What is Applied Linguistics?

Language is a system of communication and symbols which is use to communicate and interact with other communities and people to express feelings and ideas. There are three different approaches that talk about language which are: 

As a social fact , a natural behavior

As a mental organ

As an abstract object

Linguistic is the study of language whereas applied linguistics is a branch of it that focuses on language users and the ways in which they use languages. There are two views that can define AP too, there are:

- The macro view: the study of language and linguistics in relation to practical problems

- The micro view: the study of second and foreign language learning and teaching.

When we refer to languages we say that there is your mother tongue as your L1 and a second language the one that you want to acquire for different reasons and motivations, that one should be your L2 a foreign language or the one that you learnt as a second language so L1 is the language that you acquire from your environment, it is and innate process, and is genetically triggered at the most critical stage of the child's cognitive development. L1 is acquire and L2 could be acquire and learn.

The differences between acquisition and learning are:

• Acquisition:

It will depend on the amount of exposure to the language

It is an unconscious process and is modified by the environment

Is informal, and not aware of grammar.

It depends on the amount of exposure and the interaction with the language.

•   Learning:

It happens in artificial setting

It is a conscious process, is what we usually experience during the class

There is awareness of grammar rules and vocabulary.

Foreign language learning: a language that is learn in a community that uses a different mother tongue, e.g. a Spanish child that learn English in a Spanish school, English is the foreign language.

A second language learning (L2): when the Spanish child lives in Spanish – speaking community in America or Britain the child learns English as a second language. Some factors that are part of L2:

-    Affective factors: stress or self – consciousness

 -   Transfer: the act or trying to apply the pronunciation word order, vocabulary or some expression from the mother tongue to the target language learnt at the moment, we can identify a positive transfer and negative transfer.

-  Interlanguage: is an in-between system  that learners create when they are learning a foreign language, interlanguage does not exists in L1 or L2, e.g. when a student is learning a language and this one invent a word that does not come either from his mother tongue or from the language that he is learning, those words are called interlanguage.