An Introduction to Applied Linguistics PDF

An Introduction to Applied Linguistics This page intentionally left blank An Introduction to Applied Linguistics edited by Norbert Schmitt Orders: please contact Bookpoint Ltd, 130 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4SB. Telephone: (44) 01235 827720. Fax: (44) 01235 400454. Lines are open from 9.00 to 5.00, Monday to Saturday, with a 24-hour message answering service. You can also order through our website www.hoddereducation.co.uk If you have any comments to make about this, or any of our other titles, please send them to [email protected] British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN: 978 0 340 98447 5 First Edition Published 2002 This Edition Published 2010 Impression number 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Year 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010 Copyright © 2010 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or under licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited. Further details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited, of Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Hachette UK’s policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. Cover photo © Paul Taylor/Stone+/Getty Images Typeset by Phoenix Photosetting, Chatham, Kent Printed in Great Britain for Hodder Education, An Hachette UK Company, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH by Antony Rowe Ltd If you want peace, work for justice This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface viii 1 An Overview of Applied Linguistics 1 Norbert Schmitt and Marianne Celce-Murcia 1 Description of Language and Language Use 2 Grammar 18 Diane Larsen-Freeman and Jeanette DeCarrico 3 Vocabulary 34 Paul Nation and Paul Meara 4 Discourse Analysis 53 Michael McCarthy, Christian Matthiessen and Diana Slade 5 Pragmatics 70 Helen Spencer-Oatey and Vladimir Žegarac 6 Corpus Linguistics 89 Randi Reppen and Rita Simpson-Vlach 2 Essential Areas of Enquiry in Applied Linguistics 7 Second Language Acquisition 108 Nina Spada and Patsy M. Lightbown 8 Psycholinguistics 124 Kees de Bot and Judith F. Kroll 9 Sociolinguistics 143 Carmen Llamas and Peter Stockwell 10 Focus on the Language Learner: Styles, Strategies and Motivation 161 Andrew D. Cohen 3 Language Skills and Assessment 11 Listening 180 Tony Lynch and David Mendelsohn 12 Speaking and Pronunciation 197 Anne Burns and Barbara Seidlhofer 13 Reading 215 Patricia L. Carrell and William Grabe 14 Writing 232 Paul Kei Matsuda and Tony Silva 15 Assessment 247 Carol A. Chapelle and Geoff Brindley 16 Suggested Solutions 268 References 283 Index 335 Preface This book is intended to give you a broad overview of Applied Linguistics. It will introduce you to important areas in the ﬁeld, and familiarize you with the key issues in each of those areas. The book is written at the ‘sophisticated introduction’ level, where the most current ideas in the ﬁeld are presented, but explained in language that is accessible and direct. After having engaged with the knowledge in this introductory book, you should be able to move on to more advanced books and articles, such as those recommended at the end of each chapter in the ‘Further Reading’ section. In addition to helping you become familiar with the issues in Applied Linguistics, the book will also help you become familiar with some of the research methodology currently being used in the ﬁeld. Knowledge of this methodology is important in order to be able to read and understand original research studies in Applied Linguistics books and journals. A number of chapters show you how research in their area is carried out (for example, Chapter 9, Sociolinguistics, and Chapter 11, Listening), which should enable you to gain a greater awareness of various research approaches. In addition, each chapter has some data for you to analyse and interpret, with the authors’ suggested solutions at the end of the book. These ‘Hands-on Activities’ will help to understand the information in each chapter better, because you will use some of it in your own analyses. Applied Linguistics is a big ﬁeld and one person cannot be an expert in all areas. To ensure that chapters contain an authoritative treatment of an area, most are co-authored by two (and sometimes three) leading international specialists. By having multiple specialists writing together, the chapters can represent an expert consensus of the most important issues in that area. The various teams of authors working in their own separate areas have naturally developed different ways of discussing issues, and I have decided to let each team retain their own ‘voice’ and style, rather than trying to homogenize the chapters into a single style throughout the book. I hope you will ﬁnd the result illuminating and engaging. Although teams of authors will retain their individual identity, there is a common format for the chapters. First, each chapter opens with an ‘Introduction’ or ‘What is X?’ section which brieﬂy explains what the area is and why it is important. The following section will be the heart of each chapter, where the key issues pertaining to the area are discussed. Next, the pedagogical implications of the area will be considered. Of course some chapters, such as Chapter 3, Vocabulary, may have more tangible pedagogical implications than others, such as Chapter 8, Psycholinguistics, but all will address pedagogical concerns. Each chapter has a ‘Further Reading’ section, with a number of reading suggestions, complete with brief annotations. Finally, each chapter has a ‘Hands-on Activity’, where some data are presented for you to analyse and interpret. The authors present their suggestions in Chapter 16, Suggested Solutions. Preface ix The areas of Applied Linguistics are related to each other in various ways. This means that certain ideas will inevitably appear in more than one chapter. I have built a certain amount of this repetition into the book, because I believe a good way to learn key ideas is to see them approached from slightly different perspectives by several authors. When an idea is discussed in another chapter, it will usually be cross-referenced, for example: (see Chapter 4, Discourse Analysis, and Chapter 5, Pragmatics). This book has been a team effort with 30 authors contributing their expertise. Writing sophisticated ideas in an accessible way is no easy task, and I thank them for their efforts. I also wish to thank the team at Hodder Education publishers, in particular Tamsin Smith and Liz Wilson, who have worked hard to ensure that all stages of the publishing process were academically rigorous, but refreshingly expedited. I learned a lot about Applied Linguistics by editing this book. I hope you will be able to say the same thing after reading it. Norbert Schmitt University of Nottingham August 2009 This page intentionally left blank 1 An Overview of Applied Linguistics Norbert Schmitt University of Nottingham Marianne Celce-Murcia University of California, Los Angeles What is Applied Linguistics? ‘Applied linguistics’ is using what we know about (a) language, (b) how it is learned and (c) how it is used, in order to achieve some purpose or solve some problem in the real world. Those purposes are many and varied, as is evident in a deﬁnition given by Wilkins (1999: 7): In a broad sense, applied linguistics is concerned with increasing understanding of the role of language in human affairs and thereby with providing the knowledge necessary for those who are responsible for taking language-related decisions whether the need for these arises in the classroom, the workplace, the law court, or the laboratory. The range of these purposes is partly illustrated by the call for papers for the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2010 conference, which lists 16 topic areas: analysis of discourse and interaction assessment and evaluation bilingual, immersion, heritage and language minority education language and ideology language and learner characteristics language and technology language cognition and brain research language, culture, socialization and pragmatics language maintenance and revitalization language planning and policy reading, writing and literacy second and foreign language pedagogy second language acquisition, language acquisition and attrition sociolinguistics text analysis (written discourse) translation and interpretation. The call for papers to the 2011 AILA conference goes even further and lists 28 areas in applied linguistics. Out of these numerous areas, the dominant application has always been the teaching and learning of second or foreign languages (L2). Around the world, a large percentage of people, and a majority in some areas, speak more than one language. For example, a survey published in 1987 found that 83 per cent of 20–24-year-olds in Europe had studied a second language (Cook, 1996: 134), although to varying levels of ﬁnal proﬁciency. Also, in some countries, a second language is a necessary ‘common denominator’ (‘lingua franca’) when the population speaks a variety 2 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics of different L1s (ﬁrst languages). English is the main second language being studied in the world today, and even a decade before this book was published, an estimated 235 million L2 learners were learning it (Crystal, 1995: 108). So it is perhaps not surprising that this book is written in that language, although the concepts presented here should be appropriate to non-English L2 teaching and learning as well. Figures concerning the numbers of people learning or using second languages can only be rough estimates, but they still give some idea of the impact that applied linguistics can have in the world. Due to length constraints, this book must inevitably focus on limited facets of applied linguistics. Traditionally, the primary concern of applied linguistics has been second language acquisition theory, second language pedagogy and the interface between the two, and it is these areas which this volume will cover. However, it is also useful to consider brieﬂy some of the areas of applied linguistics which will not be emphasized in this book, in order to further give some sense of the breadth of issues in the ﬁeld. Carter and Nunan (2001: 2) list the following sub-disciplines in which applied linguists also take an interest: literacy, speech pathology, deaf education, interpreting and translating, communication practices, lexicography and ﬁrst language acquisition. Of these, L1 acquisition research can be particularly informative concerning L2 contexts, and so will be referred to in several chapters throughout this book (see Chapter 7, Second Language Acquisition, and Chapter 8, Psycholinguistics, in particular, for more on L1 issues). Besides mother tongue education, language planning and bilingualism/ multilingualism, two other areas that Carter and Nunan (2001) did not list are authorship identiﬁcation and forensic linguistics. These areas exemplify how applied linguistics knowledge may be utilized in practical ways in non-educational areas. Authorship identiﬁcation uses a statistical analysis of various linguistic features in anonymous or disputed texts and compares the results with a similar analysis from texts whose authors are known. When a match is made, this gives a strong indication that the matching author wrote the text in question. The search for the anonymous author of the eighteenth-century political letters written under the pseudonym of Junius is an example of this. A linguistic analysis of the vocabulary in the letters (for example, whether on or upon was used) showed that it was very similar to the use of vocabulary in the writings of Sir Philip Francis, who was then identiﬁed as the probable author (Crystal, 1987: 68). Similar analyses are carried out in forensic linguistics, often to establish the probability of whether or not a defendant or witness actually produced a speciﬁc piece of discourse. Crystal (1987) relates a case where a convicted murderer was pardoned, partially because a linguistic analysis showed that the transcript of his oral statement (written by the police) was very different stylistically from his normal speech patterns. This discrepancy cast strong doubts on the accuracy of the incriminating evidence in the transcript. In addition to all these areas and purposes, applied linguistics is interested in cases where language goes wrong. Researchers working on language-related disorders study the speech of aphasic, schizophrenic and autistic speakers, as well as hemispherectomy patients, in the belief that we can better understand how the brain functions when we analyse what happens when the speaker’s language system breaks down or does not function properly. Even slips of the tongue and ear committed by normal individuals can give us insights into how the human brain processes language (Fromkin, l973, 1980). An Overview of Applied Linguistics 3 The Development of Applied Linguistics Early History Interest in languages and language teaching has a long history, and we can trace this back at least as far as the ancient Greeks, where both ‘Plato and Aristotle contributed to the design of a curriculum beginning with good writing (grammar), then moving on to effective discourse (rhetoric) and culminating in the development of dialectic to promote a philosophical approach to life’ (Howatt, 1999: 618). If we focus on English, major attempts at linguistic description began to occur in the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1755, Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language, which quickly became the unquestioned authority on the meanings of English words. It also had the effect of standardizing English spelling, which until that time had been relatively variable (for example, the printer William Caxton complained in 1490 that eggs could be spelled as ‘eggys’ or ‘egges’ or even ‘eyren’ depending on the local pronunciation). About the same time, Robert Lowth published an inﬂuential grammar, Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), but whereas Johnson sought to describe English vocabulary by collecting thousands of examples of how English words were actually used, Lowth prescribed what ‘correct’ grammar should be. He had no specialized linguistic background to do this, and unfortunately based his English grammar on a classical Latin model, even though the two languages are organized in quite different ways. The result was that English, which is a Germanic language, was described by a linguistic system (parts of speech) which was borrowed from Latin, which had previously borrowed the system from Greek. The process of prescribing, rather than describing, has left us with English grammar rules which are much too rigid to describe actual language usage: no multiple negatives (I don’t need no help from nobody!) no split inﬁnitives (So we need to really think about all this from scratch.) no ending a sentence with a preposition (I don’t know what it is made of.) These rules made little sense even when Lowth wrote them, but through the ages both teachers and students have generally disliked ambiguity, and so Lowth’s notions of grammar were quickly adopted once in print as the rules of ‘correct English’. (See Chapter 2, Grammar, for more on prescriptive versus descriptive grammars.) Applied Linguistics during the Twentieth Century An Overview of the Century The real acceleration of change in linguistic description and pedagogy occurred during the twentieth century, during which a number of movements inﬂuenced the ﬁeld only to be replaced or modiﬁed by subsequent developments. At the beginning of the century, second languages were usually taught by the ‘Grammar- translation method’, which had been in use since the late eighteenth century, but was fully codiﬁed in the nineteenth century by Karl Plötz (1819–1881), (cited in Kelly, 1969: 53, 220). A lesson would typically have one or two new grammar rules, a list of vocabulary items and some practice examples to translate from L1 into L2 or vice versa. The approach was originally reformist in nature, attempting to make language learning easier through the use of example sentences instead of 4 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics whole texts (Howatt, 1984: 136). However, the method grew into a very controlled system, with a heavy emphasis on accuracy and explicit grammar rules, many of which were quite obscure. The content focused on reading and writing literary materials, which highlighted the archaic vocabulary found in the classics. As the method became increasingly pedantic, a new pedagogical direction was needed. One of the main problems with Grammar-translation was that it focused on the ability to ‘analyse’ language, and not the ability to ‘use’ it. In addition, the emphasis on reading and writing did little to promote an ability to communicate orally in the target language. By the beginning of the twentieth century, new use- based ideas had coalesced into what became known as the ‘Direct method’. This emphasized exposure to oral language, with listening and speaking as the primary skills. Meaning was related directly to the target language, without the step of translation, while explicit grammar teaching was also downplayed. It imitated how a mother tongue is learnt naturally, with listening ﬁrst, then speaking, and only later reading and writing. The focus was squarely on use of the second language, with stronger proponents banishing all use of the L1 in the classroom. The Direct method had its own problems, however. It required teachers to be highly proﬁcient in the target language, which was not always possible. Also, it mimicked L1 learning, but did not take into account the differences between L1 and L2 acquisition. One key difference is that L1 learners have abundant exposure to the target language, which the Direct method could not hope to match. In the UK, Michael West was interested in increasing learners’ exposure to language through reading. His ‘Reading method’ attempted to make this possible by promoting reading skills through vocabulary management. To improve the readability of his textbooks, he ‘substituted low-frequency “literary” words such as isle, nought, and ere with more frequent items such as island, nothing, and before’ (Schmitt, 2000: 17). He also controlled the number of new words which could appear in any text. These steps had the effect of signiﬁcantly reducing the lexical load for readers. This focus on vocabulary management was part of a greater approach called the ‘Vocabulary Control Movement’, which eventually resulted in a book called the General Service List of English Words (West, 1953), which listed the most useful 2000 words in English. (See Chapter 3, Vocabulary, for more on frequency, the percentage of words known in a text and readability.) The three methods, Grammar-translation, the Direct method and the Reading method, continued to hold sway until World War II. During the war, the weaknesses of all of the above approaches became obvious, as the American military found itself short of people who were conversationally ﬂuent in foreign languages. It needed a way of training soldiers in oral and aural skills quickly. American structural linguists stepped into the gap and developed a programme which borrowed from the Direct method, especially its emphasis on listening and speaking. It drew its rationale from the dominant psychological theory of the time, Behaviourism, that essentially said that language learning was a result of habit formation. Thus the method included activities which were believed to reinforce ‘good’ language habits, such as close attention to pronunciation, intensive oral drilling, a focus on sentence patterns and memorization. In short, students were expected to learn through drills rather than through an analysis of the target language. The students who went through this ‘Army method’ were mostly mature and highly motivated, and their success was dramatic. This success meant that the method naturally continued on after the war, and it came to be known as ‘Audiolingualism’. An Overview of Applied Linguistics 5 Chomsky’s (1959) attack on the behaviourist underpinnings of structural linguistics in the late 1950s proved decisive, and its associated pedagogical approach – audiolingualism – began to fall out of favour. Supplanting the behaviourist idea of habit-formation, language was now seen as governed by cognitive factors, in particular a set of abstract rules which were assumed to be innate. Chomsky (1959) suggested that children form hypotheses about their language that they tested out in practice. Some would naturally be incorrect, but Chomsky and his followers argued that children do not receive enough negative feedback from other people about these inappropriate language forms (negative evidence) to be able to discard them. Thus, some other mechanism must constrain the type of hypotheses generated. Chomsky (1959) posited that children are born with an understanding of the way languages work, which was referred to as ‘Universal Grammar’. They would know the underlying principles of language (for example, languages usually have pronouns) and their parameters (some languages allow these pronouns to be dropped when in the subject position). Thus, children would need only enough exposure to a language to determine whether their L1 allowed the deletion of pronouns (+pro drop, for example, Japanese) or not (–pro drop, for example, English). This parameter-setting would require much less exposure than a habit-formation route, and so appeared a more convincing argument for how children learned language so quickly. The ﬂurry of research inspired by Chomsky’s ideas did much to stimulate the development of the ﬁeld of second language acquisition and its psychological counterpart, psycholinguistics. In the early 1970s, Hymes (1972) added the concept of ‘communicative competence’, which emphasized that language competence consists of more than just being able to ‘form grammatically correct sentences but also to know when and where to use these sentences and to whom’ (Richards, Platt and Weber, 1985: 49). This helped to swing the focus from language ‘correctness’ (accuracy) to how suitable any use of language was for a particular context (appropriacy). At the same time, Halliday’s (1973) systemic-functional grammar was offering an alternative to Chomsky’s approach, in which language was seen not as something exclusively internal to a learner, but rather as a means of functioning in society. Halliday (1973) identiﬁed three types of function: ideational (telling people facts or experiences) interpersonal (maintaining personal relationships with people) textual (expressing the connections and organization within a text, for example, clarifying, summarizing, signalling the beginning and end of an argument). This approach to language highlighted its communicative and dynamic nature. These and other factors pushed the ﬁeld towards a more ‘communicative’ type of pedagogy. In the mid-1970s, a Council of Europe project (van Ek, 1976) attempted to create a Europe-wide language teaching system which was based on a survey of L2 learners’ needs (needs analysis) and was ‘based on semantic categories related to those needs, including the relevant concepts (notions) and uses of language (functions)’ (Howatt, 1999: 624). The revised 1998 version (van Ek and Trim: 27) lists six broad categories of language function: imparting and seeking factual information expressing and ﬁnding out attitudes getting things done (suasion) socializing 6 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics structuring discourse communication repair. In addition, eight general categories of notions were listed, which are shown here with representative examples of their sub-classes: existential (existence, presence, availability) spatial (location, distance, motion, size) temporal (indications of time, duration, sequence) quantitative (number, quantity, degree) qualitative (shape, colour, age, physical condition) mental (reﬂection, expression of ideas) relational (ownership, logical relations, effect) deixis (anaphoric and non-anaphoric proforms, articles). The materials from this project were inﬂuential (for example, Threshold Level English), and textbooks based on a notional–functional syllabus became widespread. In the early 1980s, a theory of acquisition promoted by Krashen (1982) focused attention on the role of input. Krashen’s ‘Monitor theory’ posited that a second language was mainly unconsciously acquired through exposure to ‘comprehensible input’ rather than being learnt through explicit exercises, that it required a focus on meaning rather than form, and that a learner’s emotional state can affect this acquisition (‘affective ﬁlter’). The pedagogical implications of this theory were that classrooms should supply a rich source of language exposure that was meaning-based and understandable, always including some elements just beyond the current level of learners’ ability (i+1). The methodology which developed from these factors emphasized the use of language for meaningful communication – communicative language teaching (CLT) (Littlewood, 1981). The focus was on learners’ message and ﬂuency rather than their grammatical accuracy. It was often taught through problem-solving activities and tasks which required students to transact information, such as information gap exercises. In these, one student is given information the other does not have, with the two having to negotiate the exchange of that information. Taken further, students could be taught some non-language-related subject, such as history or politics, in the L2. The assumption was that the learners would acquire the L2 simply by using it to learn the subject matter content, without the L2 being the focus of explicit instruction. Taking the communicative approach to its logical extreme, students could be enrolled in ‘immersion’ programmes where they attended primary or secondary schools which taught subject matter only in the L2. Results from this kind of immersion programme, such as those initiated in Canada but which now also exist elsewhere, showed that learners could indeed become quite ﬂuent in an L2 through exposure without explicit instruction, and that they developed excellent receptive skills. However, they also showed that the learners continued to make certain persistent grammatical errors, even after many years of instruction. In other words, a communicative approach helped learners to become ﬂuent, but was insufﬁcient to ensure comparable levels of accuracy. It seems as if a certain amount of explicit instruction focusing on language form may be necessary as well. The current focus-on-form movement (for example, Doughty and Williams, 1998) is an attempt to inject well-considered explicit instruction back into language lessons without abandoning the positive features and results of the communicative approach. An Overview of Applied Linguistics 7 Just as language pedagogy developed and advanced during this time, so did the ﬁeld of language assessment. Until the 1980s, tests were evaluated according to three principal criteria: ‘Validity’ (did the test really measure what it was supposed to measure?) ‘Reliability’ (did the test perform consistently from one administration to the next?) ‘Practicality’ (was the test practical to give and mark in a particular setting?). These criteria focused very much on the test itself, and took little notice of the effects it might have on the people (‘stakeholders’) involved with it. Messick (1989) changed this with a seminal paper which argued that tests could not be considered ‘valid’ or ‘not valid’ in a black and white manner by focusing only on test-internal factors; rather, one needed to argue for the validity of a test by considering a variety of factors: for what kind of examinee was the test suitable; what reasonable inferences could be derived from the scores?; how did the test method affect the scores?; what kind of positive or negative effect (‘washback’) might the test have on stakeholders? and many others. Now, tests are seen in the context of a complete assessment environment, which includes stakeholders (for example, examinees, raters, administrators, government ofﬁcials), test conditions (for example, can everyone hear the tape recorder clearly), the intended use of the scores (for example, will they be used for relatively ‘high-stakes’ purposes (university admission) versus relatively ‘low stakes’ purposes (a classroom quiz)) and characteristics of the test itself (Are the instructions clear? What kind of tasks does the test employ?). Within this framework, tests are generally seen as being suitable for particular purposes and particular sets of learners, rather than ‘one size ﬁts all’. Since every classroom and group of learners is somewhat different, there has been a move towards exploring the value of alternative types of assessment which can be individualized to suit particular situations. These include structured observation, progress grids, portfolios, learning journals, project work, peer-assessment and self- assessment. (See Chapter 15, Assessment, for more on these issues.) Technology was advancing throughout the century, but the advent of powerful and affordable personal computers probably has had the greatest impact on applied linguistics. Of course, language laboratories had utilized technology since the mid- to late-1940s, but the relatively recent development of very capable personal computers made quite sophisticated language programs available to the individual user, whether learner, teacher or researcher. Pedagogically, this opened the door to ‘computer-assisted language learning’ (CALL), where learners could work on individual computers truly at their own pace. Computer technology has also facilitated the incorporation of audio and video input into learning programs on a scale previously unimaginable. The best of the current programs are interactive, tailoring their input and tasks to individual learners’ progress, although it must be said that much remains to be done in this area. With new learning programs arriving regularly, today CALL is one of the more dynamic areas in applied linguistics. Computing technology also made it possible to analyse large databases of language, called ‘corpora’. Evidence from corpora have provided numerous insights into the workings of language (Egbert and Hanson-Smith, 1999; see also Chapter 6, Corpus Linguistics). Perhaps the most important revelation is the vast amount of lexical patterning which exists; in fact, it is so great that some scholars have suggested that it is more important than grammar in contributing 8 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics to the organization of language (Sinclair, 1996). Corpora are now a key tool in lexicography, and have been consulted in the development of most current learner dictionaries. Evidence from corpora of spoken discourse has also highlighted the differences between spoken and written discourse (McCarthy and Carter, 1997), and the fact that language is largely phrasal in nature (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan, 1999; Wray, 2002). Happily, corpora have now made truly descriptive grammars possible, with writers having numerous authentic examples of many grammatical structures at their ﬁngertips (Carter and McCarthy, 2006). The best studies in this area can even distinguish varying language usage between different registers, for example written ﬁction versus academic prose (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan, 1999). It is likely that evidence from corpus linguistics will continue to have a major inﬂuence on applied linguistic thinking well into the foreseeable future. Incorporating Social and Cultural Elements into Applied Linguistics The mid-twentieth century domination of behaviourism as the overriding psychological paradigm (at least in English-speaking countries) meant that only stimuli (that is, teaching input) and reactions (student responses) which could be observed were considered worthy of discussion in the area of psychology. In linguistics, a similar dichotomy occurred when Saussure (1857–1913; see Saussure, 1966) split language (‘langue’) from the actual use of language (‘parole’). Chomsky’s (1965) ideas had a similar effect as they distinguished what was happening inside the learner (‘language competence’) from what was observable outside the person (‘language performance’). There were some voices speaking out against these divisions, such as Vygotsky (1896–1934; see Vygotsky, 1987), but political and academic factors kept their inﬂuence in check until the latter part of the twentieth century. In the late 1960s, Labov (1970) began exploring how social factors inﬂuence L1 language use and Tarone (1979) and others later did the same for L2 usage. The study of the interface of social factors and language use eventually developed into the ﬁeld of ‘sociolinguistics’. Similarly, it was acknowledged that the context in which language is used (for example, for what purpose, the relative power relationship between interlocutors) also affects the language of communication. The study of these factors blossomed in the area of ‘pragmatics’. Together, these ﬁelds, along with the closely related area of ‘discourse analysis’, have shown that social and contextual inﬂuences cannot be divorced from individual learners when language learning and use are studied. One view of cognition, called ‘sociocultural theory’, emphasizes individual– social integration by focusing on the necessary and dialectic relationship between the sociocultural endowment (the ‘inter’-personal interface between a person and his or her environment) and the biological endowment (the ‘intra’-personal mechanisms and processes belonging to that person), out of which emerges the individual. Sociocultural theory suggests that in order to understand the human mind, one must look at these two endowments in an integrated manner, as considering either one individually will inevitably result in an incomplete, and thus inaccurate, representation. For it is only through social interaction with others that humans develop their language and cognition. Furthermore, most language use (spoken or written) is co-constructed with others and not simply the product of one individual acting alone in a vacuum. An Overview of Applied Linguistics 9 Psycholinguistic Perspectives in Applied Linguistics One of the most noticeable recent trends has been the establishment of a more psychological perspective of language acquisition, processing and use. This perspective is being driven by a number of sub-ﬁelds (cognitive linguistics, neurolinguistics, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience (see Dörnyei, 2009)), but I will use the umbrella cover term psycholinguistics here, as that is the title of the chapter in this volume which covers this general approach (see Chapter 8, Psycholinguistics). Psycholinguistic perspectives have now become a major inﬂuence in applied linguistics, in areas ranging from theory building to research methodology (Field, 2003; Gaskell, 2009; Harley, 2008). Perhaps the most noticeable outcome is that the current leading theories of how second languages are acquired are all informed by psycholinguistic thinking and research. Although these theories differ somewhat, at heart most of them maintain that the mind extracts the recurring patterns from the language input a learner receives. These patterns exist with the smallest components of language all the way up to overall connected discourse. For example, some graphemes often cluster together in English (spl – splatter, split, spleen), while others rarely or never do (zlf). Also, afﬁxes attach to stems in systematic ways (re- + play = replay). Similarly, words co-occur together in patterns called collocations (black coffee, strong coffee, hot coffee, but not **powerful coffee). Patterns even exist at the level of discourse, as every reader would expect some type of Introduction– Body–Conclusion organization in an academic text. Current thinking is that the human mind is very good at extracting these patterns and using them to build up a picture of the systematicity of a language. In essence, the learner’s linguistic knowledge is ‘constructed’ through general learning mechanisms, rather than being innately in place, as Chomsky posited more than half a century earlier. The process is implicit, but eventually the patterns may become salient enough that a learner is able to describe them explicitly. Various versions of this ‘pattern extraction’ can be seen in the connectionism (Elman, 2001), emergentism (Ellis and Larsen-Freeman, 2006), usage/exemplar-based (Ellis, 2008) and construction grammar (Tomasello, 2003) theories of language acquisition and use. A related trend is use of psycholinguistic research methodologies to explore language processing in much more detail than before possible. Previously, most language measurement required explicit knowledge of linguistic features because learners were required to write down or say their answers. Newer psycholinguistic techniques can look into the inner workings of the brain while learners are using language in various ways. This allows exploration of linguistic knowledge even before learners become aware of it. This has now made research into the very initial pre-conscious stages of language learning possible. For example, Schmitt (in press) describes how this is beginning to revolutionize research into vocabulary acquisition. He relates how: Reaction-timing studies can inform about the development of automaticity of lexical access. Priming studies can show the acquisition of collocation pairings. Eye-movement studies can show how formulaic sequences are read by native and non-native speakers. Event-Related Potentials (ERP) can indicate the very earliest traces of lexical learning. *An asterisk indicates a form that is ungrammatical or inappropriate. 10 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) can show the locations where various types of word (that is, words relating to parts of the body) are activated in the brain. Language is immensely complex and numerous factors affect how it is learned. While past research has often considered how these factors work in combination to lead to the end product of learning, there is a growing awareness that the various factors also affect each other in dynamic and ﬂuid ways. For example, language learners’ willingness to communicate (WTC) is partially dependent on their levels of proﬁciency and on their linguistic self-conﬁdence. However, while the two factors exert their effect on WTC, they themselves can also change (for example, successful communication can improve the learner’s language proﬁciency and enhance their conﬁdence) (Dörnyei, 2009). In addition, it is easy to see how the two factors can affect each other. Greater proﬁciency should lead to greater conﬁdence. Conversely, greater conﬁdence may lead to the learners putting themselves in situations where they use and practise their language more, which in turn may lead to improved proﬁciency. Complex interactions like these are difﬁcult to describe and understand and, in an effort to do so, some researchers are working to adapt methods from other ﬁelds which have to model complex and difﬁcult-to-predict phenomena (for example, weather). The methods come under several names: Dynamic(al) systems theory, Complexity theory and Chaos theory. Although it is still in its early days, given the dynamic nature of language acquisition and use, it is likely that this type of approach will prove increasingly inﬂuential in the future. For overviews, see Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008) and de Bot, Lowie and Verspoor (2007). Themes to Watch For in this Book This book includes a broad selection of major areas in Applied Linguistics. But this diversity does not mean that each area can be isolated and dealt with on its own. On the contrary, true understanding of any individual area can only be gained by understanding others which are related. For example, to truly understand the information in Chapter 3, Vocabulary, one must take on board the insights given in Chapter 6, Corpus Linguistics. In fact, if we look deeply enough, nearly all of the areas are related to each other in some way. This being the case, there are several themes that run through the various chapters. These underlying currents are important because they add coherence to the overall discussion and represent an entry point to understanding and critiquing the ideas in this book. The Interrelationship of the Areas of Applied Linguistics There is a story from India about the ﬁve blind men of Hindustan who went out to learn about an elephant. They all felt different parts of the elephant’s body and came to very different conclusions about what an elephant is like. The man who felt the trunk thought an elephant was like a snake, the one who felt a leg thought elephants were like a tree, the one who felt the ear thought elephants were like a fan, and so on. Similarly, language is a big, complex subject and we are nowhere near to being able to comprehend it in its entirety. The best any person can do at the moment is to study a limited number of elements of language, language use and language learning, and try to understand those elements in detail. Although An Overview of Applied Linguistics 11 we strive to connect this understanding with insights from other areas in the applied linguistics ﬁeld, we can only be partially successful. Thus we end up with scholars becoming specialists in areas of applied linguistics, but with no single person able to master the whole ﬁeld. (That is why this is an edited volume and not a book written by a single author.) This is inevitable and happens in every ﬁeld, but it does mean that applied linguistics is compartmentalized to some extent. We must be aware of this and realize that this compartmentalization is an expedient which enables us to get around our cognitive limitations as human beings; it is not the way language works in the real world. Language, language learning and language use are a seamless whole and all of the various elements interact with each other in complex ways. Each chapter in this book looks at one area of specialization, but when reading them, it is useful to remember that they make up only one part of the larger ‘complete elephant’. The Move from Discrete to more Holistic and Integrative Perspectives Despite the above-mentioned caveat about compartmentalization, we are getting better at being able to grasp larger and larger bits of the language elephant. Up until the middle of the last century, language was viewed in very discrete terms: it was made up of grammar, phonology and vocabulary, each of which could be separately identiﬁed and described. (In fact, phonetics was the ﬁrst area within linguistics to become well-developed (late nineteenth century) and the Reform Movement in language teaching, led by phoneticians, was very inﬂuential in encouraging a focus on the spoken language.) The last 40 years have seen a move towards viewing language in much more integrative and holistic terms. We now know that language use is not just a product of a number of individual language ‘knowledge bits’ which reside completely within ‘interlocutors’ (language users); it is also profoundly affected by a number of other factors, such as the social context (who you are communicating with and for what purpose), the degree of involvement and interaction, the mode of communication (written versus spoken) and time constraints. Taking these and other factors into account gives us a much richer and more accurate account of the way language is actually used and leads to a better description of the knowledge and skills which make up language proﬁciency. In fact Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000) have proposed a discourse- based framework for language teaching designed to deal with all these factors simultaneously. In the rest of this book, therefore, a trend worth watching is how the various areas of applied linguistics now embrace integrative perspectives which acknowledge the complex interplay of numerous factors. Lexico-grammar and Formulaic Language The areas of vocabulary and grammar provide a good example of this new integrative approach. Traditionally, vocabulary was viewed as individual words which could be taught and used in isolation. With grammar being highlighted in most theories and pedagogical methodologies, vocabulary items were seen merely as ‘slot ﬁllers’ necessary to ﬁll out syntactic structures. This conception saw vocabulary and grammar as two discrete entities which could be taught and learnt separately. This view is starting to change and one of the most interesting developments in applied linguistics today is the realization that vocabulary and 12 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics grammar are not necessarily separate things, but may be viewed as two elements of a single language system referred to as ‘lexico-grammar’ (Halliday, 1978). This term acknowledges that much of the systematicity in language comes from lexical choices and the grammatical behaviour of those choices. For example, you can use the word plain in many ways and in many grammatical constructions, but once you choose the collocation made it plain you are more or less constrained to using the following structure: SOMEONE/SOMETHING made it plain that SOMETHING AS YET UNREALIZED (often with authority) WAS INTENDED OR DESIRED (Schmitt, 2000: 189) This structure should not be viewed in terms of being ﬁrst generated with grammar, and then the words simply slotted into the blanks. Rather, this structure is likely to reside in memory as a bit of formulaic language which is already formed, that is, it is a ‘formulaic sequence’. Since it is preformed and ‘ready to go’, it should take less cognitive energy to produce than sequences which have to be created from scratch (Pawley and Syder, 1983; Conklin and Schmitt, 2008). Evidence from corpora show that much of language is made up of such ‘multi-word units’, many of which are likely to be preformulated in the mind (see Moon, 1997; Wray, 2002). Because we now believe that a great deal of language is stored in peoples’ minds as these ‘chunks’, it makes little sense to attempt to analyse those chunks as if they were generated online according to grammar rules. This insight is forcing a reappraisal of both how we consider language itself and how it is processed. Bringing the Language Learner into the Discussion Previously, much of the discussion about language learning focused on the best techniques and materials for teaching. In other words, it had a focus on the teacher. There seemed to be an unexpressed view that the learner was somehow a ‘container’ into which language knowledge could be poured. This view ﬁtted well with teacher-fronted classes and behaviourist theories which suggested learning was merely the result of practice and conditioning. However, in the early 1970s, it was realized that learners are active participants in the learning process and should be allowed to take substantial responsibility for their own learning. This led to interest in the various ways in which individual learners were different from one another and how that might affect their learning. It ﬁrst led to the development of the area of ‘learner strategies’. If learners were, in fact, active participants then it followed that what these learners did would make a difference in the quality and speed of their learning. Studies were carried out to ﬁnd out what behaviours differentiated ‘good’ from ‘poor’ learners (Naiman, Fröhlich, Stern and Todesco, 1978). From these studies, lists of learning strategies which good learners used were developed and it was suggested that all learners could beneﬁt from training in these strategies. Of course, nothing in applied linguistics is so straightforward, and it was eventually discovered that the correspondence between strategy training and use, and higher language achievement, was less direct than previously assumed. It is clear that effective strategy use can facilitate language learning (Oxford, 1990), but it is still unclear how to best train learners to use strategies, or indeed how effective strategy training is in general. More recently, there has been a great deal of emphasis on how the individual characteristics of each learner affects their learning (that is, individual differences). An Overview of Applied Linguistics 13 Clearly, a range of differences either constrain or facilitate the rate at which second languages are learned, including age (Birdsong, 2006), aptitude (Dörnyei, 2005), learning style preferences (Cohen and Weaver, 2006), strategy use (Grifﬁths, 2008) and motivation (Dörnyei, 2005). The area of individual differences will be discussed in detail in Chapter 10, Focus on the Language Learner: Styles, Strategies, and Motivation. New Perspectives on Teaching the Four Skills The teaching of the four language skills (see Chapter 11, Listening, Chapter 12, Speaking and Pronunciation, Chapter 13, Reading, and Chapter 14, Writing) has long been an important concern in second language pedagogy. Language use inevitably involves one or more of the four skills, thus this text devotes a chapter to each language skill. Although it is useful to give attention to the unique sub-skills and strategies associated with each skill, it is also important to consider the overlaps in mode (oral versus written) and process (receptive versus productive): Oral Written Receptive LISTENING READING Productive SPEAKING WRITING Furthermore, each skill may usefully be described in terms of the top-down and bottom-up processing required. Listeners and readers work to decode and construct meanings and messages, whereas speakers and writers use language resources to encode and express meanings and messages. These meanings and messages occur at the level of text or discourse; thus, discourse analysis is highly relevant to understanding the four skills. Top-down processing utilizes shared knowledge, pragmatic knowledge and contextual information to achieve an appropriate interpretation or realization of textual meanings and messages. Bottom-up processing depends on language resources – lexico-grammar and phonology (pronunciation) or orthography – as aids to the accurate decoding or interpretation, or encoding or realization, of meaningful text. Typically, more than one language skill is involved in any communicative activity (for example, we take turns at listening and speaking in conversation, we write notes while listening to a lecture, we read a passage carefully in order to write a summary, etc.). If teachers focus on one skill for purposes of pedagogy and practice, that is, to improve learners’ use of that skill, the ultimate goal should always be to move from such practice toward the types of integrated skill use that the learners are likely to need when using the target language for communication. The Lack of ‘Black and White’ Answers Because language is created and processed both between interlocutors and within the human mind, much of what is of interest in applied linguistics is hidden from direct view and study. Despite the advances in psycholinguistic methodologies, we cannot yet look into the human brain and directly observe language, which means that most research has to rely on indirect evidence observable through language processing and use. The results of such indirect evidence need to be interpreted, and usually more than one interpretation is possible. This makes it difﬁcult to say much with complete certainty about language learning and use. You will notice that throughout the book there are a number of theories and 14 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics hypotheses and that different scholars hold different positions on key issues. Until ‘neurolinguistics’ develops to a point which allows us to directly track language in a physiological manner (Brown and Hagoort, 1999; Paradis, 2004; Schumann et al., 2004), a degree of controversy and multiplicity of views seems inevitable. It thus remains the responsibility of researchers, teachers and you the reader to evaluate the various proposed positions and decide which makes the most sense. Readers looking for easy, tidy and absolute answers may be disappointed, but should remain open to new directions in the future. Conclusion From the discussion in this overview, it should be obvious that our ﬁeld’s views on language, language learning and language use are not static, but are constantly evolving. At the point in time when you read this book, they will still be changing. Thus, you should consider the ideas in this book (and any book) critically and remain open to future directions in the ﬁeld. Further Reading Howatt, A.P.R. (2004) A History of English Language Teaching (second edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelly, L.G. (1969) 25 Centuries of Language Teaching. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Two books which give a historical background to the key applied linguistics area of second language teaching and learning (focusing primarily on English as a second language). Carter, R., Nunan, D. (eds.) (2001) The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cummins, J. and Davison, C. (eds.) (2007) International Handbook of English Language Teaching, Parts 1 and 2. New York: Springer. Davies, A. and Elder, C. (eds.) (2006) The Handbook of Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. Hinkel, E. (ed.). (2005) Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Kaplan, R.B. (ed.) (2005) The Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spolsky, B. (ed.) (1999) Concise Encyclopedia of Educational Linguistics. Amsterdam: Elsevier. There is now a range of encyclopaedia/handbooks that cover the areas of applied linguistics and English language teaching, and the above six volumes are a representative sample. They tend to be longer books that cover a more comprehensive range of subjects than the present text, although each area is often covered in less depth. They are primarily meant as reference volumes where teachers and researchers can look up a range of topics and obtain a brief overview of that subject. An Overview of Applied Linguistics 15 Larsen-Freeman, D. (2000) Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching (second edition). New York: Oxford University Press. A very accessible book which describes, and gives examples, of the various major teaching methodologies used in the twentieth century. Celce-Murcia, M. (ed.) (2001) Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (third edition). Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle. A comprehensive introductory volume intended for preservice teachers focusing on teaching language skills and pedagogical issues. Crystal, D. (1997) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (second edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A lively table-top reference book which gives interesting snippets on a wide variety of language issues, the vast majority of them focusing on the L1 (but including an L2 section). This page intentionally left blank 1 Description of Language and Language Use 2 Grammar Diane Larsen-Freeman University of Michigan Jeanette DeCarrico Portland State University Introduction: Grammar and Grammars When it comes to deﬁnitions of grammar, confusion abounds. One problem is that the word ‘grammar’ means different things to different people. For many, the term suggests a list of do’s and don’ts, rules that tell us we should say It is I, not It is me, that we should not say ain’t, or that we should avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. For others, the term may refer to the rules of grammar found mainly in written language, for example, rules that label sentence fragments as incorrect even though they are often found in spoken language (for example, ‘Working on a term paper’ as a response to the question ‘What are you doing?’), or that admonish us not to begin sentences with and or but, though again, this usage is common in spoken English. For still others, it may simply mean an objective description of the structures of language, with no comment concerning correct versus incorrect forms. Grammars with rules that make distinctions between correct and incorrect forms are deﬁned as ‘prescriptive’ grammars. They tell us how we ought to speak, as in It is I, and how we ought not to speak, as in It is me, or He ain’t home. This approach codiﬁes certain distinctions between standard and non-standard varieties, and often makes overt value judgements by referring to the standard varieties as correct, or ‘good’, English and the non-standard as incorrect, or ‘bad’, English. Grammars that do not make these distinctions and that aim to describe language as it is actually used are called ‘descriptive’ grammars. The rules are more like a blueprint for building well-formed structures, and they represent speakers’ unconscious knowledge, or ‘mental grammar’ of the language. Taking this unconscious knowledge into account, this approach focuses on describing how native speakers actually do speak and does not prescribe how they ought to speak. No value judgements are made, but rather the value-neutral terms ‘grammatical’ and ‘ungrammatical’ are used to distinguish between patterns that are well-formed, possible sentences or phrases in a language and those that are not. For example, The cow ate the corn is a grammatical sentence in English, but *Ate the corn the cow is ungrammatical. (An asterisk indicates a form that is ungrammatical or inappropriate.) Grammar in this sense consists of rules of syntax, which specify how words and phrases combine to form sentences, and rules of morphology, which specify how word forms are constructed (for example, present and past tense distinctions: love, loved; number distinctions: word, words) and so on. For linguists, a descriptive grammar may also be a more detailed look at language, including not only syntax and morphology but also phonetics, phonology, semantics and lexis (that is, vocabulary). For applied linguists, the focus is more on ‘pedagogical grammar’, the type of grammar designed for the needs of second-language students and teachers. Grammar 19 Although teaching grammar in a second language does involve some of the prescriptive rules for the standard varieties, a pedagogical grammar resembles a descriptive grammar much more than a prescriptive one, especially in terms of the range of structures covered (Odlin, 1994). And while certain linguistic grammars tend to be narrowly focused, pedagogical grammars are typically more eclectic, drawing on insights from formal and functional grammars (see below), as well as work on corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics, addressed in other chapters in this volume. For after all, applied linguists must be concerned that students not only can produce grammatical structures that are formally accurate; students must be able to use them meaningfully and appropriately as well. Issues when Describing Grammar A descriptive approach to grammar may seem a simple matter, but in practice it is somewhat more complicated than it may ﬁrst appear. The outcome will be different depending on which parts of the grammar are included and on what the focus of the description is. Which Rules to Describe For one thing, we tend to expect grammars to state rules in terms of general statements, to describe how structures behave in a predictable, rule-governed way. Yet a moment’s reﬂection tells us that some rules apply more consistently than others. For example, whereas the ordering rule for auxiliaries is invariant (modal auxiliaries such as would, might and so on, always precede the primary auxiliaries have or be, as in, would have tried, might be trying but not *have would tried, *be might trying), the subject–verb agreement rule admits exceptions (verbs take the sufﬁx -s if their subject is third person singular, as in He leaves, but there are exceptions such as subjunctive forms, I insist that he leave now). Plural titles of books, plays, ﬁlms, etc. are also sometimes exceptions to the subject–verb agreement rule (Angela’s Ashes is a novel about growing up in an impoverished Irish family). We will also discuss other examples below in which the intended meaning dictates the form of the verb, regardless of the number of the subject. As these examples indicate, grammar must include both rules that are invariant and rules that admit variations. Notice that these examples fall under well- established categories of acceptable, standard English. But what about different varieties? Some descriptive grammars may include only standard varieties as spoken and written on formal occasions by educated speakers of the language, whereas others may focus more on standard forms but also include certain non- standard, or ‘informal’, variants. Grammars intended for use by students of writing, for instance, typically include only those forms acceptable in formal writing. Pedagogical grammars, on the other hand, may focus on standard formal patterns but also include a number of informal alternatives, with explanations of the situations in which each is acceptable, for example, class assignments, job interviews and the like typically require formal writing or speaking (How do you do?, I would like to enquire about X), whereas casual conversation with friends tends towards informal expressions (Hi there, What’s up?). These examples illustrate that issues of what to include can often be decided on the basis of the intended audience. There are other issues that depend on a particular view of what grammar is and on what type of description accords 20 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics with that particular view. These include formal versus functional approaches to grammatical description, considerations of type versus token, sentence versus discourse grammar and the role of spoken versus written forms. Choices based on these issues have far-reaching implications, not only for the particular framework of the grammar itself but also for applications that inﬂuence the design of pedagogical grammars, of syllabuses and of teaching approaches. The remainder of this section addresses these issues in more detail. Form and Function Models of grammar differ greatly, depending on whether they are formal grammars or functional grammars. Formal grammar is concerned with the forms themselves and with how they operate within the overall system of grammar. Traditional grammar, which describes the structure of sentences, is perhaps the best known formal grammar. Among linguists, the most inﬂuential formal grammar in the latter half of the twentieth century has been the generative (transformational) theory of grammar (Chomsky, 1957, 1965), the general principles of which are still the basis for Chomsky’s later versions of generative grammar in the form of principles and parameters (Chomsky, 1981) and the minimalist programme (Chomsky, 1995), and for dozens of other competing variants developed within some version of the generative framework. The focus is primarily syntax and morphology. Generative theory is based on a rationalist approach, the central assumption being that language is represented as a speaker’s mental grammar, a set of abstract rules for generating grammatical sentences. This mental grammar, or internalized, unconscious knowledge of the system of rules, is termed ‘competence’. The rules generate the syntactic structure and lexical items from appropriate grammatical categories (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) are selected to ﬁll in the corresponding grammatical slots in the syntactic frame of the sentence. The interests of generative linguists focus mainly on rule-governed behaviour and on the grammatical structure of sentences and do not include concerns for the appropriate use of language in context. Hymes (1972), an anthropological linguist, developed a functional model that focuses more on appropriate use of language, that is, on how language functions in discourse. Although not rejecting Chomsky’s model entirely, Hymes (1972) extended it and gave greater emphasis to sociolinguistic and pragmatic factors. A central concern of his model is the concept of ‘communicative competence’, which emphasizes language as meaningful communication, including the appropriate use of language in particular social contexts (for example, informal conversation at the dinner table versus formal conversation at the bank). For Hymes (1972), communicative competence is deﬁned as ‘the capabilities of a person’, a competence which is ‘dependent upon both [tacit] knowledge and [ability for] use’ (Hymes, 1972: 282). In other words, it includes not only knowledge of the rules in Chomsky’s sense (grammatical competence) but also the ability to use language in various contexts (pragmatic competence). For example, it includes knowing how to formulate a yes/no question (Operator–NP–VP), and knowing that only certain types (for example, ‘Could you VP?’) function as polite requests and knowing how to use them appropriately. In applied linguistics, the inﬂuence of these theoretical models is evident in various areas. For example, the approach to grammar as abstract linguistic Grammar 21 descriptions is found in learners’ grammars such as Quirk et al. (1972), a descriptive grammar that deals with abstract forms as syntactic combinations of words. On the other hand, a functional approach is evident in Leech and Svartvik (1975), a communicative grammar based on correspondences between structure and function. In this learners’ grammar, each section is built around a major function of language, such as denial and afﬁrmation, describing emotions, and presenting and focusing information. Inﬂuence of different models of grammar can also be seen in syllabus design. Many ESL or EFL grammar texts are based on a structural syllabus design deﬁned in formal terms, with lexical items and grammatical patterns presented according to structural categories such as nouns and noun phrases, verbs and verb phrases, verb tense and aspect, and clause and sentence types. In contrast, notional syllabuses are deﬁned in functional terms such as the speech acts of requesting, ‘Could you VP?’; offering, ‘Would you like X?’ and so on; these notional syllabuses developed at a time when linguistic interest had begun to shift to the communicative properties of language (Widdowson, 1979). Various teaching approaches also draw on insights from these differing approaches to grammar. Approaches inﬂuenced by formal theories such as generative grammar tend to view language learning as rule acquisition and, therefore, focus on formalized rules of grammar. Those that evolved from functional considerations, known as communicative language teaching, view language as communication and tend to promote ﬂuency over accuracy, consequently shifting the focus from sentence-level forms to communicative functions, such as requests, greetings, apologies and the like. More recently, some applied linguists have argued for an approach that draws not on one or the other, but on both (Rutherford and Sharwood Smith, 1988; Widdowson, 1989). Widdowson (1989) is particularly insistent that it is a mistake to concentrate solely on functional considerations while ignoring form altogether. He observes, for instance, that just as approaches that rely too heavily on achievement of rules of grammar often lead to dissociation from any consideration of appropriateness, so approaches which rely too heavily on an ability to use language appropriately can lead to a lack of necessary grammatical knowledge and of the ability to compose or decompose sentences with reference to it. There is, he says, ‘evidence that excessive zeal for communicative language teaching can lead to just such a state of affairs’ (Widdowson, 1989: 131). What is needed is an approach that provides a middle ground in that it neglects neither. Newer linguistic theories that attempt to combine form and meaning (though they give less attention to appropriate use) are cognitive grammar (Langacker, 1987) and construction grammar (Fillmore, Kay, and O’Connor, 1988). Constructions integrate form and meaning at various levels of complexity from the morphology of words to phrases to clauses. An oft-cited example is that of English verb- argument constructions (Goldberg, 2006). For instance, many English verbs enter into a pattern called the ‘ditransitive’ or ‘double object’ construction, in which the indirect object precedes the direct object following the verb. This construction entails the meaning ‘X causes Y to receive Z’, as in ‘Sam mailed Paul a letter’. When newer verbs enter into this construction, they inherit the semantics of the construction and force us to interpret the sentence in the same way. For example, ‘Paul faxed Sam a reply’. It is important to note that, contrary to formal grammar, construction grammar takes the position that certain words ﬁt certain patterns. In other words, it is not the case that any word will ﬁll any slot in a construction. 22 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics Pedagogical grammarians Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999) give strong support to the view that, in language teaching, a formal or functional approach should not be taken to the exclusion of the other. In fact, these authors recommend adopting a three-prong approach, including meaning as a separate dimension, along with those of form and function. They recognize that grammar is not merely a collection of forms ‘but rather involves the three dimensions of what linguists refer to as (morpho)syntax, semantics, and pragmatics’ (Celce- Murcia and Larsen-Freeman, 1999: 4). They illustrate the importance of all three dimensions by means of a pie chart divided into equal and interconnected parts labelled ‘Form’, ‘Meaning’ and ‘Use’ (Figure 2.1). They feel this chart is useful as a conceptual framework for teaching grammar as it serves as a reminder that learners need not only to achieve a certain degree of formal accuracy, but that they also need to use the structures meaningfully and appropriately as well (see also Larsen-Freeman, 2001; 2003). MORPHOSYNTAX/FORM SEMANTICS/MEANING How is it formed? What does it mean? PRAGMATICS/USE When/why is it used? Figure 2.1 Interconnected dimensions of grammar Type versus Token In terms of descriptive grammars, there still remain questions about what it is, exactly, that should be described. Descriptions of language will also have different outcomes depending on whether they account for types of linguistic elements in the abstract, or for tokens of linguistic elements as they actually occur in contexts of use. Descriptions that deal with forms in the abstract describe a range of category types, but those that deal with actual tokens (instances) of language use reveal more than category types: they also reveal the relative frequency of forms and their habitual co-occurrence in different contexts. Whereas a type description might present a broad array of structures and give each equal weight, a token description ‘might well reveal that some of these were of rare occurrence, or restricted to a realization through a limited range of lexical items, almost Grammar 23 exclusively conﬁned to certain contexts, or associated with certain meanings’ (Widdowson, 1990: 75). With the development of computers and computer analysis of language, token descriptions are now possible on a massive scale, and such descriptions have revolutionalized the way we view language (see Chapter 6, Corpus Linguistics). A well-known example is the COBUILD Bank of English Corpus, which contains more than 500 million words (mostly from written texts). Sinclair (1985) notes that type descriptions lacking attested data do not provide an adequate source of reference for language teaching. Instead, he believes that language for pedagogical purposes should be a projection of what actually occurs as recorded by the computer analysis of text. Projects based on analyses of this and other corpus studies have produced various dictionaries and grammars, including the Collins COBUILD English Grammar (1990) of which Sinclair was Editor-in-Chief; Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (1999); Hunston and Francis (2000); and Carter and McCarthy (2006). These grammars attempt to make statements about English, as attested by an analysis of patterns of words in linguistic corpora. Discourse Grammar Corpus studies have also led to an increased interest in analyses of ‘discourse grammar’, that is, analyses of the functional roles of grammatical structures in discourse. Here we are using discourse to mean the organization of language at a level above the sentence or individual conversational turn – that which connects language at the suprasentential level. In addition to the discourse context, there is also the inﬂuence that the non-linguistic co-text plays in the deployment of a speaker’s grammatical resources. Speakers and writers make grammatical choices that depend on how they construe and wish to represent the context and on how they wish to position themselves in it (Larsen-Freeman, 2002). For example, speakers use the past perfect tense–aspect combination in English, not only to indicate the ﬁrst of two past events, but also to give a reason or justiﬁcation for the main events of the narrative. These events are not the main events themselves but, rather, are felt to be an essential background to what happened (see McCarthy and Carter, 1994; Hughes and McCarthy, 1998). The italicized structure in the following excerpt, from an illustration given by Hughes and McCarthy (1998), occurs in a conversation between two young women who are talking about mutual friends from their days together at Brunel University. Speaker 1: Got on better with Glynbob I think and John Bish let me and Trudie sleep in his bed last time we went up to Brunel or the one time when we stayed in Old Windsor with them cos erm Ben had given us his room cos he’d gone away for the weekend and erm it was me and Trudie just in Ben’s room and John Doughty had a double bed so he, John Bish had a double bed so he offered us this double bed between us and then slept in Ben’s room cos Ben and PQ had gone away for the weekend. (Hughes and McCarthy, 1998: 270) Hughes and McCarthy (1998) note that the italicized past perfects seem to give a reason or justiﬁcation for the main events. In a similar vein, Celce-Murcia (1998) argues that the vast majority of grammatical choices that writers make represent 24 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics ‘rules’ that are discourse-sensitive, including position of adverbials, passive versus active voice, indirect object and direct object, sequencing, pronominalization across independent clauses, article/determiner selection, use of existential there and tense–aspect–modality choice. The order of adverbial clauses viz-a-viz main clauses in sentences, for instance, is not simply random. Rather, it has been found that sentence-initial adverbial clauses serve an important discourse-organizing role by linking up information in the main clause with information in the previous discourse; sentence-ﬁnal clauses, in contrast, generally only expand the local main clause (Thompson, 1985; DeCarrico, 2000). The following example, from DeCarrico (2000), illustrates this point. It is an excerpt from a description of the painter Winslow Homer. Thoreau had called the seacoast a ‘wild rank place... with no ﬂattery in it.’ Homer, in his later years, consciously cultivated a briney persona that matched [the seacoast] roughness. When he was not communing with the roaring sea from his studio, on Prout’s Neck, Maine, he was off in the Adirondacks with his brother, Charles, angling for trout. (DeCarrico, 2000: 194) The ﬁrst sentence establishes, as the discourse topic, the ruggedness of the seacoast and Homer’s deliberate cultivation of a rugged persona to match. DeCarrico (2000) notes that, given this context, the initial placement of the when adverbial clause not only functions within the sentence to indicate a time relation between the events within the two clauses themselves, but it also serves as a discourse link between the previously established topic, that of the wild seacoast and the pursuit of a briney persona, and the idea of being off in the Adirondacks angling for trout. If normal word order had been used, with the adverbial clause in ﬁnal position, the linkage with the previous discourse would be much less clear, if not entirely lost. Spoken and Written Grammar Corpus studies also reveal important distinctions between spoken and written grammar. Comparisons of spoken and written corpora have raised some basic questions concerning descriptions of grammar, such as how different types of spoken language can be classiﬁed, how features of written and spoken grammar are differently distributed and what the status of the spoken language is, as an object of study within applied linguistics (McCarthy 1998). Carter and McCarthy (1995) believe that the differences between spoken and written grammar are especially important for pedagogical grammars, since ‘descriptions that rest on the written mode or on restricted genres and registers of spoken language are likely to omit many common features of everyday informal grammar and usage’ (Carter and McCarthy, 1995: 154). For instance, grammars these authors surveyed gave examples of the reporting verb in the simple past tense (X said that Y), and yet in their spoken corpus they found various examples of the reporting verb in past continuous (X was saying Y). While undoubtedly such observations are valid, Leech (2000) contends that the same grammatical repertoires operate in both speech and writing, although the structures used in each may occur with different frequencies. It should also be noted that there has often been a ‘written bias’ in linguistic descriptions (Linell, 2005). Grammar 25 Limitations of Grammatical Descriptions Previous sections have reviewed issues in describing grammar, issues that were mainly concerned with what to describe, how to describe it and how to account for differing approaches and their implications in terms of theory and pedagogy in applied linguistics. But however precise and thorough researchers may attempt to be in addressing these issues, there are certain limitations to descriptions of grammar given in isolation from all other parts of the language system. The Interdependence of Grammar and Lexis Regardless of the type of description or the approach taken, when we try to make general statements about grammar that neatly identify broad patterns, we are abstracting away from the overall system in ways that are somewhat artiﬁcial. One reason is that it is very difﬁcult to isolate grammar and lexis into completely separate categories, because grammar does not exist on its own. It is interdependent with lexis and, in many cases, grammatical regularity and acceptability are conditioned by words. A commonly cited example is the past morpheme -ed, which applies only where the verb happens to be ‘regular’, as in walked, traded, wondered. Irregular verbs, on the other hand, take various past forms, such as drank or ate. However, the choice of lexical item may restrict grammatical structures in other ways. The progressive aspect, for instance, is often used to indicate a temporary activity, but certain lexical items may act upon the grammar to constrain this sense of temporariness. We easily recognize that a sentence such as Mary is taking a nap indicates a temporary activity, whereas Mary is taking a class indicates an activity of extended duration. Lexicogrammar: The Problem of Deﬁning Boundaries A more striking instance of the interdependence of lexis and grammar is that of prefabricated ‘chunks’ of language, in which the boundary between the two becomes even more blurred. Native speakers tend to use a great many expressions that are formulaic in nature (Pawley and Syder, 1983), ﬁxed or semi-ﬁxed expressions that act as single lexical units used as wholes. That is, they are not composed each time from scratch by the rules of syntax. As ﬁxed units, they appear to be intermediary between lexical words and grammatical structures. These prefabricated units are called by many names, perhaps most commonly ‘formulaic sequences’ (Wray, 2002), and exhibit great variability. Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) were among the ﬁrst to highlight the importance of these sequences, focusing in particular on ‘lexical phrases’, which they describe as ‘multi-word lexical phenomena that exist somewhere between the traditional poles of lexicon and syntax, conventionalized form/function composites that occur more frequently and have more idiomatically determined meaning than language that is put together each time’ (page 1). As form/function composites, lexical phrases differ from other formulaic language, such as idioms (kick the bucket, hell bent for leather), in that they have associated discourse functions. They range from completely ﬁxed, as in by the way, which functions to shift a topic in discourse, to relatively ﬁxed frames with limited slots for ﬁllers, as in a___ago, used to express time relationships (for example, a day ago, a long time ago), to frames 26 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics with slots allowing considerable variation, as in I’m (really) (very) sorry to hear that X (where X may be an entire clause, such as, you ﬂunked the test, you lost your job, etc.), used to express sympathy. The descriptive part of the problem is that these phrasal units, which are pervasive in language, cannot be adequately accounted for by models consisting of abstract rules of sentence syntax, supported by a lexicon of single word items that are inserted into abstract categories such as NP, VP, PP, etc. There is considerable evidence that the mind stores and processes lexical phrases as individual wholes, including evidence from ﬁrst language acquisition studies indicating that they are learned ﬁrst as unanalysed chunks and, only later, analysed as to particular grammatical patterns (Peters, 1983). At present, there is growing interest in investigating the implications of formulaic language for descriptions of grammar, in particular, implications for how we view the components of syntax and lexicon and for how the components interact with each other and with discourse level concerns (DeCarrico, 1998). A closer look at the limitations of various grammatical models may help us to re- examine previous assumptions and to look for new directions in resolving issues and problems in the description of grammar. As this essential work on arriving at more comprehensive descriptive grammars continues, applied linguists must also get on with the tasks of explaining the learning, and improving the teaching, of grammar. Learning Grammar Over the history of applied linguistics, different theories of learning have been proposed to account for how grammar is learned. During the middle of the previous century, for instance, grammar learning was thought to take place through a process of verbal ‘habit formation’. Habits were established through stimulus-response conditioning, which led to the ‘overlearning’ of the grammatical patterns of a language. In order to help students overcome the habits of their native language and inculcate those of the target language, teachers conducted pattern practice drills of various types: repetition, transformation, question and answer, etc. Teachers introduced little new vocabulary until the grammatical patterns were ﬁrmly established. Language use was also tightly controlled in order to prevent students making errors that could lead to the formation of bad habits that would later prove difﬁcult to eradicate. With the rise of generative grammar and its view of language as a system of rules, grammar learning was seen to take place through a process of ‘rule formation’, which itself was brought about when students formulated, tested and revised hypotheses about grammatical structures in the target language. Thus, students were seen to play a much more active role in the classroom than they had earlier. Consistent with this perspective, students’ errors were not to be feared, but rather welcomed as evidence that students were attempting to test their hypotheses and receive feedback, with which they could then revise their hypotheses. In the classroom, students were given written grammar exercises so they could induce the grammatical rules that would allow them to generate and understand novel sentences. With the shift toward a more communicative approach to language teaching, views of grammar learning changed once again. Some held that grammar learning took place implicitly and most effectively when students’ attention was Grammar 27 not on grammar at all. In other words, they said that grammar was best learned subconsciously when students were engaged in understanding the meaning of the language to which they were introduced (Krashen and Terrell, 1983). Those that adhered to a Chomskyan universal grammar (UG) perspective felt that target language input alone or input with negative evidence (that is, evidence that a particular form is ungrammatical) might be sufﬁcient to have learners reset the parameters of UG principles in order to reﬂect the differences between the native language and target language grammars (White, 1987). Others felt that explicit grammar teaching had a role (Norris and Ortega, 2000), with some claiming that explicit attention to grammar was essential for older language learners whose ability to acquire language implicitly, much as children learn their native language, was no longer possible, or at least no longer efﬁcient. Second language acquisition (SLA) research in both naturalistic and classroom environments has informed modern perspectives of grammar learning (see Chapter 7, Second Language Acquisition). SLA research tells us that an analysis of the language that learners use, their ‘interlanguage’, reveals that grammar is not acquired in a linear fashion, one structure being mastered after another. Further, with regard to any one structure, learners use a lot of intermediate forms before conforming to what is accurate in the target language. It can easily be seen that many learners’ utterances are overgeneralizations. For example, learners of English produce ‘eated’ for ‘ate’, interpreted by some researchers as evidence for the process of rule formation in SLA. Learners also use forms that do not resemble target forms, and they do so consistently, such as using pre-verbal negation during early English language acquisition (for example, ‘no want’), regardless of the native language of learners. This behaviour explains why it has been said that the interlanguage is systematic, that is, learners operate consistently within a system, albeit one that is not consonant with the target language. New structures are not simply assimilated one by one, but rather as a new structure makes its appearance into a learner’s interlanguage, the learner’s system begins to shift. Thus, learning does not add knowledge to an unchanging system – it changes the system (Feldman, 2006). It is also clear, however, that rule formation does not account for all of grammar learning. Indeed, some would argue that it has no role in SLA at all. Connectionist or neural network models support such a conclusion (Ellis, 1998). Repeated exposure to target language forms contributes to the strengthening of connections in neural network models. The models simulate rule-like grammatical behaviour even though no rules or algorithms are used in constructing the model. Instead, patterns are abstracted from the way structures are statistically distributed in massive amounts of input data. With the use of connectionism to simulate the way that neural networks in the brain function (see Chapter 7, Second Language Acquisition), new ways of conceptualizing grammar learning are coming to the forefront. One method that is receiving a great deal of attention is emergentism (Ellis and Larsen-Freeman, 2006; Larsen-Freeman, 2006). Emergentists believe that rather than speakers’ performance being managed by a ‘top-down’ rule-governed system, learners’ interlanguage emerges from repeated encounters with structures and with opportunities to use them. In this way, it could be said that language learning is an iterative process, revisiting the same or similar territory again and again (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron, 2008). Thus, grammar learning is facilitated by the frequency of use of the forms in the language to which the learner is exposed. The Zipﬁan proﬁle of language, in which certain forms are used very 28 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics frequently while others are used far less so, facilitates the process of abstracting the patterns (Ellis and Larsen-Freeman, 2009). The fact that frequently-occurring constructions are often semantically concrete and short in length aids the learning process (Goldberg, 2006). Regardless of which type (or types, as is more likely the case) of process is responsible for learning, SLA research makes clear to most researchers that some attention must be given to grammar by second language learners. However, it is also clear that the attention to form should not come through the use of decontextualized drills or isolated grammar exercises. Learners will be able to complete the exercises satisfactorily when their attention is focused on the grammar, but when their attention shifts to a more communicative interaction, the grammar will be forgotten. In order for learners to be able to transfer what they have learned in the classroom to more communicative contexts outside it, pedagogical activities have to be psychologically authentic, where there is alignment between the conditions of learning and the conditions of subsequent use (Segalowitz, 2003). Further, for new forms to be incorporated into the intermediate language, or ‘interlanguage’, that learners speak, it is thought that students must ﬁrst notice what it is they are to learn (Schmidt, 1990). Until they do, the target form may merely remain as part of the ‘noise’ in the input. Then too, even when they are able to produce grammatical structures accurately, students still need to learn what they mean and when they are used. In other words, learning grammar does not merely entail learning form. In fact, as we noted earlier, what needs to be learnt about grammar can be characterized by three dimensions: form, meaning and use. We have seen in Figure 2.1 that the dimensions are interconnected, but nonetheless can be described discretely. For example, in learning the rule of English subject–verb agreement discussed above, students would have to learn the form that an ‘s’ is added to the verb stem and that the orthographic ‘s’ may be realized in pronunciation as one of three allomorphs /s/, /z/ or /∂z/. (The slashes indicate sounds; see Chapter 9, Sociolinguistics, and Chapter 12, Speaking and Pronunciation.) They would also have to learn what it means, that is, that it signals the present tense and that the subject is third person and is conceived of as a single entity. This being the case, usually, singular subjects go with singular verbs and plural subjects with plural verbs. However, to show that the meaning contribution is independent from form, we only have to think of a case where there is a departure from this convention. For example, a sentence such as ‘Ten miles makes for a long hike.’ shows us that even a plural subject can be conceived of as a single entity. Here again, as we showed earlier, there are times when the rule of subject–verb agreement does not apply. Teaching students when to use it and when not to, then, becomes an essential element in grammar instruction. The same analysis holds for a formulaic utterance. A greeting, such as ‘Good afternoon’, for instance, can be described in terms of its form, a noun preceded by an attributive adjective. Its meaning is a greeting at a particular time of day. Learning to use it would involve, for example, students’ learning when to use it as opposed to learning to use a more informal greeting such as ‘Hi’. Another example of learning to use greetings is the need for learners of English to learn that ‘Good night’ is used only for taking leave. ‘Good evening’ is appropriate for a greeting, no matter what time of night it is. This is different from other languages in which the equivalent of ‘Good night’ is used as a greeting. This last point highlights the Grammar 29 inﬂuence of the L1. Because the patterns of the native language are so entrenched, many believe that grammar teaching is the only, or certainly the most efﬁcient, way to help learners master new patterns. Teaching Grammar As mentioned above, the prevailing view today is that students must notice what it is they are to learn. Although this has traditionally been accomplished by a teacher presentation, often of an explicit rule, a greater variety of means, some far more implicit or interactive, is favoured these days. An example of an implicit means of promoting student noticing is the use of some sort of input enhancement (Sharwood Smith, 1993). It might take the form of ‘input ﬂooding’, that is, increasing the number of times that students encounter the target structure in a particular text. Another possibility for enhancing the input is for the teacher to modify the text features in some fashion, such as boldfacing the target structures to make them more salient to students. An example of encouraging noticing through interaction is accomplished through guided participation (Adair-Hauck, Donato and Cumo-Johanssen, 2000), in which the teacher carefully leads students to awarenesses that they did not have before – it is neither an inductive nor a de

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