APPLIEDLINGUISTICS202: INTRODUCTION

Applied Linguistics addresses language-related problems and issues in the everyday world. We address these concerns from three complementary vantage points:

language acquisition
language assessment
discourse analysis/functional grammar

We focus on the interface of these perspectives in real world situations. Other departments focus on individual aspects such as first language acquisition, conversation analysis, or computational modeling, but they do not systematically bring these areas together as we do.

For example, while psychometricians in the School of Education deal with measurement issues, we are interested in the relationships between the measurement of language ability and the acquisition of that ability.

While sociologists study the structure of conversation, we apply that study to problems that second language learners have in communicating with native speakers. This work is a product of years of doing research in second language acquisition of child and adult immigrants, the acquisition of discourse competence in written and spoken language, as well as the assessment of language abilities in all types of language learners.

We have changed our focus from teacher education to research and no longer offer language education as an area of specialization.

Language Assessment

Language assessment is concerned with the empirical investigation of theoretical questions on the one hand, and with providing useful tools for assessment in Applied Linguistics on the other. Language testing research has as its goals the formulation and empirical investigation of theories of language test performance and the demonstration of the ways in which performance on language tests is related to communicative language use in its widest sense.

Language Acquisition

Research in language acquisition seeks to:
1) describe inter language systems
2) examine underlying cognitive mechanisms that could account for these systems
3) examine the social, affective, and neurobiological factors that influence second language development
4) explore the effect of instruction on the process
Additional areas of inquiry include the relationship between first and second language acquisition, and comparisons between native and nonnative linguistic systems and how speakers use them in natural discourse.

Unlike first language acquisition, which appears to be inevitable and fairly uniform in all normal humans, second language learners achieve varying degrees of success. In order to explain this variability it is necessary to understand not only the neural underpinning of language, but also the neural basis for perception, attention, memory and emotion.

Discourse Analysis / Functional Grammar

Discourse Analysis is concerned with how language users produce and interpret language in context. Discourse analysts research:

linguistic structures of speech acts
conversational sequences
speech activities
oral and literate registers
stance

These analysts seek to relate these constructions to social and cultural norms, preferences and expectations. The field articulates how lexico-grammar and discourse systematically vary across social situations and at the same time help to define those situations.