APLNG 482 Introduction of Applied Linguistics

Meet objectives: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Download the attached files

What is the difference between linguistics applied and Applied Linguistics? Can Applied Linguistics simply be taken as language teaching?

Starting with these two questions, this course expended topics covered by Applied Linguistics from how to define “native speaker” to broader issues, such as language right and language policy. Although I have never taken Applied Linguistics as only the knowledge of language teaching, the topics introduced in this course were much broader than I expected

 

Textbooks 1, 2, 3

For every class, there was an assigned topic for one student to write a reflection paper to open up an online discussion (please refer to the file Reflection Paper and PPT file “the politics of text”). The topic I got was Critical Literacy, which takes language as a set of contextualized social practices containing ideology. 

I was leading the discussion related to Critical Literacy

The application of the concept proposed by Pennycook (2001) is a reversion of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The hardest part of the project was not understanding the concepts, but finding materials which did not obviously show the ideology (since one of the critique Pennycook gives to CDA is its revealing of ideology in political texts is sometimes too apparently), but still demonstrated the way that CDA approach to the text (please refer to the attachments). I then used the picture book, Slovenly Peter, to demonstrate how social changing affects the ideology changing, and why this is missing in CDA. 

One of the activities I designed: analyzing the picture book Slovenly Peter

What I learned from the assignment was designing activities to get my colleagues to apply the concept immediately instead of “telling” the concept. The experience of this practice was and is still “alive,” even after I started teaching.

 My final project was also related to “the politics of language.” I did a small research project reflecting on how the two major “language in education planning” in Taiwan have changed the status of languages (please refer to the attached file—final project). This small project demonstrated why language teaching should not be taken as teaching other content knowledge, but as a nationwide identity transforming process (for detailed research, please refer to the attachments).

  To conclude, this introductory course serves as a fundamental basis of my preceding professional development as a language teacher proposing teaching critical literacy.