Get premium membership and access questions with answers, video lessons as well as revision papers.
Applied linguistics is defined in various ways but there’s a general agreement on what it embraces. First it is a branch of linguistics concerned with practical application of language studies. It is interdisciplinary in nature and its interdisciplinary scope includes sociology, psychology, education and pedagogy among others. It is concerned with real world issues in which language plays a leading role (Susan Hunston).Some of these issues include: language education (first language and second language teaching and learning, foreign language teaching and learning,) bilingualism and multilingualism, translation and interpreting, language policy and language planning, language testing, stylistics, literature, literacy and other areas in which language related decisions need to be taken (Juliane House).It deals with many more issues that go beyond purely linguistic ones for example linguistic analysis, a sub discipline of applied linguistics is used by many governments to verify the claimed nationality of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation to prove their claim. Today computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics .Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Thus applied linguistics has been argued to be something of a ‘misnomer’ since it focuses on making sense of and engineering solutions for real world problems not simply applying existing technical knowledge from linguistics.
francis1897 answered the question on March 8, 2023 at 08:38