An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

particular method of language teaching in which the target language only is used
in class and all the teachers are native speakers.
British Council: a government-funded but independent organisation concerned to
foster interest in British culture, including both English language and literature.
case grammar: an approach to grammatical analysis devised by Charles Fillmore in
the late 1960s within the generative grammar framework but emphasising certain
semantic relationships.
CDA: critical discourse analysis which analyses how linguistic choices in texts are
used to maintain and create social inequalities.
census: official numbering of a population and its characteristics, carried out in many
countries every ten years.
cleft palate: a birth malformation in which a gap exists in the middle or on either side
of the roof of the mouth, causing problems in speech production.
clinical linguistics: either the application of linguistics to a medical setting involving
language disorders or the practice of professionals such as speech therapists work -
ing in those areas.
codification: producing systematic statements of the rules and conventions of a
language variety. The variety usually chosen for codification is the standard dialect
and the act of codifying increases its acceptance as the standard.
communicative competence: knowledge of how to use a language appropriately as
well as the ability actually to do so.
competence: the unconscious or implicit knowledge of language that the native
speaker has, and which it is the object of linguistics to systematise in rules.
construct: a theory of linguistic knowledge or ability that may be operationalised in
a language test.
context of situation: a term deriving from the work of the anthropologist Bronislaw
Malinowski referring to the relationship between external world features such as
place and participants and a language utterance.
contrastive linguistics: a method of exploring structural similarities and differences
between languages, important in historical linguistics and formerly influential in
language teaching.
corpus linguistics: a use of the computer to collect a large sample of language both
spoken and written for purposes of description.
correctness: the strongly held notion that there are right and wrong language usages.
critical applied linguistics: a judgemental approach by some applied linguists to
‘normal’ applied linguistics on the grounds that it is not concerned with the trans -
formation of society.
critical discourse: an approach to language use as the manifestation of political
ideology.
critical pedagogy: an approach to teaching similar to that of critical applied linguistics.
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critical period: the claim that there is a stage in human development during which
natural language acquisition is possible, usually placed before puberty. Also
known as the sensitive period.
cultural relativity: the view that the values and concepts of a culture are unique to
that culture.
curriculum: the total teaching programme of a school or educational system. Some -
times used synonymously with syllabus.
DAL: Department of Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh.
declension: a traditional term for a class of nouns, adjectives or pronouns; the usual
contemporary linguistic term is word-class.
deficit grammar: the grammar of those whose language development is said to be
incomplete. An unfavourable view today with regard to differences among social
groups but relevant to the kinds of loss dealt with in clinical linguistics.
descriptive linguistics: the approach which sets out to describe the facts of language
usage as they are at a particular period of time.
diachronic: the dimension of linguistic investigation which studies the historical
development of languages.
dialect: a regional or social variety of a language, frequently used to refer to any
variety which is not the standard,
diglossia: a situation in which two distinct varieties of a language are used in a
speech community for quite distinct purposes, for example Classical and Standard
Egyptian Arabic in Egypt.
direct method: an approach to language teaching emphasising the spoken language.
direct question: a question which may be answered without inferencing.
discourse: connected texts larger than a sentence.
discriminatory language: racist, sexist etc. language which is hurtful to disem -
powered groups in society.
Durkheim: Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), French sociologist, one of the founders
of modern sociology. 
dysarthria: speech abnormalities caused by neuromuscular disorders.
dyslexia: partial inability to read, characterised by associative learning difficulty.
ebonics: a term used for the variety of English spoken by Afro-Americans, also
known as Black (American) English.
ECAL 1–4: the