THE IMPACT OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS

By
Kadek Agus Juniarta
 Table of Contents

1. The Way of How Applied Linguistics Has Influenced Second Language Teaching....1
2. The Way of How Applied Linguistics Has Influenced the Types of Language that
Learners are Exposed to..........................................................................................................3
3. The Way of How Applied Linguistics Has Led to a Better Understanding of
Different Types of Discourse....................................................................................................4
4. The Way of How Applied Linguistics Has Influenced Language and the Law...........5
5. How applied linguistics has contributed to cross-cultural understanding..................6
REFERENCES.........................................................................................................................7

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 THE IMPACT OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS

1. The Way of How Applied Linguistics Has Influenced Second Language Teaching
Work in applied linguistics has a significant impact to how second foreign languages
are taught. Work in language teaching has followed two interrelated strands. The first is about
how language should be taught, the focus on how language is best presented to learners and
what kinds of activities are used to language learning. The second focuses on what kind of
language should be taught. The first discussion is about how applied linguistics research has
affected the ways in which languages are taught.
The impact of applied linguistics research on the teaching of languages has been very
important. The main impact is in the form of increasing focus on communication and
meaning, which has led to more communicative approaches to language teaching. According
to Richards and Rodgers (2001), the principles of communicative approaches are as follows.
 Learners learn a language through using it to communicate.
 Authentic and meaningful communications are the goal of classroom activities.
 Fluency is an important part of communication.
 Communication involves the integration of different language skills.
 Learning is a process of creative construction and involves trial and error.
Widdowson, Brumfit and Johnson in Groom and Littlemore (2011) argue that in
communicative approach to language teaching, the language learning should not just be about
learning grammar rules and vocabularies, but it should focus on teaching learners how to use
the language that they have learned to express themselves effectively. Furthermore, learners
have to understand how linguistic meanings relate to the social and situational contexts in
which they occur.
The communicative approach to language teaching can be implemented in the
language classroom through task-based learning. It involves the use of tasks where the focus
is mainly on meaning. Many textbooks have elements of task-based learning that can be
found in a wide variety of course books. The second discussion is on what kind of language
should be taught by the teachers. In communicative approaches to language teaching, the
language used is communicative language. It means that learning a language is about learning
to communicate, and that learning can actually take place through communication.

Furthermore, the goal of communicative language teaching is to foster ‘the ability not only to
apply the grammatical rules of a language in order to form grammatically correct sentences
but also to know when and where to use these sentences and to whom’ (Richards et al. 1992).

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In order to make communicative approach be useful for language teachers, Hedge (2000)
divides communicative competence into five components: linguistic competence; pragmatic
competence; discourse competence; strategic competence; and fluency.
1. Linguistic Competence refers to knowledge of the language itself, and includes
knowledge of vocabulary, morphology, syntax and phonology as well as knowledge about
how the different parts of a text fit together and are generally organized. It is incorrect to
say that communicative language teaching is all about ‘communication’, and that it
therefore does not involve grammar teaching. In fact, the teaching of grammar should be
an important part of communicative approaches to language teaching.
2. Pragmatic Competence refers to the ability to understand the message behind the
words that we read or hear. It is what usually prevents us from misunderstanding one
another. More recent approaches have emphasized the fact that pragmatic competence does
not develop automatically with linguistic competence, and that it is more closely related to
motivation and the extent to which a learner identifies with the target language community.
3. Discourse Competence refers to the ability that is required to create and understand
coherent written and spoken discourse (Groom and Littlemore, 2011). Cohesion and
coherence in discourse refer to the ways in which words and ideas are linked in a text.
Discourse competence applies not only to references to other parts of the text but also to
things outside the text.
4. Strategic Competence is made up of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies
that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to
insufficient competence (Canale and Swain, 1980). The use of strategic competence is
always good as it keeps the conversation going, allowing for more input which in turn will
lead to more learning.
5. Fluency is concerned with the linking together of ideas, words and sounds in a way
which enables learners to communicate without inappropriate slowness.
More recently, Carter and McCarthy (2006) have begun to use another term ‘confluence’
which refers to a speaker’s ability to keep the conversation going, hold the floor,
understand what’s being said to them and respond to it appropriately.

2. The Way of How Applied Linguistics Has Influenced the Types of Language that
Learners are Exposed to
The influence of applied linguistics to the types of language that learners use in
learning, can be seen in the recent work of applied linguists Ronald Carter and Michael
McCarthy on the grammar of spoken English. Carter and McCarthy (2006) outline a number
of key characteristics of spoken English which are as follows.
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 The use of the active voice; the frequent use of ‘topic-comment’ structures, where the
speaker mentions the thing he or she is interested in first, then tells us what he or she
wants to say about it, as in: ‘You know Kevin, the guy we saw yesterday, I think he likes
you very much’.
 The lack of explicit logical connectors, such as ‘therefore’, ‘because’, ‘so’.
 The use of Ellipsis (elliptical construction) in spoken language; the speaker omits
subjects or verb because he or she can assume that the listener knows what is being
referred to. For example:
- loads of things to do tomorrow [there are…]
- didn’t know you were going now [ I…]
 The use of low levels of grammatical subordination. Subordination is the process of
linking two clauses in a sentence so that one clause is dependent on (or subordinate to)
another. For example: I swear that I didn't dream it, where one clause is part of the other,
it is called subordination. Spoken language uses simple sentences.
 The use of pauses and fillers; a filler is a sound or word that is spoken in conversation
by one participant to signal to others a pause to think without giving the impression of
having finished speaking. For example: ah or uh and um. Among younger speakers, the
fillers "like", "you know", "I mean", "okay", "so", "actually", "basically", “well” and
"right”.
 The use of vague language. Vague language is used when a speaker doesn’t know the
name of something, or to make things sound less factual, or to talk about groups and
categories. Speakers often add words and phrases such as about, kind of, sort of, and
that kind of thing to and so on. For example: There were about twenty people at the
meeting.
 The use of idiomatic language. It is a type of informal English that has a meaning
different from the meaning of the words in the expression.
For example: Hold your tongue (it doesn’t actually mean that you should stick your
fingers in your mouth and grab a hold of your tongue. It means that you shouldn’t talk).
 The use of presence of modifiers. A modifier is a word, phrase, or clause which
functions as an adjective or an adverb to describe a word or make its meaning more
specific. For example: John caught small fish (the adjective small modifies the noun
fish).
 The common use of tails in spoken English. It appears at the ends of clauses and helps
the speaker to reinforce what he or she is saying by referring back to an earlier pronoun.
For example: he’s really clever, (Robert is).

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  The omission of initial auxiliary verb in spoken language. Another characteristic
feature of spoken English is that in interrogatives, the initial auxiliary verb is often
missing. For example: The dog bothering you?
In addition, an important contribution of applied linguistics to the field of language
learning has been the contribution of corpus linguistics to the ways learner dictionaries are
written. The electronic language corpora develop the way dictionaries are compiled. The
information that corpus-based dictionaries contain is therefore of much more practical benefit
to learners than the sort of information that could be found in more traditional dictionaries.
The example of corpus-based dictionary is the Cambridge dictionary or Oxford dictionary.
When you search the word education in the dictionary, you will find much information
including pictures about what you have searched.

3. The Way of How Applied Linguistics Has Led to a Better Understanding of

Different Types of Discourse
One of works of applied linguists in relation to different types of discourse is genre
analysis. One of the most famous examples of genre analysis is that carried out by John
Swales (1990), who studied the features of academic articles in which research results are
reported.
He found that the introductions to such articles often follow the same pattern, which he
describes in terms of four moves:
Move 1 Establishing the research field, asserting briefly how significant, relevant and
important one’s chosen topic is.
Move 2 Summarizing previous research, giving a few key references.
Move 3 Preparing for present research by indicating a gap in the existing knowledge that
needs to be filled or by raising a question about previous research.
Move 4 Introducing one’s own research, stating the purpose of the research. Outline what one
intends to do or what hypothesis will be tested.
Students on courses that are preparing them for research students who are being trained to
publish, will often have this pattern so that they can use it to better understand research
articles.
Genre analysis is also starting to be used to teach other types of writing in schools in a
number of countries. For example: in English lessons, students are encouraged to read and
imitate certain genres. In order to help them do so, their teachers will sometimes point out the

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move structures of those particular genres. For example, when writing stories, students are
encouraged to set the scene, introduce the characters, introduce the problem, show how it was
resolved, and offer a conclusion. These approaches to writing are a direct result of researches
in applied linguistics. All of genre analysis such language features, generic structures are the
results of research in applied linguistics.
Discourse analysts also investigate how language is used to convey ideology. Findings
of a research related to this topic, which is sometimes referred to as Critical Discourse
Analysis that has direct applications in the political arena. One of the most widely used
models of Critical Discourse Analysis is proposed by Fairclough (2003). This model
combines a focus on the internal properties of texts (i.e. the uses that they make of grammar,
semantics, lexis and phonology) with a focus on their external properties (i.e. the relations
that they have with more general social practices). Critical discourse analysts are interested in
what speech functions are prominent in the texts, how people and ideas are represented, and
what kind of stance or attitude is conveyed. Drawing on this information, they attempt to
identify what the writer is trying to do with the text, and how he or she is using the text to
represent the world. Fairclough’s model assumes that no discourse can be completely neutral,
and that a speaker’s or writer’s language choices convey particular ideologies.
The illustrations that are similar to this include the type of vocabulary that is often used to
describe car crashes. For example, people will often say that they ‘had an accident’ or ‘had a
crash’. They will rarely admit that they themselves ‘drove their car into a tree’.

4. The Way of How Applied Linguistics Has Influenced Language and the Law
Legal language or jargon can be extremely difficult for the lay person to understand.
Linguists working in this area are interested in helping people to understand this jargon.

In a related field of study, which is sometimes referred to as forensic linguistics, researchers

use linguistic tools to identify, for example, the likely authorship of blackmail notes, suicide
notes and disputed plagiarism cases. Their evidence is sometimes used in court to establish
whether or not it is likely that a person accused of writing for instance a blackmail letter did
in fact write the letter, on the basis of linguistic comparisons made with other pieces of
writing that they have produced (Eagleson 1994). These comparisons are based not just on
the handwriting itself but also on the writer’s typical choices of vocabulary, collocation and
phraseological patterning. The influence of applied linguists to language and law is very

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significant in which the police, lawyer could know legal language. When someone gives
incorrect or fake information, polices and lawyers will know that.

5. How applied linguistics has contributed to cross-cultural understanding

Applied linguists’ findings to cross-cultural understanding are people from different
cultures have different communication patterns and different world views, and that these can
affect how they communicate with one another. Furthermore, culture can be applied equally
well to people belonging to different discourse communities all of whom speak broadly the
same language and who live in the same geographical area. For example, factory workers
living in Detroit could be said to constitute a different culture from that of a group of lawyers
living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Although they will have much in common
because they all live in the USA and all speak English, they will also have much that
differentiates them making it difficult for them to understand one another at times as they
lack shared points of reference. In order to be understood people rely on a wealth of shared
knowledge which we expect our interlocutor to draw on in order for successful
communication to take place.
Another contribution of applied linguistics is in a business communication.
Researchers working in business communication have found significant differences in
negotiating styles as well as in the way they conduct themselves in meetings and
negotiations. For example, Grinsted (1997) studied the use of jokes in Spanish and Danish
business negotiations. She found that Danes were more likely to make themselves the butt of
their own jokes, whereas Spanish negotiators were more likely to make others the butt of
their jokes. Neither of these approaches to joke telling is intrinsically ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ but
knowledge of these types of differences may prevent serious misunderstandings in
international business negotiations.

REFERENCES

Carter, R. and McCarthy, M. (2006). Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive

Guide to Spoken and Written English Grammar and Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Eagleson, R. (1994) Forensic analysis of personal written text: a case study, in J. Gibbons
(ed.), Language and the Law, Harlow: Longman, pp. 362–373.

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Fairclough, N. (2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research, London:
Routledge.
Grinsted, A. (1997) Joking as a strategy in Spanish and Danish negotiations, in F. Bargiela-
Chiappini and S. Harris (eds), The Languages of Business: An International
Perspective, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 159–182.
Groom, N and Littlemore, J. (2011). Doing Applied Linguistics: A guide For Students.
Richards, J.C. and Rodgers, T. (2001) Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching,
second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richards, J.C., Platt, J. and Platt, H. (1992) The Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics,
London: Longman.