APPLIED LINGUISTICS

DR. BOUZEKRI

ADAPTED FROM PRINCIPLES OF LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING BY DOUGLAS BROWN

•[email protected]
•‘

• Learning a second language or a foreign language is a long and

complex process.

• Why is it so?

challenges both your mind (your brain has to construct new cognitive frameworks) and time (it requires
sustained, consistent practice).
The person is affected as he/she struggles to reach beyond the confines of his/her first language and into a
new language (a new system), a new culture, a new way of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Few if any people achieve fluency in a foreign language solely within the confines of the classroom.
• In any language acquisition or learning process we have to take
into considerations many variables:
1. Learners’ profile:
• Who are the learners ?
• What is their ethnic, linguistic, and religious heritage?
• What are their native languages, levels of education, and socioeconomic
characteristics?
• What life's experiences have they had that might affect their learning?
• What are their intellectual capacities, abilities, and strengths and
weaknesses?
• How would you describe the personality of any given learner?
2. Linguistic factors
• What is it that the learner must learn?
• What is language?
• what is communication?
• What does it mean when we say someone knows how to use a language?
• What is the best way to describe or systematize the target (second)
language?
• What are the relevant differences (and commonalities) between a
learner's first and second language?
• What properties of the target language might be difficult for a learner to
master?
• The teacher

the system and

functioning of the second
It is one thing for a
language and the
teacher to speak and
differences between the
understand a language
first and second language
and yet another matter
of the learner.
to attain the technical
knowledge required to
understand and
explain the system of
that language
• 3. Learning processes

• How does learning happen?

• How can a person be successful in language learning?
• What cognitive processes are used in second language learning?
• How important are factors like frequency of input, attention to form and
meaning, memory and storage processes, and recall?
• What is the optimal interrelationship of cognitive, affective, and physical
domains for successful language learning?
4. The factor of age

• Many questions are raised about differences between children and adults
in learning a second language.
• Common observation tells us that children are "better" language learners
than adults.
• If so, in what way does the age of learning make a difference?
• How do the cognitive and emotional developmental changes of
childhood and young adulthood affect language acquisition?
5. Instructional Variables
• What are the effects of varying methodological approaches, textbooks,
materials, teacher styles, and institutional factors?
• Consider the amount of time spent in classrooms learning a second
language: is there an optimal length of time required for successful
mastery?
• Should the learner be exposed to three or five or ten hours a week in
the classroom? Or a five-to-seven-hour day in an intensive language
program?
• And how "active" should a learner be outside of the classroom?
6. Context
• Are the learners attempting to acquire the second language within the
cultural and linguistic milieu of the second language, that is, in a
"second" language situation in the technical sense of the term?
• Or are they focusing on a "foreign" language context in which the second
language is heard and spoken only in an artificial environment, such as
school?
• How might the sociopolitical conditions of a particular country or its
language policy affect the outcome of a learner's mastery of the
language?
• How' do intercultural contrasts and similarities affect the learning
process?
7. Goals
• Why are you learning this language? For professional reasons? Pleasure?
To communicate with family?
• With your goal in mind, actively search for opportunities to learn
what you need and filter out what you don’t (for example, vocabulary for
talking about your work is very different to that necessary to travel
around)
• Focusing on your overall learning goal will help you combat burnout
when it comes.
• Some definitions
• Language is the system of human communication by means of
a structured arrangement of sounds (or their written
representation) to form larger units, e.g. morphemes, words,
sentences.

• Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the

child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal
instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying
logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is
distinct from more general abilities to process information or
behave intelligently. (Pinker's The Language Instinct (1994), p.18)
• Language can be defined as
• Systematic vocal

• A set of arbitrary symbols

visual

• Those symbols have conventional meaning

• A medium of communication
• Operates in a speech community
• Essentially human
• Acquired by people in much the same way, language and language
learning have universal characteristics

Each concept is a
field of research in
linguistics
• What is first language (L1)?
 native
language of a acquired
person in early
childhood

the language
The mother spoken in the
tongue of a family
person (L1) /caregivers
• What is a second language ?
• It is also called a foreign language. A language which is not a native
language in a country.
• It is a language taught as a school subject but which is not used as a
medium of instruction in schools nor as a language of communication
within a country (in government, business, or industry). English is
described as a foreign language in France, Japan, China, etc.
• A second language is a language which is not a native language in a
country but which is widely used as a medium of communication (in
education and government)
• Second language acquisition

• The process by which people develop proficiency in a second or foreign

language. These processes are often investigated with the expectation
that information may be useful in language teaching.
• The term has been used particularly in the USA by researchers interested
in:
• Longitudinal studies and case studies of the devt. Of syntax and phonology in
second and foreign language learners.
• Analysis of the spoken and written discourse of second and foreign language
learners
• The study of other aspects of language development
• Teaching/learning
retention of storage systems,
acquisition or information or memory, cognitive
"getting." skill. organization.

involves active,
conscious focus on
and acting upon is relatively
learning
events outside or permanent but
inside the subject to
organism. forgetting.

involves some form

of practice, perhaps a change in
reinforced practice. behavior
 Enabling the
learner to learn

guiding and setting the

facilitating conditions for
learning learning.
Teaching

The teacher’s understanding of how the learner learns will determine

his/her philosophy of education,
his/her teaching style,
his/her approach, methods, and classroom techniques.
• Different Schools of thought in SLA
Generative
Linguistics and
Behaviorism
Cognitive
Psychology

Constructivism
• Behaviorism/Behaviorist theory/ Behaviorist psychology
• It was an important influence on psychology, education, and language
teaching, especially in the United States and it was used by
psychologists like Skinner, Pavlov, Osgood, and Staats to explain first
language learning.

• It is a theory of psychology which states that human and animal

behavior can and should be studied in terms of physical processes only.
• It led to theories of learning which explained how an external
event (a stimulus) caused a change in the behavior of an
individual (a response) without using concepts like ‘mind’, or
‘ideas’, or any kind of mental behavior. Reinforcement is a
stimulus which follows the occurrence of a response.

• Reinforcement which increases the likelihood of a response is

known as positive reinforcement as opposed to negative
reinforcement.
• Within this theory, learning took place in a stimulus-response-
feedback pattern.
• It dealt only with observable data.
• Repetition, memorizing and habit forming were crucial to
acquisition.
• Learning happens through a lot of listening, drilling and
repeating with little attention to meaning or any cognitive effort
in the apprehension of rules.
• The learner is perceived as passive who imitates like a parrot.
• Generative Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology

• In the decade of the 1960s, generative-transformational linguistics

emerged through the influence of Noam Chomsky and a number of his
followers.
• According to Chomsky , human language cannot be scrutinized simply in
terms of observable stimuli and responses or the volumes of raw data.
The generative linguist was interested not only in describing language
(achieving the level of descriptive adequacy) but also in arriving at an
explanatory level of adequacy in the study of language, that is, a
"principled basis, independent of any particular language, for the
selection of the descriptively adequate grammar of each language"
(Chomsky, 1964, p. 63).
• For Chomsky, all humans have innate knowledge of the
essential underlying grammatical relations.
• The extreme innate position is that the child comes into the
world with very specific knowledge of the nature of language.
• This knowledge is universal
• Within the mentalist school/ the innatist hypothesis, nativist
position or innateness, Chomsky stipulates the following major
points:
• Children are born with a unique kind of knowledge which fits them for
language learning. It’s called Language Acquisition Device (LAD),
• In this regard, Chomsky claims that since children must be
equipped to learn any language as a native language, the prior
knowledge embodied in LAD must constitute that which is
common to all languages, in other words, LAD must contain
language universals.

• Chomsky believes that a language is based on a highly

integrated system of rules, Any user of the language must
internalize these rules, which form the basis of his
performance.
• In addition, the child has a ‘hypothesizing and testing device’,
allowing him/her to determine from a small amounts of
experience which language out of all possible languages
she/he is exposed to.
• He also claims the existence of innate properties to explain the
speed with which the child acquires her/his native language.
• Children are also observed to acquire their native language in a
very short period of time (at the age of 5) and are likely to utter
new words and sentences they have never heard before.
• Early seeds of the generative-transformational revolution were
planted near the beginning of the twentieth century. Ferdinand
de Saussure (1916) claimed that there was a difference between
parole (what Skinner "observes," and what Chomsky called
performance), on the one hand, and langue (akin to the concept
of competence, or our underlying and unobservable language
ability).
• Similarly, cognitive psychologists asserted that meaning,
understanding, and knowing were significant data for
psychological study.
• Cognitive psychologists, like generative linguists, sought to
discover underlying motivations and deeper structures of
human behavior by using a rational approach.
• That is, they freed themselves from the strictly empirical study typical of
behaviorists,
• and employed the tools of logic, reason, extrapolation, and inference in
order to derive explanations for human behavior.
• Constructivism

• Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky are regarded as the great pioneers of the
constructivist theory of knowing.
• It is a multidisciplinary approach in the sense that it integrates
paradigms from three main disciplines :
• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Sociology
• It suggests that learners construct knowledge.
• There are two versions of constructivism
• Cognitive
• Social

• In the cognitive version of constructivism, emphasis is placed

on the importance of learners constructing their own
representation of reality. "Learners must individually discover
and transform complex information if they are to make it their
own, [suggesting] a more active role for students in their own
learning than is typical in many classrooms" (Siavin, 2003. pp.
257-258). Such claims are rooted in Piaget's (1954, 1955,
1970; Piaget & Inlielder. 1969)
• Piaget suggests mechanisms by which knowledge is
internalized by learners:

• Through processes of accommodation and assimilation, individuals

construct new knowledge from their experiences

• How?
• When learners assimilate, they incorporate the new experience
into an already existing framework without changing that
framework,
• This may happen when individuals’ experiences are aligned
with their internal representations of the world.
• In contrast, when individuals’ experiences contradict their
internal representations, they may change their perceptions of
the world to fit their internal representations.
•
• According to the theory, accommodation is the process of
reframing one’s mental representation of the external world to
fit new experiences .
• for Piaget, "learning is a developmental process that involves
change, self-generation, and construction, each building on
prior learning experiences" (Kaufman, 2004, p. 304).
• Social constructivism emphasizes the importance of
social interaction and cooperative learning in
constructing both cognitive and emotional images of
reality.

• Spivcy (1997, p. 24) noted that social constructivism

tends to focus on "individuals engaged in social
practices, ... on a collaborative group, [or] on a global
community." "
• Vygotsky is among the pioneers of social
constructivism.

• He advocated the view that "children's thinking

and meaning-making is socially constructed
and emerges out of their social interactions
with their environment" (Kaufman, 2004. p.
304).