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Applied Linguistics

حسن محمد القشي:طلبال إعداد

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Chapter 1

Introduction

Applied linguistics’ definition 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.

Some sub-fields of applied linguistics:

• Sociolinguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Discourse Analysis
• Assessment and Evaluation
• Language and Ideology
• Language and Technology
• Second Language Acquisition
• Translation and Interpretation

Regarding to the list above, we can say the relation between linguistics and applied linguistics that the first one is theoretical and the second is the applicational one. Noam Chomsky, an American linguistics who first introduced the concept of Competence and Performance as part of the foundation for his Generative grammar. According to him, “Competence” is what a person knows about language in the person’s mind, in contrast of “Performance” which it is the actual use of a language by a person. Chomsky’s linguistics, however, is not the only kind. In sociolinguistics, the focus is very much upon the relation between language and society. In functional linguistics, the concern is with language as a means of communication, the purposes it fulfils, and how people actually use their language. In corpus linguistics, vast databanks containing millions of words of actual language in use can be searched within seconds to yield extensive information about word frequencies and combinations which is not revealed by intuition.

Historical Development

Interest in languages and language teaching has an ancient history as ancient Greeks is, 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. If we focus on English, major attempts at linguistic description began with Samuel Johnson as he published his Dictionary of the English language which had the effect of standrazing English spelling in a time where it (words) was written in different form. About the same time, Robert Lowth published an influential grammar, short introduction to English

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Chapter 3

Language and languages

Different languages within one place sometimes causing some difficulties in communication level, for example, there are two possible solutions to speak to my Russian friend as Arabic speaker; one is for one, or both, sets of speakers to learn the other’s language, and the other solution is to employ a translator.

Attitudes to languages

While linguists regard all languages as equal and arbitrary systems capable of fulfilling the same functions, this is far from how they are perceived by language users. Some languages are popularly regarded as being less complex than others. Others are popularly as being more beautiful and romantic and so on. Language users have their own views too.

The languages of nations

In addition to academic linguistic and popular approaches, there are two other ways in which languages can be compared, both of which are of particular importance in the contemporary world. These are by (a) numbers of speakers and by (b) geographical distribution. Powerful nations have frequently asserted their unity by promoting one single majority language in a standard written form while simultaneously suppressing or ignoring minority languages. In fact, the majority of the world’s languages are much smaller, some with only a few hundred speakers, and for these languages that have no more speakers alive, death was their fate which is known by language death. For that, on personal level, a lot of people must change their tongue to go to work, to speak to elderly relatives, making this code-switching a salient and significant part of their daily experience.

The growth of English

English in addition to its 400 million or so first language speakers, and over a billion people who live in a country where it is an official language, is now taught as the main foreign language in virtually every country, and used for business, education, and access to information by a substantial proportion of the world’s population. Furthermore, it is the dominant language of the internet and with the frequent absence of available software for writing systems other than the Roman alphabet, electronic mails is often conducted in English, even among people who share another language. This new situation means that the learning and use of English as additional language is both a major language need and also one of the salient language experiences of their lives.

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Both non-native and native speakers are involved in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) as teachers planners, administrators, publishers and testers.

Chapter 4

Vocabulary

One of the most difficult questions is “what is a word?” and there are variety of answers due to the variety of their reasons. One of these answers is: the combination of groups of letters in a speech or writing text which has a meaning. It is important to teach students words in order to make them communicate with the different information they have. A teacher can assessment them whether they learned the words he gave them, hypothetically, or not by seeing who do know words more than the others. It is necessary to know, also, that there is two main domains of vocabulary knowledge:

1. Receptive (involves recognition and understanding like listening and reading)
2. Productive (the actual use of a word like writing and speaking)

In addition, students should know six things about a word:

• The using of a word
• Its meaning
• Its spelling
• Its pronunciation
• Its synonyms
• It’s part of speech

In this regards, one usage of words is to count them for seeing how long a book is or how fast someone can speak words per a minute. This kind of counting called counting word tokens. The sentence “to be or not to be, that is the question” contains ten tokens. Though the word “be” have written twice, it is counted each time it occurs. So, we can define token as the number of words in a sentence. Another usage is for knowing how much sight vocabulary a learner has. This one called counting word types. The sentence “to be or not to be, that is the question” contains eight words type. Both “be” and “to” occur twice, and so they are not counted after their first occurrence. Talking about words, language users see closely related word forms as belonging to the same word family. A major problem with counting word families is in deciding what should be counted as a member of a family. The most conservative way is to count lemmas. A lemma is a set of related words that consist of the stem form and inflected forms that are all the same part of speech. So, approach, approaches, approached, approaching would all be members of the

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The core of the meaning-focused input strand of a course is a well-organized, well- monitored, substantial extensive reading programme based largely, but not exclusively, on graded readers. Nation and Wang (1999) estimate that second language learners need to be reading at least one graded reader every two weeks in order for noticeable learning to occur. Listening also a source of meaning-focused input. Quantity of input, which directly affects repetition, can be partly achieved through repeated listening, where learners listen to the same story several times over several days.

Learning Vocabulary from Meaning-focused Output (Listening and

Reading).

Learning from meaning-focused output, that is, learning through speaking and writing. It is necessary to move receptive knowledge into productive knowledge. This enhancement of vocabulary through the productive skills can be occur in several ways:

First. Activities can be designed (such as those involving definitions).

Second. Speaking activities (like involving a group work to negotiate the meanings of unknown words).

Third. Using partly known word in speaking or writing (that can help strengthen and enrich knowledge of the word).

Deliberate Vocabulary Learning

Studies comparing incidental vocabulary learning with direct vocabulary learning characteristically show that direct learning is more effective. This is not surprising as noticing and giving attention to language learning generally makes that learning more effective (Schmidt, 1990). Also, deliberate learning is more focused and goal-directed than incidental learning. There is a long history of research on deliberate vocabulary learning, which has resulted in a very useful set of learning guidelines (Nation, 2001). These guidelines are illustrated below through the use of word cards.

1. Retrieve rather than recognize
2. Use appropriate groups of cards
3. Space the repetition
4. Repeat the words aloud or to yourself
5. Process the words thoughtfully
6. Avoid interference
7. Avoid a serial learning effect
8. Use context where this helps

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Strategy Development

There are four major strategies that help with finding the meaning of unknown words and making the words stay in memory. These strategies are:

1. Guessing from context (guessing a meaning for a word from context clues is the most useful of all the strategies. To learn the strategy and to use it effectively, learners need to know 95-98% of the tokens in a text. Training in the skill of guessing results in improved guessing. Such training should focus on linguistic clues in the immediate context of the unknown word, clues from the wider context including conjunction relationships, common-sense and background knowledge. Word part analysis is not a reliable means of guessing, but it is a very useful way of checking on the accuracy of a guess based on context clues.)
2. Learning from word cards
3. Using word parts (learning from word cards and using word parts are usually frowned on by teachers. there are also very useful mnemonic strategies that can increase the effectiveness of such learning. The most well-researched of these is the “keyword technique” which typically gives results about 25% higher than ordinary rote learning. The keyword technique is used to help link the form of a word to its meaning, and so can be brought into play once the learner has access to the meaning of the word. The word parts are like keywords, and the analysis of the word into parts is like the first step of the keyword technique. The second step is to relate the meaning of the parts to the meaning of the whole word, which is a simple procedure for apposition. This is done by restating the meaning of the word including the meaning of the parts in the definition - ‘placed next to each other’.)
4. Dictionary use (dictionaries may be monolingual, bilingual, or bilingualized. Learners show strong preferences for bilingual dictionaries, and research indicates that bilingualized dictionaries are effective in that they cater for the range of preferences and styles.)

Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge

or assessing lexical knowledge

Vocabulary tests can have a range of purposes:

1. To measure vocabulary size (useful for placement purposes or as one element of a proficiency measure).
2. To measure what has just been learned (a short-term achievement measure).
3. To measure what has been learned in a course (a long-term achievement measure).
4. To diagnose areas of strength and weakness (a diagnose measure).

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a vocabulary of 2000-3000 words might give you access to a very much larger vocabulary which could be constructed and decoded on-line.

Vocabulary Size and Language Proficiency

This means that the relationship between vocabulary size and overall linguistic ability may differ from one language to another. In English, there is relatively close relationship between how many words you know, as measured on the standard vocabulary tests, and how well you perform on reading tests, listening tests and other formal tests of your English ability. In other languages, it is much less clear that this relationship holds up in a straightforward way, This means that we would not always expect to find that vocabulary plays important role in learning these languages as it does in English. The general point here is that the sheer size of English vocabulary has a very marked effect on the way we teach English, and severely constrains the level of achievement we expect of learners. Most people agree that fluent English speakers need very large vocabularies, and that we should rely principally on the learners’ own motivation to get them to these high levels of vocabulary knowledge.

Chapter 5

Language Assessment

Whenever we talk about assessment, two important questions come to one’s mind; (1) why are we looking for assessment? (2) what are the main purposes for assessment? The answer of such questions could be briefly as the following:

1. Testing (is a tool for assessment).
2. Evaluation (is related to decision making).
3. Measurement (is usually associated with numbers).
4. Accountability (for example, either high marks or low marks of all classroom’s students of a course is an evidence for a problem. Students grades shall be variable).
5. Improvement

Equally important, it is necessary to know the types of test:

1. Proficiency test (sometimes it is called standards, like TOEFL and IELTS).
2. Achievement test (like the ones in schools to see how much students obtained from the objectives of a course. It is usually taken in the end of the course “finals” or during it “midterms”).

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3. Progress test (it is taken during the course to see students’ progress whether they are doing good or not “quizzes”).
4. Diagnostic test (it is used to see where the strength or weak points of students).
5. Placement test (it is used to divide students into different levels).

Again, it is suitable to mention that there are three characteristics to measure a test:

1. Validity (a) face validity (b) content validity (c) construct validity.
2. Reliability (a) statistics (b) split half.
3. Practicality

Finally, students should be able to distinguish between the test types formats, which are:

1. Objectives (like true and false, matching, multiple choice questions, or gap filling with suggested-answers).
2. Subjectives (like define, list, essay, discuss questions, or gap filling without suggested-answers).

Objective test formats’ question accepts only one specific answer, and the examiner have no influence on your marks. In contrast, subjective test formats’ question may accept different answer, and the examiner have an influence on your marks.

Test Scoring

There are two big issues in test scoring that could face any examiner:

1. Fairness (for whatever reason like being tired from evaluation lots of paper or anything else).
2. Interpreting (like the lack of understanding students writing, point of view or else).