This document provides an overview of applied linguistics. It defines applied linguistics as looking at how linguistics can help understand real-life problems in areas such as education, psychology, and sociology. Some key areas of applied linguistics mentioned include language acquisition, corpus studies, sociolinguistics, language education, clinical linguistics, language testing, workplace communication, language planning, and forensic linguistics. The document also discusses the scope and need for applied linguistics and provides examples of how linguistics can be applied to education, law, and analyzing information and effects.

1. Major: English Language and Literature
Applied Linguistics
Session1 (Overview of Applied linguistics)
Dr. Badriya Al Mamari
Academic year 2021/2022

2. Introduction to the course
-Content of the course syllabus
-Aims and objectives
-Requirements (Readings, Exams and attendance)

3. Activity 1.
Watch the video, write as many notes as you could
hear about applied linguistics.

4. What is applied linguistics?
• Applied linguistics is a field of study that looks at how
linguistics can help understand real-life problems in areas such
as psychology, sociology and education.
• It can be compared with theoretical linguistics, which looks
at areas such as morphology, phonology and lexis.
• Areas of applied linguistics of interest to teachers of
languages include language acquisition, corpus studies and
sociolinguistics

5. • Linguistics are concerned with finding and describing
the general characteristics of languages. They also study
the different varieties of a particular language.
• Applied linguistics take the result of those findings and
apply them to other areas.
• Linguistic research is commonly applied to areas such as
education, lexicography, translation etc. applied
linguistics work towards finding solutions for real
world linguistics problems and apply technical
knowledge from many sources, e.g. sociology,
psychology, anthropology etc.

6. The need for Applied Linguistics:
• Language is at the heart of human life. Without it many of our most
important activities are inconceivable, e.g. relating to our family, making
friends, learning religious faith, having political ideas, etc.
• Throughout history and across the world, people have used language to
gossip and chat, play games, sing songs, tell stories, teach children, pass on
information, remember the past. Such activities seem to be intrinsic to human
life.
• People do them without conscious analysis. Language is thus natural
phenomenon without conscious control.

7. Scope of Applied Linguistics:
• Since language is implicated in so much of our daily lives, there is
clearly a large and open-ended number of quite disparate
activities to which applied linguistics is relevant. To do this we
need to refer to specific instances of more general conceptual
areas of study. These areas can be identified under three areas as
follows:

8. 1. Language and education:
This area includes:
• a. First language education- When a child learns or studies their home language or languages.
• b. Addition language education- This is often divided into second language education, when
someone studies their society’s majority or official language which is not their home language
and foreign language education- when someone studies the language of another country.
• c. Clinical linguistics- The study and treatment of speech and communication impairment,
whether hereditary, developmental or acquired (through injury, stroke, illness or age).
• d. Language testing- The assessment and evaluation of language achievement and proficiency,
both in first and additional languages, and for both general and specific purposes.

9. 2. Language work and law
• This area includes:
• a. Workplace communication- The study of how is used in the workplace and how it
contributes to the nature and power relations of different types of work.
• b. Language planning- The making of decisions, often supported by legislation about the
official status of languages and their institutional use, including their use in education.
• c. Forensic linguistics- The deployment of linguistic evidence in criminal and other legal
investigation, for example to establish the authorship of a document, or a profile of a
speaker from a tape- recording.

10. 3. Language information and effect:
• This area includes:
• a. Literary stylistics- The study of the relationship between linguistic choices and effects in literature.
• b. Critical discourse analysis- The study of the relationship between linguistic choices and effects in
persuasive use of language, for example in marketing and politics.
• c. Translation and interpretation- The formulation of principles underlying the perceived
equivalence between a stretch of language and its translation, and the practice of translating written
texts and interpreting spoken language.
• d. Information design- The arrangement and presentation of written language. including issues
related to typography and layout, choices of medium and effective combination of language with
other means of communication such as pictures and diagrams.
• e. Lexicography- The planning and compiling of both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries and
other language reference works such as Thesaurus.

11. Other areas of Applied Linguistics:
• a. Sociolinguistics- The focus here is upon the relationship between language and society. In
sociolinguistics we find systematic relationship between social groups and contexts and the
variable ways in which language is used.
• b. Functional linguistics- Here the concern is with language as a means of communication, the
purpose it fulfills and how people actually use their language.
• c. Corpus linguistics- Vast data banks containing millions of words of actual language in use can
be searched within seconds to yield extensive information about word frequencies and
combinations.
• d. Computational linguistics- Today computers are widely used in many areas of applied
linguistics. Application of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted
translation and natural language processing are areas of applied linguistics which have recently
been developed.

12. References:
• Cook, G. (2003). Applied linguistics. Oxford University Press.