Applied Linguistics As Problem Solving (2020-Ii) [PDF]

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APPLIED LINGUISTICS NIVEL VII CREDITS: 3 PRESENTIAL WORK: 3 HOURS/WEEK

INDEPENDENT WORK: 6 HOURS/WEEK

FACILITADOR OBJECTIVES: 1.      Estudiar el papel de la lingüística aplicada dentro de las ciencias del lenguaje y sus relaciones con la lingüística teórica. 2.      Ofrecer una visión panorámica de la multiplicidad de áreas de interés de la lingüística aplicada, desde las más tradicionales hasta las últimas tendencias. 3.      Proporcionar al alumnado una visión global de la investigación aplicada, cuantitativa y cualitativa, a partir del análisis práctico de datos recogidos de una variedad de contextos naturales. CONTENTS 1. Applied linguistics in the context of the language sciences. 1.1. ¿What is applied linguistics? 1.2. Fields of study and focus. 2. Traditional areas of interest in applied linguistics. 2.1. Language acquisition/learning and psychology of language. 2.2. Language teaching. 2.3. English for specific purposes. 2.4. Contrastive linguistics and translation. 3. Latest applications of discourse analysis. 3.1. Institutional Discourses. 3.2. Intercultural negotiation aspects. 3.3. Linguistic Analysis of legal transcriptions. 3.4. Forensic linguistics. 3.5. Genre Analysis. 4.

New areas and last tendencies.

4.1. Computational Linguistics. 4.2. Corpus Linguistics. 4.3. Other new technologies. METHODOLOGY: PRESENTIAL WORK: Teacher explanation and Students’ oral Presentations

INDEPENDENT WORK : Written essays

EVALUATION Del aprendizaje adquirido bajo la metodología presencial: Pruebas escritas

Independent work follow up: Essays submission

BIBLIOGRAPHY E. Alcaraz Varó, Inglés profesional y académico, Madrid, Alianza, 2000. J.P. Allen (ed.), The Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics, Vol. I, Readings for Applied Linguistics; Vol. II, Papers in Applied Linguistics; Vol. III, Techniques in Applied Linguistics; Vol. IV, Testing and Experimental Methods, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1973-1977. T. Boswood (ed.), New Ways of Using Computers in Language Teaching, Washington, TESOL, 1977. S.P. Corder, Introducing Applied Linguistics, Londres, Penguin, 1973. C. James, What is applied linguistics, International Journal of AppliedLinguistics, 3, 1993, 17-32.1.

Introduction to Applied Linguistics The concept of applied linguistics starts with the founding of the University of Edimburgh school of Applied Linguistics in 1956 and of the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C., in 1957. In the case of Edimburgh because the British Council for English wanted to provide specialist courses for high level teacher trainers and senior educators from both Britain and overseas countries in the national interest of a major English-speaking country. In the case of Washington because the Ford Foundation wanted to assist in solving the problem in language education aiming at promoting the learning and teaching of English for educational development, and to unluck the considerable funds necessary in order to establish an institutional base. Pit Corder, the founding father of British applied linguistics in the 1950s, described applied linguistics as ‘The theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue’ (Brumfit, 1995). Charles Ferguson one of the directors in Washington had as his main task to design and carry out multiple large-scale surveys of language use in Africa nd those countries that had recently obtained their independence from France or Britain. Linguistics is the science of language concerned with how languages work, develop and transmit meaning through verbal and non-verbal means. Linguistics has also ventured into the realms of social examination and recommendations. Applied linguistics, on the other hand, narrows its focus to more real-world considerations of learning and education. Since World War II, learning languages has increasingly come to the forefront, and applied linguists constantly is developing newer and better ways to acquire language skills. Applied linguistics studies how the brain processes language as well as the basic fundamentals in languages. It is also concerned with how language works, in order to determine how we can learn and remember it. How a language is used is also a consideration of applied linguists, in that it examines

ways of expressing meaning and communicating concepts. Language use also covers the areas of grammar and vocabulary and how these are defined for the purposes of education. Systemic functional linguistics for example, redefines how grammar is taught to children. SLA: Second Language Acquisition Second Language Acquisition, or SLA, refers to any language that is learned after the native language. However, it usually is mentioned in the context of English as a Second Language, ESL. Certainly, English is the most widely spoken and learned second language in the world. The Audio-Lingual Method, ALM, was a system where students learned language by repeating recorded phrases. Krashen's Monitor Model, and Communicative Language Teaching, CLT, are also some methods developed by applied linguistics. Sociolinguistics Also called the psychology of language, psycholinguistics studies the psychological and neurobiological considerations in language acquisition. Psycholinguists study the factors that enable people to learn, speak, understand and produce language. Modern researchers use biology, neuroscience and cognitive (how we learn) science in studying how humans process language. Practically, psycholinguistics looks at how the building blocks of language are learned, and developmental psycholinguists study a child's ability to acquire language. Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the generalities and varieties both within particular languages and among all language. Applied linguistics takes the result of those findings and "applies" them to other areas. The term "applied linguistics" is often used to refer to the use of linguistic research in language teaching only, but results of linguistic research are used in many other areas as well, such as lexicography and translation. "Applied linguistics" has been argued to be something of a misnomer, since applied linguists focus on making sense of and engineering solutions for real-world linguistic problems, not simply "applying" existing technical knowledge from

linguistics; moreover, they commonly apply technical knowledge from multiple sources, such as sociology (e.g. conversation analysis) and anthropology. Today, computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics. Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are areas of applied linguistics which have come to the forefront. Their influence has had an effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modeling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constraints. Linguistic analysis is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics used by many governments to verify the claimed nationality of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation to prove their claim. This often takes the form of an interview by personnel in an immigration department. Depending on the country, this interview is conducted in either the asylum seeker's native language through an interpreter, or in an international lingua franca like English. In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination about the speaker's nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic analysis can play a critical role in the government's decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker. The need for applied linguistics Language is at the heart of human life. Without it, many of our activities are inconceivable. Try to imagine making friends, falling in love, having practical ideals or taking political actions without words. Nevertheless, there are other activities which seem to exist without language, for example sexual relations, preparing and eating food, playing and listening to music. These activities are often developed and enhanced through language. People have used language throughout the history and across the world to gossip and chat, flirt and seduce, play games, sing songs, tell stories, insult enemies, pass on information, remember the past and lament the dead. Such activities are intrinsic to human life, since people do them without conscious analysis because we don`t need to know about language to use it effectively.

Language use is in many ways a natural phenomenon beyond conscious control in which we can intervene to make decisions answering many questions, such as, for example: What language skills should children attain beyond basic literacy? In communities with more than one language which ones should be used in schools, in law courts and official documents? Should every child study literature? In order to answer these questions it is reasonable to set out to investigate and understand the facts of language use, to organize and formalize what we know, and to subject our knowledge to rational consideration and crucial analysis. This is the aim of applied linguistics, the academic discipline concerned with the relation of knowledge about language to decision making in the real world.

UNIVERSIDAD TECNOLÓGICA DEL CHOCÓ “DIEGO LUÍS CÓRDOBA FACULTAD DE EDUCACIÓN PROGRAMA DE INGLÉS Y FRANCÉS LINGÜÍSTICA APLICADA NIVEL VII PROF: M.A. FIDEL ANTONIO BEJARANO APPLIED LINGUISTICS AS PROBLEM SOLVING Language teachers and dictionary makers are engaged in finding answers to questions related to language. For example, the language teachers face questions such as: What is known about the learner’s first language or any other language they know which might be interfering with their learning of the foreign language? What do grammarians say about this structure? What psychological barriers might be preventing the learning of the structure? Are some structures difficult to learn if they are tackled too early on? Is there an order in which structures are best presented? These are Potential linguistic questions for the solution of a grammatical problem. If we consider another of the problems, that of the dictionary writer looking for alternatives to the alphabetical dictionary, we might imagine a different set of questions, like the following: What is the internal structure of the vocabulary of the language(s) I am dealing with?

What do we know about the mental organization of vocabulary in human beings? Perhaps this can be utilized in Lexicographic dictionary organization? Dictionary makers on their part try to give answer to the following questions: What problems might a non-native user of the dictionary have with the organizing principle chosen? What place should information about grammar have in such a dictionary? Is a bilingual dictionary along non alphabetical lines possible? These are Potential linguistic questions for the solution of a lexicographic problem. The dictionary writer, like the language teacher, confronts the same basic questions: Can linguistics offer an approach or a solution to the problem at hand? If so, which branch(es) of linguistic study, and by what method(s)? How reliable is the information offered by linguists? How tenable are their theories and models of the language? In their day to day business, all professionals whose work involves language often face problems with no immediate or obvious solution within the habitual practice of their professional expertise. For this reason they seek the discipline of linguistics as a resource in the belief that it can offer insights and ways to solve these problems related to language in a variety of contexts corresponding to applied linguistics. Applied linguistics try to offer solutions to real-world problems related to language, which fall within the domain of this discipline. Professionals whose work involves language investigate these problems within their field of study. For example 1 A speech therapist sets out to investigate why a four-year-old child has failed to develop normal linguistics skills for a child of that age. 2 A teacher of English as a foreign language wonders why groups of learners sharing the same first language regularly make a particular grammatical mistake that learners from other language backgrounds do not. 3 An expert witness in a criminal case tries to solve the problem of who exactly instigated a crime, working only with statements made to the police. 4 An advertising copy writer searches for what would be the most effective use of language to target a particular social group in order to sell a product. 5 A mother-tongue teacher needs to know what potential employers consider important in terms of a school-leaver’s ability to write reports or other business documents

6 A historian wishes to understand the meanings of place-names in a particular geographical area and how they have changed over time. 7 A person constructing a language test for non-native speakers for entry into further education needs to know what the key linguistic or psycholinguistic indicators are of reading ability in a second or foreign language. 8 A literary scholar suspects that an anonymous work was in fact written by a very famous writer and looks for methods of investigating the hypothesis. 9 A dictionary writer ponders over possible alternatives to an alphabetically organized dictionary. 10 A computer programmer wrestles with the goal of trying to get a computer to process human speech or to get it to translate from one language into another. 11 A group of civil servants are tasked with standardizing language usage in their country, or deciding major aspects of language planning policy that will affect millions of people. 12 A body is set up to produce an international, agreed language for use by air-traffic controllers and pilots, or by marine pilots and ships’ captains. 13 A zoologist investigates the question whether monkeys have language similar to or quite distinct from human language and how it works. 14 A medical sociologist sets out to understand better the changes that occur in people’s use of language as they move into old age. What all these professional problems have in common is the possibility of turning to linguistics to seek insight and potential solutions. If they were to do this, the professionals directly involved would become, even if only temporarily, applied linguists. Over the last few decades, more and more people working in different professional areas have sought answers to significant problems by investigating how language is involved in their branch of human activity. This has been especially notable in very recent years in areas such as (3), (10) and (14) in the list of possible problems above (e.g. the growth of forensic applications of linguistics, see Kniffka et al. 1996; the growth of interest in language and the elderly, see Coupland et al. 1991). Other areas, such as (1), (2) and (8), have used linguistic knowledge and insight over a much longer period. In the future, even more professions will almost certainly turn to linguists for potential solutions to practical problems: the increasing sophistication of computers is just one obvious example where a correspondingly complex understanding of human language may be beneficial. Thus even more professionals will have the opportunity to become applied linguists. No one will need to embrace the whole range of the discipline of linguistics to find a solution to their particular problem. Linguistics itself is now an extremely broad discipline, and we

shall see in this book just how large a number of interests it encompasses. Furthermore, within this broad discipline, the various compartments into which the subject falls are themselves quite vast (e.g. see Malmkjaer’s 1991 encyclopedia of the discipline), and compartmentalization creates its own problems for the application of linguistics (see Brumfit 1980 for a discussion). What this book will try to do in its limited scope is to exemplify how language teachers and others involved directly or indirectly in language teaching and learning (such as materials writers, syllabus designers, dictionary writers, etc.) may approach their problems via the many and varied aspects of linguistic study. Wherever relevant, I will also mention work done by other, non-pedagogical applied linguists in the spirit of learning and benefiting from their insights and in the fostering of a shared professional identity, which can only be a good thing. The book cannot and does not pretend to offer prescriptions for the solving of every problem. You, the reader, will, it is hoped, see how and where linguistics might rub shoulders with your own professional preoccupations.

As we can see, applied linguistics is essentially a problem-driven discipline, rather than a theory-driven one, and the community of applied linguists has characterized itself in the historiography of the discipline by variety and Catholicism of theoretical orientation. This is in contrast to linguistics, where association with particular schools of thought or theories tends to exert considerably greater centripetal force. There is a set of responsibilities falling on the shoulders of linguists and applied linguists. These include: 1 The responsibility of linguists to build theories of language which are testable, which connect with perceived realities and which are not contradicted or immediately refuted when they confront those realities. 2 The responsibility of linguists to offer models, descriptions and explanations of language in order to satisfy not only intellectual rigor but intuition, rationality and common sense (but see Widdowson 1980 for comments on both sides of this particular coin). 3 The responsibility of applied linguists not to misrepresent theories, descriptions and models. 4 The responsibility of applied linguists not to apply theories, descriptions and models to illsuited purposes for which they were never intended.

5 The responsibility of applied linguists not simply to ‘apply linguistics’ but to work towards what Widdowson (1980) calls ‘relevant models’ of language description (see also Sridhar 1993, who sees applied linguists as generating their own paradigms for studying language). 6 The responsibility of applied linguists to provide an interface between linguists and practitioners where appropriate, and to be able to talk on equal terms to both parties (see James 1986). 7 The responsibility on both sides to adopt a critical position vis-à-vis the work of their peers, both within and across the two communities. 8 The responsibility of both communities to exchange experience with front-end practitioners such as language teachers, psychologists or social workers, who may not have a training in linguistics nor the time or resources to ‘do applied linguistics’ themselves, but who may be genuinely eager to communicate with both groups.