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A New Field of Research: SLA-Applied Linguistics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Claire Kramsch
Claire Kramsch*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

Second language acquisition research (sla) is the systematic exploration of the conditions that make the acquisition of a foreign language possible, both in natural and in instructional settings. Its objects of study are the biological, linguistic, psychological, and emotional makeup of language learners and the educational, social, and institutional context of learning and teaching. Whereas language as a linguistic system is studied through the metalanguage of linguistics (phonology, syntax, and semantics), language learning, as psycholinguistic process and sociolinguistic discourse, is researched through the metadiscourse of applied linguistics: psycho- and sociolinguistics, anthropological and educational linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, stylistics, and composition and literacy studies. These fields illuminate what it means to learn to speak, read, write, and interact in a foreign language, what it means to appropriate for oneself the national idiom of communities that share a history and a culture that are different from one's own. SLA provides the applied linguistic metadiscourse for the practice of language learning and teaching.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 115 , Issue 7: Special Millennium issue , December 2000 , pp. 1978 - 1981
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2000

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References

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