THE DEFINITION AND SCOPE
OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS
History of the field
Traditional Latin and Greek through
grammar translation
How to learn to speak a L2 fast?
Audiolingualism - the „Army method”
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Pronunciation and
conversation drills
Focus on speech
No explanation
and translation
How to define language knowledge?
Council of Europe Language Project
(John Trim)
- notions and functions for
Threshold Levels
- rigorous linguistic study
intellectual basis for the
development of ELT
How to best teach a langauge?
Behaviourism and Bloomfieldian Linguistics
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Discrete items (Bloomfield, structuralism)
Contrastive analysis (Lado)
Conditioning
(Pavlov, Skinner)
Why can’t kids imitate?
Cognitivism and
Generative Grammar
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Child language research (Berko)
Cognitive development (Piaget)
LAD (Chomsky)
Deep structure – surface structure
Competence – performance
Where do mistakes come from?
SLA research, Error Analysis and
Interlanguage Theory
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Transfer, interference,
generalisation
(Corder, Selinker)
Input Hypothesis
(Krashen)
„Én röfög kicsi német”
Communicative Competence
CALP and BICS (Dell Hymes)
 Grammatical, discourse,
sociocultural,strategic
competence
(Canale and Swain)
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Why don’t we say what we mean?
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Gricean Maxims
manner
quality
quantity
relevance
Speech Acts (Austin, Searle)
- John, the phone is ringing!
- I’m in the bath!
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Locution
Illocution
Perlocution
How to read (between) the lines?
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Joan: I mean, I don’t like this new emblem at all.
Claire: The logo.
Joan: Yeah, the castle on the Trent, It’s horrible.
Claire: Did you get a chance to talk to him.
Joan: Yeah.
Claire: How does he seem?
Hey diddle, diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed,
To see such fun,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
„I don’t think it will work out – but
maybe it will be useful after all.”
Contrastive rhetoric
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Cultural thought patterns in writing (R.
Kaplan)
English
Semitic Oriental Romance Russian
The narrow definition of AL:
„the showpiece of linguistics”
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Language teaching theory, language
pedagogy
Testing ground for linguistics
The broad definition of AL:
„the basket of many goodies”
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Theoretical orientation:
sociolinguistics
psycholinguistics
pragmatics
L1 and L2 acquisition
discourse analysis
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Practical orientation
L1 and L2 teaching
translation
discourse and conversation analysis
language planning
LSP
neurolinguistics
computational linguistics
What is applied?
The methods and findings of various
disciplines
New definitions of linguistics
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Formal linguistics (Strevens)
a current best theory of language exists
based on linguistics
task of the scholar: contribute to the
development of theory
theory determines what research is
needed
practice should be restricted to the
validated results of that theory
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Communicative linguistics
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problem-driven
empirically grounded
multi-disciplinary
contextualised view of language
functionalist approach
What is linguistics about it?
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AL investigates language in use
linguistic descriptions of language
and methods of linguistic enquiry
aim is NOT to contribute to
descriptions of language, but to
solve practical problems