Applied Linguistics: Scope, Issues, and Interdisciplinarity
**Applied Linguistics: Scope and Central Issues**
In the 1950s, Applied Linguistics (AL) studied the structure and function of language to improve first and second language teaching. In the 1960s, the study continued on teaching but also in learning. Linguistics became implicated in solving language problems. In the 1970s, their theme of interest was real-world problems, studying different fields such as language policy and minority languages. In the 1980s, AL created a new system that covered teaching, learning, and solving problems through the use of translation, lexicography, and multilingualism. In the 1990s, the evolution of AL was a parallel co-evolution of linguistics and its importance to understanding why and how. Other successful disciplines emerged: systematic linguistics, descriptive and corpus linguistics, and functional linguistics.
Has the Central Issue in AL Changed in the Same Way as Its Scope?
The focus of AL is based on resolving real-world language problems. The central issue has not changed over the years: learn more about language to teach it accurately in order to detect problems and find solutions. Nevertheless, the methods have improved, and different theories have appeared with a lot of new information.
Why Is Interdisciplinarity a Defining Aspect of AL Nowadays?
Because if AL wants to solve the problems that people face in the real world, AL needs to use knowledge from other fields to understand how those problems affect people and find solutions. It has to take into account other areas besides language. For instance, how our brain processes words. AL works on: language learning problems, language teaching problems, literacy problems, language contact problems, and language inequality problems. These problems also lead AL to use knowledge from other fields, apart from linguistics, and thereby impose the interdisciplinarity that is a defining aspect of the discipline.
**Comprehension and Psycholinguistics**
Scovel on Comprehension of Sounds
“Learning to comprehend is…” Significant parts of human language are innate and do not have to be learned. Humans are born with the capacity to perceive phonemes, to differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar sounds, understand sentences, and analyze texts. Humans can read and understand without having to think of reading or understanding; it is a self-act, it is innate. The successful comprehension of speech sounds is, therefore, a combination of the innate ability to recognize distinctions between speech sounds, along with the ability all learners have to adjust their acoustic categories to the parameters of the language.
Comprehension of Sentences
“Transformational rules are not psycho…” Transformational rules are not psycholinguistically relevant because transformational complexity does not affect comprehension. The ambiguity of words seems to slow comprehension time, but the complexity of sentences does not make a conviction more difficult to understand. It is more complicated to understand the negative than the passive, which proves that complexity in structure does not affect comprehension.
Comprehension of Texts
Texts are more accessible to comprehension when there is general background because the previous language helps activate mental associations. In that case, the reader recalls and comprehends the complete text in a better way than without a title or introduction. Psycholinguistics research into the comprehension of texts has demonstrated that the presence or absence of background information can dramatically affect the way we remember a piece of discourse.
Experiments Demonstrating Comprehension
- Reading a text without a title or background and then trying to repeat the full text; when reading, previous information makes comprehension easier.
- A child reads a passive sentence and a simple sentence with two negations. The child has more difficulties understanding the second sentence. The passive is not more difficult to understand than the negative because the transformational complexity has no relation to comprehension.
- A set of sentences was played to a group of listeners who had to write down the sixth word in each of the sentences. Each person writes different sounds because they write what they expected to hear. People do not have to listen or read something to understand a full sentence.
- The exercise to recall an obscure word. We can identify which words are not the one we are looking for, and when we hear the word, we can instantly recognize it. Our memory works like a dictionary.
**Speech Therapy: Psycholinguistic vs. Pragmatic Approaches**
Difference Between Psycholinguistic and Pragmatic Approaches to Speech Therapy
Psycholinguistics makes a test for patients to provide an improvement in specific aspects of language performance, while pragmatics takes into account other abilities related to social communication.
Key Factors in Language and Communication
- Brain: Essential to language.
- Speech organs: Not essential.
- Deafness: Language impairment affects only one modality of language use.
- Aphasia: Affects the language system.
- Apraxia: Affects linguistic capacities.
- Dyslexia: More general disability.