APPLIED LINGUISTICS LARA MORALES ADRIANA MARIAGNA

APPLIED LINGUISTICS THE NEED FOR APPLIED LINGUISTICS Language is the “heart of the human life” this means that without it, many of our most important activities are inconceivable because most of them need principally the use of words. Throughout the story and across the world, people have used language to gossip and chat, flirt and seduce, play games, sing songs, tell stories, teach children, worship gods, insult enemies, pass on information, make deals, remember the past, and lament the dead; such activities seem to be intrinsic of human life and people do them without conscious analysis (It does not seem that we need to know about language to use it effectively).

Language use then, is in many ways a natural phenomenon beyond conscious control. Yet there are also aspects of language use in which we can intervene and about which, consequently, there are decisions to be made. In making decisions there are many questions and subsidiary questions to be asked, each one admitting many different and opposed answers.

EXAMPLE AND PROCEDURE A bussiness executive wants to learn Japanese in preparation for taking up a post in Tokio. There are 3 courses avaiable: On the basis of this definition, then we can say that applied linguistics sets out to investigate problems in the world in which language is implicated for example:

- Course 1: Has a strong emphasis on learning to write. - Course 2: Focuses on the spoken language, and explains rules of Japanese grammar. - Course 3: Is more “natural” than the others because has not any explanation or of rules or translation, only a series of comunicative classroom activities and tasks. What of the last courses is better for this executive and why? The answer is, Course 3, but Why?: ?

First of all, we need to know what the man is going to learn Japanese to taking op a post in Tokyo this means that he´s going to take one course not tor personal preparation or because he want to know Japanese, it´s only one job requirement, so, he must take the course number 3, why? Because he need to understand and can talk with fluency this language in a short period of time so, this executive need to familiarize himself in with it, talk a lot without translation, nothing of grammar rules, only understand when he´s listening someone speaking Japanese and can speak it.

THE SCOPE OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS Since language is implicated so much of our daily lives, there is clearly a large and open minded number of quite desperate activities which applied linguistics is relevant and can be identifying under three headlines as follows:

1.- LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION *First Language Education: When a child studies their home language/s * Additional Language Education: Often divide into: - Second Language Education: When someone studies their society´s majority or official language which is not their home language. - Foreign Language Education: When someone studies a language from another country. * Clinical Linguistics: The study and treatment of speech and communication impairments, whether hereditary, developmental or acquired (through injury, stroke, illness, or age) * Language Testing: The assessment and evaluation of language achievement and proficiency, both in first and additional languages, and for both in general and specific purposes.

2.- LANGUAGE, WORK AND LAW * Workplace Communication: The study of how language is used in the work space, and how it contributes to the nature and power relations to different types of work. * 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. * Forensic Linguistics: The development of linguistic evidence in criminal and other legal investigations.

3. - LANGUAGE INFORMATION AND EFFECT * Literary Stylistics: The study of the relationship between linguistic choices and effects in literature. * Critical Discourse Analysis: The study of the relationship between linguistic choices and effects in persuasive uses of languages. * Translation and Interpretation: The formulation of principles underlying the perceived equivalence between a stretch of language, it´s translation, the practices of translating written text and interpreting spoken language.

* Information Design: The arrangement and presentation of written language; including issues relating to typography and layout, choices of medium and effective combinations of language with other means of communication such as pictures and diagrams. * IEXCOGRAPHY: The planning and compiling of both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries and other language reference works such as thesauri.

All of this areas fall within our definition of applied linguistics and are claimed as areas of enquiry by organizations and journals concerned with the discipline. Yet in practice some of them are more independent t than others. For example: Clinical Linguistics and Translation Studies in particular are often regarded ad independent disciplines. Among the others some –such as the Study of Foreign Language learning- are more active as areas academic enquiry than others.

LINGUISTICS AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS: A DIFFICULT RELATIONSHIP One way of approaching the practical an professional problems of this areas is by relating them to what has been said about languaje in linguistics. Like any discipline, linguistics looks for generalities underlying actual apperances and so in some degree is bound to represent an abstract idealization of language rather than the way it is espected in the real world.

One particulary influential type of idealization is that used in the generative linguistics, in this view the proper subjet matter of linguistics should be the representation of language in the mind , rather than the way in which people actually used language everyday in life.

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