V Applied Linguistics

Content

This lecture covers all major areas of applied linguistics, esp. sociolinguistics, stylistics, psycholinguistics/second-language learning, CALL, language testing, translation studies, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics, lexicography and language, thought and culture/intercultural communication.

Objectives:

In this lecture, you gain a very broad survey of the field and learn about exemplary approaches that also have a job-oriented perspective:

you learn to look "behind" the cultural and formal variables governing language comprehension or language learning in context,

you are introduced to the "professionalisation" of "language services", i.e. teaching, text production/editing and translation,

you see English in contrastive perspective, to your mother-tongue as well as to intercultural usage/lingua franca situations, and

you become aware of the possibilities and limitation of computer applications in linguistics.

The approach will be based on the critical evaluation of sections in Wikipedia and in the Handbook of Applied Linguistics edited by Alan Davies/Catherine Elder for Blackwell in 2004.
This course will be accompanied by its own www page.