The role of Linguistics in Language Teacher Education

Toyyib Abdulwahid adebisi

[email protected]/08103409896

Dept. of Arabic, University of Ilorin

Abstract

Linguistics is important for language teaching because linguistics and language teaching can be
likened to the relationship of knowledge about engine and the skill in driving a car. It will be better
for the driver to supported with some knowledge about the car or the engine so that he can drive it
well and know how to overcome some engine trouble in case he has to face it. In the same way it
will be better if a language teacher has some knowledge about, for instance, the characteristics of
language in general and the specific language he is teaching in particular. In this relation, he should
know how language works and express meaning, and what structures are used in the particular
language he is teaching. He should get familiar, for instance, with the theory about the general
mechanism of producing speech sounds, so that he will be able to tackle any pronunciation
problem his students may encounter. It has been for a long time that the existence of Linguistics in
a teacher education programme is debated. Many teacher educational designers avoid to put these
disciplines in the programme. They think that these subjects are not helpful and not relevant to the
preparation of language teachers. The importance of applied linguistics in language teaching is
perceived by almost all pedagogues and educationists. Gone are days when a postgraduate or a
graduate used to join teaching profession due the fact that he possessed good knowledge in
language. In the modern educational setting, the Language teacher is supposed to know linguistics
or applied linguistics in order to prove himself as an effective language teacher. The teacher of
Language is bound to make error/contrastive analysis so that he can evolve a compatible strategy for
each sub-aspect of the language: sound, grammar, spelling, meaning etc. The present project is a
modest attempt towards exploring the use of applied linguistics in the whole process of
teaching/learning of the target language.

Introduction

It would be useful to begin the discussion by considering what Pit Corder has said (1968: 74) that a
teacher can not teach a Language by any of current techniques without linguistics knowledge, and
that he does make constant use of what are basically linguistic concepts in this teaching”

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This quotation tells us that linguistics has a great role in language teaching. Further, the points out
that it is mistaken when someone claims that he has been teaching language for years but he knows
nothing about linguiustics. What actually he does not know is the meaning of the word linguistics
itself.

Halliday, (1964: 166) points out that the role of linguistics and phonetics in language teaching is
not to tell the teacher how to teach. The teacher of the language is as much a specialist in the feild
as the linguist is in his, and will remain so. He is not teaching linguistics. But he is teaching
something which is the subject of the study of linguistics, and is described by linguistics method.

Further, he also says that the main contribution that linguistic sciences can make to the teaching of
languages, to provide good descriptions. Any of a language implies linguistics, that is; a definite
stand on how language work and how it is to be accounted for. As soon as the teacher uses the
work ‘sentence’ or ‘verb’ in relation to the language he is teaching, he is applying linguistics.

The concept of Linguistics

Crystal, David (1990) Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Such study has, broadly
speaking, three aspects: language form, languagemeaning, and language in context. The earliest
known activities in the description of language have been attributed toPāṇini (fl. 4th century BCE),
with his analysis of Sanskrit in Ashtadhyayi. S.C. Vasu (Tr.) (1996).
Jakobson, Roman (1937). Linguistics analyzes human language as a system for relating sounds (or
signed gestures) and meaning. Phonetics studies acoustic and articulatory properties of the
production and perception of speech sounds and non-speech sounds. The study of
language meaning, on the other hand, deals with how languages encode relations between entities,
properties, and other aspects of the world to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as to
manage and resolve ambiguity. While the study of semanticstypically concerns itself with truth
conditions, pragmatics deals with how context influences meanings.
In the early 20th century Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between the notions
of langue and parole in his formulation ofstructural linguistics. According to him, parole is the
specific utterance of speech, whereas langue refers to an abstract phenomenon that theoretically
defines the principles and system of rules that govern a language (de Saussure, F. 1986) This
distinction resembles the one made byNoam Chomsky between competence and performance,
where competence is individual's ideal knowledge of a language, while performance is the specific
way in which it is used. Chomsky, Noam. (1965)

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The formal study of language has led to the growth of fields like psycholinguistics, which explores
the representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which studies language
processing in the brain; and language acquisition, which investigates how children and adults
acquire a particular language.

Language Teacher Education

Language teacher education in this context concerns the education of pre‐school, primary, lower,
upper secondary school and institution teachers of languages. Pre‐school and primary school
teachers are usually distinguished from lower and upper secondary school teachers in the
educational paths they follow and in the language and language education training they receive,
with the former following a generalist route and the latter receiving specific language teacher
training. The objectives of teacher education programmes are generally defined in terms of
competences to be obtained in relation to the level of education for which the student teachers are
being prepared, although these are not generally specified in terms of language competences.
Language Teaching and learning
The language teacher education curriculum contains both theoretical and practical elements which
emphasis learner-centredness and task based learning. Much of the learning will be done through
practical experience, reflection on practice and relating theory to practice. Students will consider
(and experience) the following teaching and learning approaches

 use of reflective tools such as portfolios. From the start of the teacher education programme,
teacher students are taught to engage in reflection in a structured way, using several
instruments such as:
 a practice diary
 discussion sessions with tutors and peers about significant teaching practices.
 self-monitoring with the reflection circle
 15 supervision meetings in small groups about personal teaching experiences
 informed reflective practice.
 constructivist models of learning
 learner autonomy
 cognitive models such as language learning strategies
 content and Language Integrated Learning (see section 6.1.4)
 task-based learning through group and individual projects, problem-based learning
techniques
 methods for developing language skills (including grammar and vocabulary acquisition)

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  use of new technologies for language learning including computer assisted language learning
Language Education
Language education is the teaching and learning of a foreign or second language. Language
education is a branch of applied linguistics.
Innovation in foreign language teaching began in the 19th century and became very rapid in the
20th century. It led to a number of different and sometimes conflicting methods, each trying to be
a major improvement over the previous or contemporary methods. The earliest applied linguists
included Jean Manesca, Heinrich Gottfried Ollendorff (1803–1865), Henry Sweet (1845–
1912), Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), and Harold Palmer(1877–1949). They worked on setting
language teaching principles and approaches based on linguistic and psychological theories, but
they left many of the specific practical details for others to devise.
Those looking at the history of foreign-language education in the 20th century and the methods of
teaching (such as those related below) might be tempted to think that it is a history of failure. Very
few students in U.S. universities who have a foreign language as a major manage to reach
something called "minimum professional proficiency". Even the "reading knowledge" required for a
PhD degree is comparable only to what second-year language students read and only very few
researchers who are native English speakers can read and assess information written in languages
other than English. Even a number of famous linguists are monolingual.

Linguistics in Language Teaching

The obvious reason for considering the role of linguistics in relation to language teaching is that
both in different ways have to do with language. It would be unreasonable for language teaching to
disregard what linguistics have to say about language.

Linguistics is the science of languages, and the major concern of all the Linguists is largely related to
the finding and describing the characteristics of a particular language(s). Applied linguistics takes the
result of those findings and ‘applies’ them to other areas. The term ‘applied linguistics’ is often used
to refer to the use of linguistic research in language teaching only, but results of linguistic research
are used in many other areas especially language teaching (LT). Linguistic analysis is a sub-
discipline of applied linguistics used by many researchers, pedagogues and educationalists by
diagnosing learning difficulties and solving such problems including looking for a
compatiblestrategy.

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While Wilkins (1972: 216) points out that it is hard to imagine that languages can ever be taught
without refrence to the available language descriptions. It means that linguistics will always be a
feild of study relevant to language teaching. Further, he comments that the main role of linguistics
in language teaching is to produce good descriptions of languages. Then these descriptions of
language serve as the input to language teaching materials.

Language teaching is said to be the activities which are intended to bring about language learning.
It is more widely interpreted than instructing a language class. Formal instruction and methods of
training, preparation of teaching materials, as well as making the necessary administrative provision
inside and outside an educational system all fall under the concept of language teaching.

According to stern (1983), a good language teaching would meet the conditions and needs of
learners in the best possible ways. It would strive to provide a conceptual framework devised for
identifying all factors relevant in the teaching of languages and the relationship(s) between them
forgiving effective direction to the necessary research and enquiry.

Linguistics constitute the most systematic study of language at our disposal. Linguistics is a subject
developed by scholars who devote themselves to the explanation and detailed description of
language phenomena. Linguistics has to play down the natural understanding that people have
about languages in order to gain precision in description. Present day linguists as against traditional
grammarians use a descriptive method which relies heavily on access to the intuitions of a native
speaker.

Linguistics is usually defined as the science of language or the systematic study of language. As a
science, it cultivates a rational outlook upon language. Linguistics is a theoretical science that
formulates explanations which are designed to account for the phenomena of languages. It is also
an empirical science making detailed observation on particular languages to conform or refute
generalizations. It is also a descriptive discipline, this contrast to the normative nature of much
language study. The linguist accepts language as he finds it, observes it and explain why it is so.
From a linguist’s point of view, a language is what the speakers say and not what someone thinks
they ought to be.

The impact of linguistics on language teaching cannot be over-emphasized. Carter (1982)

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learners in their selection of vocabulary and grammar constructions. It should be stressed that not
every teacher does need to become a competent field linguist with experience in comparative
theoretical approaches. The teacher needs to know linguistics before he can apply it because
without a background in linguistics, it would be very difficult for a teacher using linguistic-based
materials either to elaborate on them, or to repeat the linguist’s formula in new material or to
capitalize on points raised on discussion or to hold to a coherent line of description.

The main role of linguistics in language teaching is to produce good descriptions of languages.
From the linguistics levels of phonetics and phonology, language teaching have benefitted from the
description of sounds of human languages. The primacy of speech in language teaching can be
attributed to the influence of structural linguistics, the interest in the descriptive study of the
spoken language. Phonetics studies speech sounds as such regardless of a particular language, while
phonology investigates the sound system of a particular language. Phonetics can be considered as
helpful to pronunciation teaching (oral) in that it provides the language teacher with a diagnostic
understanding of how speech are produced. Phonology is needed to understand what constitutes
the sound system of a particular languages and how the sounds are internalized by speakers for the
purpose of communication.

At the level of the grammar, which is traditionally gotten insight from linguistics. Morphology
deals with internal structure of the forms of words or word formation principles, while syntax is the
study of sentence structure, that is, how words are strung together to form phrases, classes and
sentences. The importance of grammar will hardly be questioned by language teachers. Most
language courses and textbooks are organized along grammatical criteria. Language teachers have
operated with grammatical concepts and categories which have been considered as a self-evident
and simple basis of language.

At the level of meaning, which has to do with the semantics, language teaching have benefitted
from linguistics in the knowledge of the meaning of utterances that are made or to be made by
language learners.

Language teaching have borrowed a leaf from the linguistic level of function which actually have to
deal with sociolinguistics. The linguist competence which is developed at the theoretical linguistics
have to be used in socially appropriate circumstance for communicative competence to be attained.

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Language teacher should be aware that it is not enough for the learner to know the rules of the
grammar alone, but the learner should also know when these rules should be applied in discourse.
Because the knowledge of a language goes beyond knowing the grammar of the language alone.

In the area of developing orthography (a conventional), linguistics role in language teaching cannot
be compromised. The linguist helps to design orthography for languages for unwritten languages
written languages in order for than to meet up with standard orthographies.

In the field of applied linguistics, Corder (1973) points out that the relevance of linguistics to
language teaching is indirect and it is not the task of the linguist to say what relevance it may have.
The relation between linguistics theory and the actual materials used for teaching is an indirect one.
Linguistic theory cannot alone provide the criteria for selecting, ordering or presenting the content
of a teaching programme. However, theoretical linguistic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic
criteria determine the content of a syllabus.

Corder suggested what specific contribution to language teaching can be expected from theoretical
linguistics. He recognizes three order of application, the concepts of theoretical linguistics are used
to analyse language data leading to the description of the second language. On this basis, the second
order applications determine the selection of items. Such selections will be helped by contrastive
analysis (which compares L 1 and L2 to spot the differences which are likely to create difficulty for
the learner) and error analysis (which identifies the errors made by the learner and compares it with
the L2) and will yield an inventory from which the linguistic content of the syllabus, as well as in
the teaching materials can be determined at the third-order or level of application.

Error analysis

Systematically analyzing errors made by learners makes it possible to determine areas that need
reinforcement in teaching (Corder, 1974).Error analysis is a type of linguistic analysis that focuses
on the errors that learners make. Gass & Selinker (2008) defined errors as “red flags” that provide
evidence of the learner’s knowledge of the second language. Researchers are interested in errors
because they are believed to contain valuable information on the strategies that people use to
acquire a language (Richards, 1974; Taylor, 1975; Dulay and Burt, 1972).

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error analysis has two objects: one theoretical and another applied. The theoretical object serves to
“elucidate what and how a learner learns when he studies a second language.” And the applied
object serves to enable the learner “to learn more efficiently by exploiting our knowledge of his
dialect for pedagogical purposes.”

Ideas derived from structural linguistics became the accepted doctrine which was more or less
implemented in language teaching. They are commonly expressed in five slogans which reflect the
influence of structural linguistics.

1. Language is speech, not writing

The fifth slogan expresses more a pedagogical principle than a linguistic principle. It emphasizes the
need for practice rather than explanation.

Therefore, it will be quite illogical for language teaching to disregard what the linguist have shown
from the relevance of his work, in his terms, to the enquiries of others. In other words, language
teaching cannot disregard a discipline which shares with it its central concern of language.

Conclusively, linguistics does not focus on how language is to be taught, it only shows the
language teaches what he wants to teach, that is, linguistics makes available to the language teacher
their object of study, which is language in a clear manner. Linguistics has revolutionalized language
teaching and has lay bare what the teacher needs to know about language.

The need for social recognition, the desire for economic independence, the indispensability of
being educated, the obligations of scientific research and the inevitability to survive significantly in
a multilingual society both within a national entity and at the international stage all resulted into
learning a relevant language which led to the practice of language teaching. The idea of language
teaching, thus, was brought about with the aim of teaching a language to non-native speakers.
Language teaching draws much of its contarts from the output of linguistics, which is the scientific

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study of language. In other words, the meeting point between language teaching and linguistics is
language itself.

Linguistics helps to enhance the teacher’s understanding of learning and the content of what is
being learnt. As such, language teaching has benefitted a lot from linguistics. This is so because the
content of language teaching is dependent on the findings of linguistics. It should however, be
clear that linguistics does not provide to the teacher how he should teach the language, i.e the
method Rather, it provides him with what may form the contents of what he wants to teach as raw
materials. It does so by describing the structure of the target language in order to provide the
learner with the linguistics competence of the language, and by explaining how the structures are
used in content with a view to providing them with the communicative competence.

Conclusion

To conclude, linguistic can be said to be the backbore of language teaching. The work of a
language teacher starts where the linguistic stop. This is because the meeting point of linguistic and
language teaching is language. The linguistic describe all the parts of language while the teacher
select what is relevant for the learner. In this manner, language teaching has benefitted a lot from
linguistic

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Crystal, David (1990). Linguistics. Penguin Books.

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