1. Introduction to Applied Linguistics
Chapter 1: Language, Learning, and Teaching
Dr. Asma Almusharraf
2. CHAPTERS Language, Learning, and Teaching
First Language Acquisition
Age and Acquisition
Human Learning
Styles and Strategies
Personality Factors
3. Language
Possible definitions:
• The Merriam-Webster's Dictionary: “Language is a systematic means of communicating
ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having
understood meanings.”
• The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia: “Language is a system of communication by vocal
symbols.”
• Pinker’s definition: “Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child
spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without
awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is
distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.”
4. All possible
definitions of
language
yields the
following
combined
definition.
Language is systematic.
Language is a set of arbitrary symbols.
Those symbols are primarily vocal, but may also be visual,
The symbols have conventionalized meanings to which they refer.
Language is used for communication.
Language operates in a speech community or culture.
Language is essentially human, although possibly not limited to humans.
Language is acquired by all people in much the same way; language and
language learning both have universal characteristics.
5. Questions and issues in second language acquistion
Learner characteristics (Who does the learning and the teaching?)
Linguistic factors (What should be learned and taught?)
Learning processes (How does learning take place?)
Age and Acquistion (When does learning take place?)
Instructional variables (Do all people acquire language successfully?)
Context (Where learning should take place?)
Purpose (Why accruing a second language?)
6. Learning:
It is acquiring or getting of knowledge of a
subject or a skill by study, experience, or
instruction.
1- Learning is acquiring or getting.
2- Learning is retention of information or skill.
3- Retention implies storage system, memory,
cognitive organization.
4- Learning involves active, conscious focus on and
acting upon events outside or inside the organism.
5- Learning is relatively permanent but subject to
forgetting.
6- Learning involves some form of practice, perhaps
reinforced practice.
7- Learning is a change in behavior.
Teaching:
It is showing or helping someone to learn how
to do something, giving instructions, guiding
in the study of something, providing with
knowledge, causing to know or understand.
1- Teaching cannot be defined apart from
learning.
2- Teaching is guiding and facilitating learning,
enabling the learner to learn, setting the
conditions for learning.
3- Your understanding of how the learner learns
will determine your philosophy of education,
your teaching style, your approach, methods, and
classroom techniques.
Learning vs. Teaching
7. Schools of Thought in Second Language Acquisition/Learning/Teaching
Generative
1960s-1980s
Structural (descriptive)
1940s-1950s
Constructive
1980s-2000s
-It emerged through the influence
of Bloomfield.
-It used the scientific observation
of human language.
-Only the publicly observable
responses could be studied.
-It described human languages
and their structural
characteristics.
-Behavioral approaches in
teaching (drills, repetitions, etc.).
-It emerged through the
influence of Noam Chomsky.
-A distinction was made
between competence and
performance.
-It emerged through the
influence of jean piaget.
-It emphasized social
interaction and cooperative
learning.
8. 19th century and Language teaching
• Classical method (Grammar-translation method)
• The focus on grammatical rules, memorization of vocabulary, translation
of texts, and doing written exercises.
• The Classical Method was adopted as the chief means for teaching
foreign languages.
• Little thought was given at the time to teaching oral use of languages;
after all, languages were not being taught primarily to learn oral
communication, but for gaining a reading proficiency in a foreign
language.
9. 19th century and Language teaching
• The major characteristics of Grammar Translation:
1. Classes taught in the mother tongue; little use of the L2
2. Much vocabulary taught in the form of lists of isolated words
3. Elaborate explanations of the intricacies of grammar
4. Reading of difficult classical texts begun early
5. Texts treated as exercises in grammatical analysis
6. Occasional drills and exercises in translating sentences from LI to
L2
7. Little or no attention to pronunciation
10. 20th century and Language Teaching
• Audiolingual Method (ALM) in the late 1940s and 1950s
• It has an overemphasis on oral production drills.
• Not focusing on form
• It is connected in the 70s to constructivism and socio-cultural theory
• Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
• It stresses the importance of self-esteem, intrinsic motivation, students
cooperatively learning together, of developing individual strategies for
constructing meaning, and above all of focusing on the communicative
process in language learning
