Author Profile

Dr. Andrew Thomson is Professor of Foreign Language Acquisition at the University of California at Berkeley, USA. His research interests include: language, culture, and identity; discourse analysis and second language acquisition; language and literature. He is the author of Content and Culture in Language Teaching and Language and Culture, and the editor of Redrawing the Boundaries of Language Study and Language Acquisition and Language Socialization. Ecological perspectives. His main research interest is in the interface of second language acquisition, second language teaching, and language testing. Drawing on a task-based language teaching approach, he has investigated the role of task and task design in language teaching and their impact on second language performance, acquisition, assessment and the cognitive processes associated with second language development. His research also focuses on the measurement and development of speech fluency in language learning, and its relationship with other aspects of linguistic performance. In the syntax-semantics interface, he is particularly interested in definiteness, quantification, and relative clauses. His work on the syntax-phonology interface examines how theories of morpho-syntactic structures can inform our understanding of domains in which phonological processes apply. He teaches courses on syntax, semantics, typology, and fieldwork. His work focuses on languages of East and Southeast Asia and Subsaharan Africa. He likes working on languages with tone! He has also worked for several years on Moro, an endangered Kordofanian language spoken in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. He co-developed the Moro Story Corpus; a descriptive grammar of Moro is to appear with Language Sciences Press, coauthored with Sharon Rose.

About The Book

Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field that uses linguistic theories and methods to solve real-world problems involving language, such as improving language teaching, developing translation tools, creating speech therapy techniques, and analyzing communication in media or legal contexts. It bridges the gap between abstract language study and practical applications, focusing on how language functions in society, education, technology, and culture. Applied linguistics is often said to be concerned with solving or at least ameliorating social problems involving language. The problems applied linguistics concerns itself with are likely to be: How can we teach languages better? How can we diagnose speech pathologies better? How can we improve the training of translators and interpreters? How can we write a valid language examination? How can we evaluate a school bilingual program? How can we determine the literacy levels of a whole population? How can we helpfully discuss the language of a text? This tradition of applied linguistics established itself in part as a response to the narrowing of focus in linguistics with the advent in the late 1950s of generative linguistics, and has always maintained a socially accountable role, demonstrated by its central interest in language problems. But there is another tradition of applied linguistics, which belongs to linguistics; it is sometimes called Linguistics-Applied (L-A) but perhaps "applications of linguistics" would be a more appropriate title for this tradition. This version has become more noticeable in the last 20 years as theoretical linguistics has moved back from its narrowly formalist concern to its former socially accountable role (for example in Bible translation, developing writing systems, dictionary making). In this way the two traditions have come to resemble one another. Or have they? Handbook of Applied Linguistics investigates real-world problems involving language. As such it has the difficult task of mediating between academic expertise and lived experience, attempting to reconcile opposed interests and perspectives. This clearly written text provides a concise but comprehensive overview of the most pressing and controversial issues surrounding contemporary language use today, including intercultural communication, political persuasion, new technologies, the growth of English, language in education, and foreign language teaching and learning. This book provides a state-of-the-art account of contemporary applied linguistics. The kinds of language problems of interest to applied linguists are discussed and a distinction drawn between the different research approach taken by theoretical linguists and by applied linguists to what seem to be the same problems. Professor Thomson describes a variety subjects, offers between practical experience and theoretical understanding. The increasing emphasis of applied linguistics on ethicality is linked to the growth of professionalism and to the concern for accountability, manifested in the widening emphasis on critical stances.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. LANGUAGE DESCRIPTIONS
2. LEXICOGRAPHY
3. SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND ULTIMATE ATTAINMENT
4. LANGUAGE CORPORA
5. DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
6. BRITISH SIGN LANGUAGE
7. ASSESSING LANGUAGE ATTITUDES: SPEAKER EVALUATION STUDIES
8. LANGUAGE ATTRITION
9. LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, AND CULTURE
10. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
11. LANGUAGE AND THE LAW
12. LANGUAGE AND GENDER
13. STYLISTICS
14. LANGUAGE AND POLITICS
15. WORLD ENGLISHES
16. THE PHILOSOPHY OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS
17. THE NATIVE SPEAKER IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS
Bibliography
Index