Exemples de la "Grolier"

applied linguistics

The contemporary world is marked by problems relating directly to language. The 20th century has been called the Age of the Refugee because large numbers of people have been displaced from their homes by war, revolution, and other disasters. Since the mid-1950s, new nations have emerged from former colonial empires; they have had to select languages for government, education, and trade. In the great urban centers, there are multilingual populations; as a response to multilingualism, law courts, police, social agencies, employers, schools, and churches have needed to become concerned about language issues. Applied linguistics is the academic discipline that studies such problems and devises solutions to the human questions rooted in language.

Linguistics is the study of language; applied linguistics is the study of human and social problems connected with language, language learning, and language use. A familiar example is the difficulty experienced by a Spanish-speaking minority in an English-speaking country such as the United States. How can the Hispanic community preserve its own linguistic and cultural heritage, and at the same time enable its children to find a place in American society? In an attempt to resolve this problem, bilingual education was introduced into the American school system. Drawing on psychology, sociology, learning theory, and other disciplines, applied linguists can evaluate the effectiveness of such programs.

Applied linguistics has a number of areas of concern. Among them are the teaching of language, the learning environment, the psychology of language, the preparation of grammars and dictionaries, the study of specialized languages, and language rehabilitation.

Language Teaching

In learning languages, a distinction is usually made between mother tongues, second languages, and foreign languages. A mother tongue is the first language or languages one learns as a child. When immigrants come to a new country and learn the language of that country, they are learning a second language. On the other hand, when English speaking students in the United States learn French or Spanish in school, they are usually learning a foreign language.

There are many approaches to the teaching of secondary and foreign languages. The grammar-translation method, for example, is based on the discipline of philology and approaches language from the viewpoint of comparison with a classical language such as Latin. In classical languages, the vocabulary and grammar are limited because no mother-tongue speakers are living, and the literature serves primarily to give access to the thought and art of a dead civilization. Therefore, rote memorization is the mode of teaching commonly employed in the grammar-translation method.

The audio-lingual approach, which was very popular from the 1940s through the 1960s, is based in structural linguistics, which places heavy emphasis on spoken rather than written language, and on the grammar of particular languages, stressing habit formation as a mode of learning (see STRUCTURALISM).

Beginning in the 1950s, Noam CHOMSKY and his followers challenged previous assumptions about language structure and language learning, taking the position that language is creative (not memorized), and rule governed (not based on habit), and that universal phenomena of the human mind underlie all language. This "Chomskian revolution" initially gave rise to eclecticism in teaching, but it has more recently led to two main branches of teaching approaches: the humanistic approaches based on the charismatic teaching of one person, and content-based communicative approaches, which try to incorporate what has been learned in recent years about the need for active learner participation, about appropriate language input, and about communication as a human activity. Most recently, there has been a significant shift toward greater attention to reading and writing, based on a new awareness of significant differences between spoken and written languages, and on the notion that dealing with language involves an interaction between the text on the one hand, and the culturally-based world knowledge and experientially-based learning of the receiver on the other.

The Learning Environment

Learning and teaching are not the only concerns of applied linguistics; it is also concerned about the environment in which learning occurs and about the social interaction of learners with each other, with teachers, and with society more broadly defined. Among multilingual populations, it investigates such questions as who speaks which language to what other persons, and to accomplish what objectives. In this sense, applied linguistics overlaps with SOCIOLINGUISTICS, except that the applied linguist is not interested in merely describing the situation and understanding its causes, but also in ways to mediate the situation to increase mutual communication and decrease stress. These general concerns are grouped under the heading of sociology of language, and to the extent that these concerns invoke political action, policy and planning, they become the concerns of language policy and language planning.

The Psychology of Language

Additionally, applied linguists are concerned about what goes on in the mind of the learner when language is being learned--indeed, when language is being used. At this point, applied linguistics overlaps with PSYCHOLINGUISTICS. A great deal of research in recent years has been conducted in second-language acquisition, and a teaching method known as the natural approach has been designed based on the notion of the natural processes of child-language acquisition, on the assumption that mother-tongue (first-language) and second-language acquisition are analogous.

Research in the psychology of language has also played a major role in INTELLIGENCE studies, that is, in the attempts to design computers that can actually process natural language and in the problems of how language is stored in memory in the mind and in the computer.

Policy and Planning

Concern with language policy and planning has resulted in a two-fold division of the planning activity into status planning and corpus planning. Status planning deals with the political and social areas of language use and falls under the area of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language addressed above. Corpus planning, on the other hand, deals with the language itself. Any natural language is so complex that it would be impossible to capture all of its manifestations in a single volume called a grammar or in a single dictionary, even one as large as the Oxford English Dictionary. Applied linguists are, then, of necessity concerned with writing descriptive grammars--ones which try to describe the general rules of a given language--or pedagogical grammars--ones that try to deal with that fraction of a language which can reasonably be taught either to mother-tongue or to second-language learners. They also compile dictionaries (LEXICOLOGY AND LEXICOGRAPHY), both general dictionaries, and specialist dictionaries dealing with the usages of particular professions such as law, medicine, or engineering.

Specialized Language

The study of language for specific purposes goes well beyond listing the specialized jargon of a profession in a dictionary. It also includes studies of the functions of particular grammatical forms (for example, the passive voice can be used in English to achieve objectivity and to distance its user from the subject under discussion). This area of interest has, in turn, led to elaborate studies of the special sociolinguistic uses of language in the different professions. The most detailed studies have looked at the language interaction between doctors and their patients in various settings, at the various uses of language in courtrooms, and at the uses of language by governments, by politicians, and by advertisers--all of which attempt to cause people to behave in certain ways.

Language Malfunctions

The concern with the relationship between language and mind--with what happens in the mind when language is learned and when language is used--brings applied linguistics into contact with neurolinguistics. This includes not only the biology and physiology of language functions but also aberrant language functions--that is, the study of malfunctions in the uses of language. Various kinds of aphasias, for example, have been examined in the search for more effective treatment modes. Applied linguists have also been interested in the way in which alternative languages are acquired by individuals who for some reason lack either hearing (the deaf) or sight (the blind) or speech (the mute), and particularly interesting work has been done on the acquisition of sign language.

Robert B. Kaplan

Bibliography: Corder, S., Introducing Applied Linguistics (1973); Crystal, David, Directions in Applied Linguistics (1981); Kaplan, Robert B., On the Scope of Applied Linguistics (1980); Widdowson, H. G., Explorations in Applied Linguistics (1979) and Explorations in Applied Linguistics Two (1984).