The Applied Linguistics Project (ALP) started at the International School of Prague (ISP) in 2013. Every year, Grade 9 English as an Additional Language (EAL) students identify an area of learning in need of improvement and design a research method followed by data collection and analysis using basic computer software tools or online corpora.…

In this research project, students in applied linguistics were asked to keep blogs over a three-month period in which they reported on their online informal learning of English through activities such as social networking, downloading films and TV series and listening to music on demand. The study is situated within the framework of complexity…

A study based on textual analysis of sales letters is reported that evaluates the Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action (AIDA) approach to teaching the writing of sales letters. Thirty business letters written by undergraduate business students and executives were analyzed. The forms of cohesion, voice pattern, and information focus of the…

Two approaches to analyzing service encounters (instances of face-to-face interaction between a server designated in a particular area and a customer receiving service from the server) are examined. Some linguists view service encounters as business transaction texts. The two approaches are the "top-down" approach, in which linguists make direct…

An organizing framework is presented that can help integrate the large mass of apparently disparate work on written language. The starting point of the paper was collections of articles of reading, writing, and literacy, which seemed not to have a conceptual framework. Ways are discussed that knowledge from linguistics as an academic discipline…

After a review of the theoretical context to current research on literacy, consideration is given to aspects of the literacy practices of the Moroccan community in the Ladbroke Grover area of West London. Findings from a study of literacy in its social context in Morocco are cited in the discussion of the West London practices. Emphasis is on the…

Approaches used by linguists to examine the way in which speakers or writers modify their commitment to the propositional content of their utterances are discussed, and it is noted that a frequent criticism is the failure of inexperienced speakers or writers to modulate their utterances properly. This paper considers economic reports and in…

This paper traces the three major developmental strands that converged to contribute to the definition of the applied linguistics field in the Philippines: the institution and capacity-building work supported by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations; the forging of a vibrant consortium among three Filipino institutions of higher education to offer…

In a discussion of video technology and language learning, video is defined as any form of language-teaching (LT) material that can be shown on a television monitor, excluding interactive video. The first part of the paper presents a possible pedagogical framework for video in language learning. The role of video is: (1) to provide a source of…

The concept of authenticity in foreign language pedagogy is discussed with particular reference to the methodology of instructing through the medium of authentic texts. It is suggested that the use of authentic texts in a classroom setting actually deauthenticates those elements that made the texts originally authentic; i.e., placing them in a…

Examples are given of real lexical errors made by learner writers, and consideration is given to the way in which three learners' dictionaries could deal with the lexical items that were misused. The dictionaries were the "Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary," the "Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English," and the "Chambers Universal Learners'…

Language policy and planning has become a major concern of applied linguistics. Most language planning is institutional and not systemic, planning not the forms of the language but the relationship between the language and the individuals who use it. Institutional language planning, policy formation, provides the context for systemic language…

Applied linguistics has made major contributions to literacy teaching in recent years, in four general areas. First, second language acquisition is becoming the model for first language literacy teaching in schools through the "whole language approach" to literacy. Second, the field of sociolinguistics has convinced educators that literacy is a…

This paper is based on information and insights gained from the preliminary data-gathering phase of a project on the acquisition of Irish as first and second language. The main aim of the project is to establish a database constituted of acquisitional data gathered from children acquiring Irish as a first language and in the early stages of…

Methodological problems caused by an ethnocentric view in analyzing another culture are discussed along with some aspects of culture analysis in general and stereotypes about other cultures and their functions in cross-cultural communication. It is suggested that miscommunication is subject to various norms and value systems that are not made…