.

The primary linguistic data is processed by the UG module in the mind. The result of the UG processing the input data is an adult grammar. Children’s language acquisition Children come to know more about the structure of their language than they could be expected to learn on the basis of the samples they hear. The language the child is exposed to in the environment is full of confusing information and does not provide all the information the child needs. Children are born with a special ability to discover for themselves the rules of a language system. Why it is not imitation? Imitation of some sort is probably involved in some aspects of acquisition. Take words, for example, there is only one way for children to learn that the word for “cat” is cat. They have to notice what the adults and then try to do the same, in other words they have to imitate what they hear. But the imitation won’t take us far, because there are parts of language that cannot be imitated, like sentences. Unlike words, which are memorized and stored in the brain, sentences are created as the need arises. Apart from greetings and other expression, most of the sentences we utter do not involve repeating and memorizing. 2 facts confirm imitation doesn’t explain how children learn to produce sentences: • •

Children are not good at imitating sentences that contain unknown words and structures. They repeat only what they can already say. They do not try to imitate sentences (maybe because they are not good)

ln sum, although children sometimes repeat what they have just heard (as do adults), imitation does not seem to be a very large part of the picture, especially when it comes to figuring out how sentences work. Why it is not teaching If children don't learn language by imitation, then how do they do it? Could it be that parents somehow teach their children to speak by explaining things or by correcting them? That too is unlikely. Parents correct their children when they make a mistake, but they don't try to explain why it was a mistake. There are two big problems with that idea. Parents don't try to correct their children’s language that often. In general parents seem to pay little attention to how children say things, they care about what their children say. They would respond “uh huh” to linguistic atrocities like “her curl my hair”, while correcting perfect natural sentences like “there’s an animal farmhouse” because it was actually a lighthouse. The other problem with the correction hypothesis is that children often don't respond very well to corrections. The key idea is that although parents usually don't make a deliberate effort to correct their children's speech, they often end up providing alternative sentences. Ex: a child says, "The dog runnned really fast, Daddy," and, without really thinking about it, her father says "Yes, he ran really fast, didn't he? Notice that the father said ran where the child said runned. He didn't actually try to correct his daughter, he was just trying to agree with her and keep the

conversation going, but he set a good example for her. Linguists call these responses recasts. A recast is a technique used in language teaching to correct learners' errors in such a way that communication is not obstructed. To recast an error, an interlocutor will repeat the error back to the learner in a corrected form. Although recasts look helpful mothers don’t provide them that often. (Fathers and siblings provide recasts too, but not as frequently as mothers do). With numbers like these, it would be pretty hard for 2-year-old to rely on their mother's recasts to learn a language. Not only do mothers leave the vast majority of their children's bad sentences alone, but they also sometimes partially repeat and change correct utterances. To complicate it more, there are even times when mothers repeat their child's imperfect utterances. The effectiveness of recasts is dubious. Take for example definite and indefinite articles (the/a) young children often drop these words, and parents sometimes respond with a recast that includes the missing element. However, this seemed to have no immediate effect. No matter how many recasts children heard, it didn't seem to speed up their learning of articles. On the other hand, we know that recasts are sometimes effective. Children are sensitive to recasts, especially, those that offer a direct and immediate contrast between the child's way of saying something and the adult way. Maybe recasts are more useful for remembering the forms that have already been learn than for learning new forms. If this is right, it means that recasts don’t help children to learn language. They just help them to get better at using what they’ve learn. This seems reasonable. If recasts were the key to language learning, we’d expect some children to be more successful at language learning than others since some parents provide more recasts than others. There cultures in which children aren’t treated as conversational partners until they can produce a sentence, yet they still learn their language without any difficulty or delayed. So, recasts are helpful but that they are not necessary. Motherese It has been suggested that one of the ways in which parents contribute to language acquisition is by speaking to children in a special way, called motherese, this type of speech is characterized by slow, careful articulation and the use of basic vocabulary items, short sentences, and exaggerated intonation. Fathers and siblings adjust their speech too, but not as much as mothers do. it is easy to see how the sorts of adjustments associated with motherese could be helpful to children. Slow, careful articulation makes speech easier to perceive and to break down into smaller parts. Restricted vocabulary, short sentences, and a focus...