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Linguistics: Applied Linguistics
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Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It studies both the structure and the use of language. Language is a universal human characteristic. All human languages share some traits, while diverging in particulars. Linguists may describe both universal and specific traits of language and of languages. This knowledge can be applied to a broad spectrum of problems from bilingual education to artificial intelligence, second language learning to conflict resolution.
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Applied Linguistics is a growing and vibrant discipline in universities nationally and internationally. It is an interdisciplinary field of research and instruction that provides theoretical and descriptive foundations for the empirical investigation and solution of language-related issues, especially those of language education (first-language, secondlanguage, foreign-language and heritage-language teaching and learning), but ... issues of bilingualism and biliteracy, language policy, language assessment, translation and interpretation, lexicography, rhetoric and composition. Students who demonstrate competence in these areas increase their opportunities for employment, as many job descriptions indicate a preference for candidates with an emphasis in applied linguistics or second language acquisition. Also, with the ever-increasing number of second language learners at the K-12 levels, it is essential for all teachers and educational researchers to have a fundamental understanding of language learning and teaching theories and practices.
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Linguistics is not limited to grammatical theory. Descriptive linguistics analyzes the grammars of individual languages; anthropological linguistics, or ethnolinguistics, and sociolinguistics focus on languages in relation to culture, social class, race, and gender; dialectologists investigate how these factors fragment one language into many. In addition, sociolinguists and applied linguists examine language planning, literacy, bilingualism, and second-language acquisition. Computational linguistics encompasses automatic parsing, machine processing, and computer simulation of grammatical models for the generation and parsing of sentences. If viewed as a branch of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics has as its goal the modeling of human language as a cognitive system. A branch of linguistics concerned with the biological basis of language development is neurolinguistics.
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Many areas of applied linguistics today involve the explicit use of computers. Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are extremely fruitful areas of applied linguistics which have come to the forefront in recent years with increasing computing power. Their influence has had a great effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modeling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constrains the theories to computable operations and provides a more rigorous mathematical basis.
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Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language Quarterly journal publishes articles on linguistics, applied linguistics, English as a second or foreign language and English language training. Host: UC Berkeley College and Kyoto Sangyo University. ISSN: 1072-4303
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Theoretical linguistics are concerned with finding and describing generalities both within particular languages and among all languages. Applied linguistics take the results of those findings and applies them to other areas. Often applied linguistics refers to the use of linguistic research in language teaching, but results of linguistic research are used in many other areas, as well.
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Applied Linguistics