five generations of applied linguistics

FIVE GENERATIONS OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS SOME FRAMEWORK

ISSUES1

Albert Weideman Department of Didactics University of the Western Cape Private Bag X17 Bellville 7535 E-mail albertwuwcacza A number of discussions in recent years have kept alive the debate on the definition of applied linguistics The range of the debate covers both ends of the spectrum of applied linguistic work the philosophical and the practical This paper attempts to put a response to such (re-)considerations into an interpretative framework and considers the conception of the discipline as it has evolved over five generations of applied linguistics The argument of the paper is that different historical understandings of applied linguistic work point to the relativity of the discipline and prevent its practitioners from entertaining the belief that because they are doing applied science their designed solution to a language problem will be sufficient 0 First questions A handful of discussions (James 1993 Sridhar 1993 Masny 1996 Lightbown and Spada 1993 and Stevick 1990) have re-opened the debate on the definition of applied

linguistics The first three discussions are of a foundational character the 1 This is a substantially reworked and expanded version of a set of arguments

presented at the SAALA 1994 conference

Framework issues are themselves foundational issues Normally enquiries involving the framework for our actions and endeavours attempt to answer a number of such first questions 10487081048708What is our vision what are the perspectives that support our work 10487081048708What underlying views and assumptions colour and determine our actions 10487081048708How is the world organized and how do our own endeavours fit into that structure The idea that we have of the world and its structure determines the way that we respond to that world to the contexts we live in and to our own actions (cf Masny 1996 21 who refers to our ways of understanding and ways of being in the world) This responsiveness or respons-ibility is the very essence of our lives also of our professional lives as language teachers teacher trainers and applied linguists Our responsiveness in the above sense is also without doubt always situated historically We therefore respond in and to a particular historical context All of this applies equally to our visions and practices as applied linguists

1 The rise of applied linguistics In order to begin to respond to framework questions such as those posed above we need to gain a historical understanding of applied linguistics Applied linguistics as it relates to language teaching is a fairly modern phenomenon It arose in the 1940s in the latter part of the Second World War The war effort required American soldiers to be able to speak the languages of the Pacific or of other places where Americans were dispatched to do battle Some theoretical linguists who had an intimate knowledge of the structure of especially the indigenous American Indian languages took up this concern At the inception of applied linguistics as a discipline the first concern was thus with the application of linguistic analyses to language teaching In audio-lingualism which marks the beginning of modern applied linguistics we have an attempted solution to the problem of language teaching that its authors believed could be justified in addition to linguistic analysis by behaviourist psychology Those of us who came through language laboratories in the 60s will remember the Skinnerean approach that supported the learning theory behind audio-lingualism the more one repeats things the more likely you are to learn them Implicit in the approach was also a theory that in the same way that the linguist dissects language one needs to break language up into little units Questions were not asked about whether units of analysis and units of learning could be the same thing Furthermore although the manner in which these bits would actually come together in the mind of the learner remained a mystery to behaviourists still they believed firmly that it would somehow happen In some fashion all these fragments would be synthesized Where the theory had left a vacuum common sense at least seemed to imply that smaller digestible units were more easily learnable The approach was imbued with the notion that learning takes place incrementally in small portions Most importantly to its proponents audio-lingualism prescribed a method that was indebted to linguistic theory in its scientifically chosen and arranged language 4

teaching materials Fries (1945) insists that this approach depends on materials that are arranged according to linguistic principles that the contribution of the techniques of scientific analysis to language teaching is to provide a thorough and consistent check of the language material if the language teaching method that derives from this is to be effective in ensuring the maximum progress in the language being learned by the studentThere have of course been debates about whether the debt that audio-lingualism owes to linguistics is not much more indirect than is often claimed or indeed whether the aural-oral procedure of audio-lingual teaching has anything to do with learning theory (cf Carroll 1971 110) but that is another debate What matters is that the proponents of audio-lingualism thought and believed that they were applying linguistic analysis and that in doing so their efforts were scientific and had for that reason become authoritative James sums it up (1993 23) This approach says that since linguistics is about language and it is language that we teach linguistics must also be about L2 teaching Applied linguistics at its inception therefore responded in the dual sense described above (a) to the way its originators saw the world (b) to the urgent demands of its historical context Of these response (a) was to return to haunt the fledgling discipline The belief that scientific analysis will lead not only to truth but to the desired behaviour in the client has been widespread in applied linguistics As such it has been held as an article of faith which as Stevick (1990 17) points out is pervasive unrecognized and therefore very powerful As Stevick referring to Maleys pronouncements also explains those assumptions that remain untested are comparable to the assumptions that lead to acceptance or rejection of what are called religions (1990 4) My thesis is therefore that the view that the originators of the discipline had of

In an earlier analysis of the vacuity of Lados claim that his seventeen principles of a scientific approach to language teaching were indeed derivable from linguistic theory (Lado 1964 49ff) I concluded Such statements on the application of linguistics in language teaching would no doubt have been seen to be bordering on the absurd if it had not been for the aura of scientific truth in which they are dressed up What is ludicrous upon subjecting them to closer scrutiny however becomes tragic when one is reminded that these principles provided the scientific justification for one of the most influential approaches to the teaching of foreign languages viz the audio-lingual method (Weideman 1987 42) It is a point that applied linguists would do well to remember and the rest of this discussion will attempt to articulate a way of becoming critically aware mdash responsible mdash in doing applied linguistics In this sense I would agree with James (1993 17) that applied linguistics is still under-defined 2 The further historical development of applied linguistics Applied linguistics responded in successive waves to a complex set of historical influences and can be discerned to have undergone various adjustments to bring it into line with the ideas of new users and its context of use For the sake of coming to an understanding of these developments I shall categorize them as five successive generations of the discipline with the linguistic behaviourist forefather discussed in section 1 above constituting the first of these The generation that filled the shoes of this parent can be characterized as continuing the linguistic tradition in applied linguistics The initial kinds of analyses that were considered important before namely phonological morphological and syntactic analyses for a while remained prominent in applied 6

linguistic work But the scope of linguistic analysis itself soon broadened to include semantic studies text linguistics discourse analysis and all kinds of language studies that placed language in a social context and claimed therefore that language was a social phenomenon an instrument of communication Those studies began to influence applied linguistics as well as is evident in the development of some varieties of communicative teaching at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 80s This generation would fall into what Sridhar (1993 5) categorizes as the extended paradigm model of applied linguistics What all these developments yielded in the end however remained a linguistic conception of applied linguistics It said in essence that if you wanted to teach languages then you had to make an analysis of language first This conception did not endure There was obviously something missing For example what was missing mdash at least initially mdash in the communicative approach was a theory of language learning The audio-lingualists at least could claim such a theory for their designs but what sort of learning theory people were asking in the early 80s was there behind communicative language teaching While many could readily agree that not the forms of language but also its functions were important considerations in designing language courses how students would actually learn better was not clear at the inception of communicative teaching Initially this was the Achilles heel of the communicative approach As a result the predominance of linguistic concerns in applied linguistics came under scrutiny and those working in the field began to borrow from a multitude of other disciplines from pedagogy from psychology and especially from that branch of the latter that dealt with learning theory The stimulus provided in what some still considered the source discipline linguistics by the rise of transformational generative grammar and the latterrsquos own reliance on (and contribution to) cognitive psychology was another cross-current that aided this development In a word by linking up with insights from various disciplines other than linguistics third generation applied linguistics became a multi-disciplinary enterprise 7

It is difficult to summarize in a few sentences what was in effect a decade of criticism of and change in applied linguistics One important criticism stands out a concern that remained in spite of the fact that applied linguistics became a multi-disciplinary undertaking in the early to mid-80s This criticism was remarkable in that it was evidence of a practical classroom concern that helped to change applied linguistics mdash a practitioners concern one might call it The criticism concerned the confusion of analytical units with units of learning Once one has analyzed a language into forms and sentences mdash all highly abstract analytical objects theoretical entities not real ones mdash the question remained are these units necessarily the best units for learning a language that is not ones own As Corder (1986 186-187) puts it The syllabus that a teacher uses is essentially a linear one a list of linguistic forms in a certain order From all the evidence we have about the way linguistic knowledge develops spontaneously in the learner that is not the way things happen The question remained unanswered in third generation applied linguistics even among those who entertained social views of language and were using other units of language such as notions and functions as the building blocks with which language courses could be designed Again the influence of Chomskyan ideas on applied linguistics should not be underestimated Chomskys view of language was taken less as good linguistics to be applied in language teaching than as good psychology a psychology that could potentially provide an explanation for how languages are learned and how second languages are acquired Second language acquisition research was the characteristic feature therefore of what I would call fourth generation applied linguistics As Diane Larsen-Freeman (1993) pointed out in a keynote address to AILA language teaching methods today unlike those of the 60s have grown out of and have been influenced by second language acquisition research Second language acquisition research gave applied linguistics the hope of finding out enough about how one learns another language in order to know how language 8

teachers can arrange things in a classroom mdash which normally is not a very friendly environment in which to learn a language mdash to facilitate language learning Since it appeared that learning another language is easier and more successful outside of the classroom than inside it the expectation was that second language acquisition research could tell us how to replicate in a classroom those conditions that exist outside of it and which appear to make language learning easier Hence as Lightbown and Spada (1993 72) remark The design of communicative language teaching programs has sought to replace some of the characteristics of traditional instruction with those more typical of natural acquisition contexts The influence of Krashen on third generation applied linguistics perhaps stands out more than any other and the language teaching methodologies that are a prime example of this influence come together in the Natural Approach (Krashen amp Terrell 1983 Terrell 1985) These ideas struck a powerful chord in the minds of teachers who had already abandoned traditional grammar translation methods and audio-lingualism for communicative teaching More recently in the late eighties applied linguistics at least in the way that it is practised in South Africa has come to rely more heavily on social theory This fifth generation type of applied linguistics is characterised more than anything else by constructivism In a way this resulted in a revival of the older ideas on experiential learning that somehow when we learn we construct knowledge in our interactions with others be they teachers or peers Knowledge is systematically constructed in interactions with others In order to learn students need an environment that provides both stimuli to learn and resources for learning This rather stale observation takes on new meaning as we agree that students must construct their own knowledge New knowledge comes only from the engagement of the students own interest in something beyond her present understanding (Moulton 1994 33) In constructivism incidentally one found a belated psychological justification for communicative teaching (cf Greyling 1993) All of the basic techniques of the communicative approach viz information gap exercises role play tasks and group 9

information gathering techniques were ideal techniques for allowing the learner to build a language in interaction with others This generation of applied linguistic work is well represented by research that has been called lsquointerpretiversquo since such research proposes that all knowledge is culturally embedded in specific social contexts and that it therefore needs to be understood from the particular points of view of the people acting in these contexts and how they collaborate to construct their realities socially (Cumming 1994 685) As Spada (1994 686) points out the value of such analysis is that it allows one to examine interactions (for example between teacher and learner or between learner and learner) that may be more or less effective for language learning to take place thus allowing the inexperienced teacher to become sensitive to good (or ineffective) practice and the experienced teacher to reflect on and find a systematic rational justification for effective classroom performance The five generations of applied linguistic work discussed above can be summarised in the following diagram

Description Characterised by

1 Linguistic behaviourist

lsquoscientificrsquo approach

2 Linguistic lsquoextended paradigm modelrsquo

language is a social phenomenon

3 Multi-disciplinary model

attention also to learning theory and pedagogy

4 Second language acquisition research

experimental research into how languages are learned

5 Constructivism knowledge of a new language is interactively constructed

The role of applied linguistics in material developmentPoint of departure Good materials are a must for successful teachingAim of group-work To reflect upon and discuss about material development forbilingual teachingStep 1 Look at the diagram below about development of materials Theaim of the diagram is to illustrate that there are various facetsinvolved in material developmentStep 2 Discuss 1 Who develops materials at your school eg teachers expertsthe following 2 What materials do you develop for which subject in whichquestions language3 Which curriculum do you use for the bilingual subject4 Is the language sufficiently developed linguistically for use asmedium of instruction eg corpus development translationproblems5 What problems do you have in developing materials6 What about the costs7 What advantages and disadvantages do you face in using the

available materials or in developing your ownStep 3 Fill in the diagram below and re -design it if necessary on thebasis of the answers you have given to the question aboveAuthors ofmaterialCorpusdevelopmentTranslationproblemsRole oftheteacherCostsOtherproblemsDisadvantagesadvantagesMATERIALDEVELOPMENT

Applied linguistics

WHAT IS APPLIED LINGUISTICS THE HISTORY OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS BRANCHES OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS

What is applied linguistics

Vivian Cook University of Newcastle upon Tyne

If you tell someone youre an applied linguist they look at you with bafflement If you amplify its 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 dont 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 TESOL or TEFL 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 Its 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 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 Now many who call themselves applied linguists seldom attend general organisations such as BAAL (British Association of Applied Linguistics) but go to more specialist conferences such as EUROSLA (European Second Language Association) for second language acquisition (SLA) or MATSDA (Materials Development Association)

for materials construction

To many however applied linguistics has become synonymous with SLA (though never linked to first language acquisition) SLA 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 peoples minds Some SLA researchers analyse large corpora of learners 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 PhD 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

History of Applied Linguistics

G Richard Tucker

The term applied linguistics refers to a broad range

of activities which involve solving some language-related problem or addressing some language-related concern It appears as though applied linguistics at least in North America was first officially recognized as an independent course at the University of Michigan in 1946 In those early days the term was used both in the United States and in Great Britain to refer to applying a so-called scientific approach to teaching foreign languages including English for nonnative speakers Early work to improve the quality of foreign language teaching by Professors Charles Fries (University of Michigan) and Robert Lado (University of Michigan then Georgetown University) helped to bring definition to the field as did the 1948 publication of a new journal Language Learning A Quarterly Journal of Applied Linguistics

During the late 1950s and the early 1960s the use of the term was gradually broadened to include what was then referred to as automatic translation In 1964 following two years of preparatory work financed by the Council of Europe the Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquee (the International Association of Applied Linguistics usually referred to by the French acronym AILA) was founded and its first international congress was held in Nancy France Papers for the congress were solicited in two distinct strandsforeign language teaching and automatic translation

Applied Linguistics Today

Over the intervening years the foci of attention have continued to broaden Today the governing board of AILA describes applied linguistics as a means to help solve specific problems in societyapplied linguistics focuses on the numerous and complex areas in society in which language plays a role There appears to be consensus that the goal is to apply the findings and the techniques from research in linguistics and related disciplines to solve practical problems To an observer the most notable change in applied linguistics has been its rapid growth as an interdisciplinary field In addition to foreign language teaching and machine translation a partial sampling of issues considered central to the field of applied linguistics today includes topics such as language for special purposes (eg language and communication problems related to

aviation language disorders law medicine science) language policy and planning and language and literacy issues For example following the adoption of English as the working language for all international flight communication by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) some applied linguists concerned themselves with understanding the kinds of linguistic problems that occur when pilots or flight engineers from varying backgrounds communicate using a nonnative language and how to better train them to communicate in English more effectively

Some applied linguists are concerned with helping planners and legislators in countries develop and implement a language policy (eg planners are working in South Africa to specify and to further develop roles in education and government not only for English and Afrikaans but also for the other nine indigenous languages) or in helping groups develop scripts materials and literacy programs for previously unwritten languages (eg for many of the 850+ indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea)

Other applied linguists have been concerned with developing the most effective programs possible to help adult newcomers to the United States or other countries many of whom have limited if any prior education develop literacy in the languages which they will need for survival and for occupational purposes Other topics currently of concern to applied linguists are the broad issue of the optimal role of the mother tongue in the education of culturally and linguistically diverse students the language of persuasion and politics developing effective tools and programs for interpretation and translation and language testing and evaluation

In the United Kingdom the first school of applied linguistics is thought to have opened in 1957 at the University of Edinburgh with Ian Catford as Head In the United States a nonprofit educational organization the CENTER FOR APPLIED LINGUISTICS (CAL) was founded in 1959 with Charles Ferguson as its first Director CALs mission remains to promote the study of language and to assist people in achieving their educational occupational and social goals through more effective communication The organization carries out its mission by collecting and

disseminating information through various clearinghouses that it operates by conducting practical research by developing practical materials and training individuals such as teachers administrators or other human resource specialists to use these to reduce the barriers that limited language proficiency can pose for culturally and linguistically diverse individuals as they seek full and effective participation in educational or occupational opportunities

Major branches of applied linguistics

BILINGUALISM MULTILINGUALISM COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION (CMC) CONVERSATION ANALYSIS LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT DISCOURSE ANALYSIS LANGUAGE PEDAGOGY SOCIOLINGUISTICS SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION LANGUAGE PLANNING AND POLICIES FORENSIC LINGUISTICS TRANSLATION

The term multilingualism can refer to an occurrence regarding an individual speaker who uses two (bilingualism)or more languages a community of speakers where two or more languages are used or between speakers of different languages

Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) can be defined broadly as any form of human interaction across two or more networked computers While the term has traditionally referred to those communications that occur via computer-mediated formats (ie instant messages e-mails chat rooms)it has also been applied to other forms of text-based interaction such as text messaging (Thurlow Lengel amp Tomic2004) Research on CMC focuses largely on the social effects of different computer-supported communication technologies Many recent studies involve Internet-based social networking supported by social software

Conversation analysis (commonly abbreviated as CA) is the study of talk in interaction CA generally

attempts to describe the orderliness structure and sequential patterns of interaction whether this is institutional (in the school doctors surgery courts or elsewhere) or casual conversation Thus use of the term conversation to label this disciplinary movement is misleading if read in a colloquial sense as many have In light of this one of CAs principal practitioners Emanuel Schegloff has more recently identified talk-in-interaction as CAs topic Perhaps for this same reason others (eg Jonathan Potter) who use CA methods identify themselves as discourse analysts (DA) though that term was first used to identify researchers using methods different from CA (eg Levinson 1983) and still identifies a group of scholars larger than those who use only CA methods

Inspired by ethnomethodology it was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s principally by the sociologist Harvey Sacks and among others his close associates Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson Sacks died early in his career but his work was championed by others in his field and CA has now become an established force in sociology anthropology linguistics speech-communication and psychology It is particularly influential in interactional sociolinguistics discourse analysis and discursive psychology as well as being a coherent discipline in its own right Recently CA techniques of sequential analysis have been employed by phoneticians to explore the fine phonetic detail of speech

Discourse analysis (DA) or discourse studies is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written spoken or signed language use

The objects of discourse analysisdiscourse writing talk conversation communicative event etcare variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences propositions speech acts or turns-at-talk Contrary to much of traditional linguistics discourse analysts not only study language use beyond the sentence boundary but also prefer to analyze naturally occurring language use and not invented examples

Discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of social science disciplines including linguistics

anthropology sociology cognitive psychology social psychology international relations communication studies and translation studies each of which is subject to its own assumptions dimensions of analysis and methodologies

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society including cultural norms expectations and context on the way language is used Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics

It also studies how lects differ between groups separated by certain social variables eg ethnicity religion status gender level of education etc and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social class or socio-economic classes As the usage of a language varies from place to place (dialect) language usage varies among social classes and it is these sociolects that sociolinguistics studies

The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and Japanese linguists in the 1930s and also by Gauchat in Switzerland in the early 1900s but none received much attention in the West until much later The study of the social motivation of language change on the other hand has its foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century Sociolinguistics in the west first appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered by linguists such as William Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK

Second language acquisition is the process by which people learn a second language in addition to their native language(s) The term second language is used to describe the acquisition of any language after the acquisition of the mother tongue There is also research into the similarities and differences of Third Language Acquisition The language to be learned is often referred to as the target language or L2 compared to the first language L1 Second language acquisition may be abbreviated SLA or L2A for L2 acquisition

The term language acquisition became commonly used after Stephen Krashen contrasted it with formal and non-constructive learning However second

language acquisition or SLA has become established as the preferred term for this academic discipline

Though SLA is often viewed as part of APPLIED LINGUISTICS it is typically concerned with the language system and learning processes themselves whereas applied linguistics may focus more on the experiences of the learner particularly in the classroom Additionally SLA has mostly examined naturalistic acquisition where learners acquire a language with little formal training or teaching

Pragmatics is the study of the ability of natural language speakers to communicate more than that which is explicitly stated The ability to understand another speakers intended meaning is called pragmatic competence An utterance describing pragmatic function is described as metapragmatic Another perspective is that pragmatics deals with the ways we reach our goal in communication Suppose a person wanted to ask someone else to stop smoking This can be achieved by using several utterances The person could simply say Stop smoking please which is direct and with clear semantic meaning alternatively the person could say Whew this room could use an air purifier which implies a similar meaning but is indirect and therefore requires pragmatic inference to derive the intended meaning

Pragmatics is regarded as one of the most challenging aspects for language learners to grasp and can only truly be learned with experience

Forensic linguistics is the name given to a number of sub-disciplines within applied linguistics and which relate to the interface between language the law and crime

The range of topics within forensic linguistics is diverse but research occurs in the following areas

Translation is the action of interpretation of the meaning of a text and subsequent production of an equivalent text also called a translation that communicates the same message in another language The text to be translated is called the source text and the language it is to be translated into is called

the target language the final product is sometimes called the target text

Translation must take into account constraints that include context the rules of grammar of the two languages their writing conventions and their idioms A common misconception is that there exists a simple word-for-word correspondence between any two languages and that translation is a straightforward mechanical process A word-for-word translation does not take into account context grammar conventions and idioms

Translation is fraught with the potential for spilling over of idioms and usages from one language into the other since both languages repose within the single brain of the translator Such spilling-over easily produces linguistic hybrids such as Franglais (French-English) Spanglish (Spanish-English) Poglish (Polish-English) and Portunol (Portuguese-Spanish)

The art of translation is as old as written literature Parts of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh among the oldest known literary works have been found in translations into several Asiatic languages of the second millennium BCE The Epic of Gilgamesh may have been read in their own languages by early authors of the Bible and of the Iliad

With the advent of computers attempts have been made to computerize or otherwise automate the translation of natural-language texts (machine translation) or to use computers as an aid to translation (computer-assisted translation)

Applied linguistics




G Richard Tucker



1 The rise of applied linguistics In order to begin to respond to framework questions such as those posed above we need to gain a historical understanding of applied linguistics Applied linguistics as it relates to language teaching is a fairly modern phenomenon It arose in the 1940s in the latter part of the Second World War The war effort required American soldiers to be able to speak the languages of the Pacific or of other places where Americans were dispatched to do battle Some theoretical linguists who had an intimate knowledge of the structure of especially the indigenous American Indian languages took up this concern At the inception of applied linguistics as a discipline the first concern was thus with the application of linguistic analyses to language teaching In audio-lingualism which marks the beginning of modern applied linguistics we have an attempted solution to the problem of language teaching that its authors believed could be justified in addition to linguistic analysis by behaviourist psychology Those of us who came through language laboratories in the 60s will remember the Skinnerean approach that supported the learning theory behind audio-lingualism the more one repeats things the more likely you are to learn them Implicit in the approach was also a theory that in the same way that the linguist dissects language one needs to break language up into little units Questions were not asked about whether units of analysis and units of learning could be the same thing Furthermore although the manner in which these bits would actually come together in the mind of the learner remained a mystery to behaviourists still they believed firmly that it would somehow happen In some fashion all these fragments would be synthesized Where the theory had left a vacuum common sense at least seemed to imply that smaller digestible units were more easily learnable The approach was imbued with the notion that learning takes place incrementally in small portions Most importantly to its proponents audio-lingualism prescribed a method that was indebted to linguistic theory in its scientifically chosen and arranged language 4



















Applied linguistics














G Richard Tucker







































Applied linguistics




G Richard Tucker





















Applied linguistics














G Richard Tucker







































Applied linguistics




G Richard Tucker











G Richard Tucker







































Applied linguistics




G Richard Tucker








































Applied linguistics




G Richard Tucker



five generations of applied linguistics

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