- ID
- 5217013
- Banca
- FUNDEP (Gestão de Concursos)
- Órgão
- Prefeitura de Nova Serrana - MG
- Ano
- 2019
- Provas
- Disciplina
- Inglês
- Assuntos
Text
What is applied linguistics?
Vivian Cook, Newcastle University
Polish Translation
If you tell someone you’re an applied linguist, they look at you with bafflement. If you amplify – it’s to do with linguistics – they still look baffled. You know, linguistics the science of language? Ah so you speak lots of languages? Well no, just English. So what do you actually do? Well I look at how people acquire languages and how we can teach them better. At last light begins to dawn and they tell you a story about how badly they were taught French at school.
The problem is that the applied linguists themselves don’t
have much clearer ideas about what the subject consists
of. They argue over whether it necessarily has anything to
do with language teaching or with linguistics and whether
it includes the actual description of language. All of these
views exist among applied linguists and are reflected in
the MA courses available at British universities under the
label of applied linguistics.
The language teaching view of applied linguistics parallels
TESOLorTEFL, by looking at ways of improving language
teaching, backed by a more rigorous study of language.
The motivation is that better teaching will be based on
a better understanding of language. However, in British
universities language teaching itself is not highly valued,
often carried out by ancillary staff, because it does not
lend itself easily to the kind of research publications that
university careers now depend upon.
The closeness of the link to linguistics is also crucial.
At one extreme you need the latest ideas hot from MIT
on the principle that information about linguistics must be
up-to-date – and linguistic theories change so fast that
undergraduates discover their first year courses are out
of date by their final year. It’s up to the end-users how
they make practical use of the ideas, not the applied
linguists.
This raises the issue whether other disciplines are as
important as linguistics for applied linguistics. Psychology
enters into many courses, as does education, particularly
ideas about testing and about language learning. To some
applied linguists the discipline draws on any subject with
anything to say about language teaching or language
learning. To others linguistics is the sole source of ideas.
Sometime this is referred to as the issue of ‘autonomous
applied linguistics’; is it a separate discipline or a poor
relative of linguistics?
To some, applied linguistics is applying theoretical
linguistics to actual data. Hence the construction of
dictionaries or the collection of ‘corpora’ of millions To some, applied linguistics is applying theoretical
linguistics to actual data. Hence the construction of
dictionaries or the collection of ‘corpora’ of millions of words of English are applied linguistics, as are the
descriptions of social networks or of gender differences
(but not usually descriptions of grammar). Once
applied linguistics seemed boundless, including the
study of first language acquisition and computational
linguistics. To many, however, applied linguistics has
become synonymous with SLA (though never linked
to first language acquisition). SLA (Second Language
Acquisition) research has had an enormous growth over
the past decades. It enters into all of the above debates.
Some people are concerned with classroom language
acquisition because of its teaching implications, drawing
mostly on psychological models of language and
language processing and on social models of interaction
and identity; others are concerned with SLA in natural
settings. On another dimension, SLA can be seen as
providing data to test out linguistic theories rather than
to increase our knowledge of SLA itself; they are then
more like linguists who happen to use SLA data than
investigators of SLA in its own right. On a third dimension
the linguistic world is more or less divided between those
who see language as masses of things people have said
and those who see it as knowledge in people’s minds.
Some SLAresearchers analyse large corpora of learner’s
utterances or essays; others test their ideas against the
barest minimum of data; neither side really accept that
the other has a valid point of view.
Applied linguistics then means many things to many
people. Discovering what a book or a course in applied
linguistics is about involves reading the small print
to discover its orientation. Those with an interest in
linguistic theory are going to feel frustrated when
bombarded with classroom teaching techniques; those
who want to handle large amounts of spoken or written
data will be disappointed by single example sentences
or experiments. Of course many people discover
unexpected delights. One of my students who came to
an MA course as an EFL course-writer ended up doing
a Ph.D. thesis and book on learnability theory. This does
not mean that most prospective MA students should not
look very carefully, say checking the titles of the modules
that actually make up the degree scheme, before they
back a particular horse.
Available at: <http://www.viviancook.uk>.
Accessed on: November 2nd, 2018 (Adapted).