Page 209 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 15: Branches in Linguistics: Educational Linguistics

and are taught via pedagogies that stress explicit teaching, identifying sub-skills and teaching Notes
these separately and aiming through apprenticeship to combine the subskills. For instance, it
may be suitable for "language for specific purposes".
• Eloquence: A humanistic-intellectual paradigm: When curricula are conceptualized as in
some sense "humanizing", the educational linguistics makes use of notions of eloquence,
expression, rhetoric, and elevated culture. Informing learners of timevalidated canonical
thought, works of art, and literature distinguishes this class of curricula.
• Virtue: Paradigms of religion or social ideology: Some curricula aim to reproduce norms of
life that derive from ethnicity, religious creed, or moral ideology. Educational linguistics, in
this respect, serves unique goals of teaching, content sequencing, assessment, and evaluation
associated with modes of practice particular to the ideology of the schools involved.
• Nationing: The discourse of loyal citizenship to nationality-defined states: Nationing, both
in new nations intent on forging identities larger than regional or local ones and in established
nations intent on preserving distinctiveness, utilizes linguistic based narration, story telling
about national cohesion and unity, or subliminal and continual reminders of the persistence
of nationality.
On the other hand, it gave way to the emergence of Whole Language Approach in 1980s which is also
called "the real books approach" since it used real books instead of coursebooks. Its focus on meaningful
and purposeful communication in language classes enabled it to help students be at ease while
communicating.
In this respect, it is not wrong to say that Ausubel's Meaningful Learning Theory is one of the
contributions of EL to the teaching and learning foreign languages. As an opposition to the traditional
language learning theories, particularly Audiolingualism, it has derived from a cognitive perspective
to language learning and teaching, thus attempts to find ways of creating meaningful learning
situations in which learners feel comfortable and construct knowledge with their own effort.
Participatory approach is another term proposed by educational linguists which means a process
through which the views of all interested parties are integrated into the decision-making process
Alatis, et al. That is why EL benefits from a number of disciplines to solve an educational problem.
Educational linguistics also created a market of materials designed specifically for foreign language
learning and teaching. Different text types and application-oriented materials became available all
around the world.
Furthermore, it became influential on the emergence a number of language teaching methods such as
Silent Way, TPR, content-based and task-based language teaching, which are all holistic, humanistic,
and problem-oriented in nature. But most importantly, educational linguistics enabled L1 and L2
learning to be an independent field with its own research studies, approaches and applications for
better educational opportunities.
15.13 Criticism of Educational Linguistics

Educational linguistics is a relatively recent issue that draws scholars' and researchers' attention
from a number of disciplines and thus takes various reflections concerning its strong sides and
inadequacies. They can be listed as follows:
15.13.1 Advantages of Educational Linguistics
• It has been understood that there is a need for more research into teachers' explicit beliefs
about, and understanding of, language in order to enable us to understand teachers' central
role as educational linguists, that is, as conscious analyst of linguistic processes.
• Educational linguists made an attempt to address a fundamental problem -the language
barrier to education- i.e. the instance where a child acquires a vernacular language informally
and is required by the educational system to acquire a different, standard language, a problem
which recurs for millions of children daily, weekly, and yearly all over the world.

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