1. 3. Contributions of Other Disciplines

Foreign language education has been evolving in new directions under the influence of research in certain social sciences that emerged relatively recently as a result of interdisciplinary approaches in science and education. For instance, Chomsky's emphasis on linguistic competence greatly stimulated the development of the related disciplines of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Other related fields are anthropological linguistics, computational linguistics, mathematical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and the philosophy of language.

Here are some of the significant interdisciplinary aspects of science and scientific disciplines that contributed to the development of foreign language teaching approaches and methods:

Linguistics

Defined as the study of the nature and structure of language, it traditionally encompasses semantics, syntax, and phonology.

Synchronic linguistic studies aim to describe a language as it exists at a given time; diachronic studies trace a language's historical development.

Greek philosophers in the 5th century BC who debated the origins of human language were the first in the West to be concerned with linguistic theory. The first complete Greek grammar, written by Dionysus Thrax in the 1st century BC, was a model for Roman grammarians, whose work led to the medieval and Renaissance vernacular grammars. With the rise of historical linguistics in the 19th century, linguistics became a science.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Ferdinand de Saussure established the structuralist school of linguistics, which analyzed actual speech to learn about the underlying structure of language.

In the 1950s Noam Chomsky challenged the structuralist program, arguing that linguistics should study native speakers' unconscious knowledge of their language (competence), not the language they actually produce (performance). His general approach, known as transformational generative grammar, was extensively revised in subsequent decades. Other grammatical theories developed from the 1960s were generalized phrase structure grammar, lexical-functional grammar, relational grammar, and cognitive grammar.

Applied linguistics

Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, linguistics, psychology, computer science, anthropology, and sociology.

Major branches of applied linguistics focus on bilingualism and multilingualism, computer-mediated communication , conversation analysis, contrastive linguistics, sign linguistics, language assessment, literacies, discourse analysis, language pedagogy, second language acquisition, lexicography, language planning and policies, stylistics, pragmatics, forensic linguistics, and translation.

The tradition of applied linguistics established itself in part as a response to the narrowing of focus in linguistics with the advent in the late 1950s of generative linguistics, and has always maintained a socially accountable role, demonstrated by its central interest in language problems.

In the early days, applied linguistics was thought as “linguistics-applied” at least from the outside of the field. In the 1960s, however, applied linguistics was expanded to include language assessment, language policy, and second language acquisition. Applied linguistics also included solution of language-related problems in the real world. By the 1990s, applied linguistics has broadened including critical studies and multilingualism. Research of applied linguistics was shifted to "the theoretical and empirical investigation of real world problems in which language is a central issue."

Psycholinguistics

As the study of the mental processes involved in the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language, much psycholinguistic work has been devoted to the learning of language by children and on speech processing and comprehension by both children and adults. Traditional areas of research include language production, language comprehension, language acquisition, language disorders, language and thought, and neurocognition.

Although psychologists have long been interested in language, and the field of linguistics is an older science than psychology, scientists in the two fields have had little contact until the work of Noam Chomsky was published in the late 1950s. Chomsky's writing had the effect of making psychologists acutely aware of their lack of knowledge about the structure of language, and the futility of focusing attention exclusively upon the surface structure of language. As a result, psycholinguists, who have a background of training in both linguistics and psychology, have been attempting since the early 1960s to gain a better understanding of how the abstract rules which determine human language are acquired and used to communicate appropriately created meaningful messages from one person to another via the vocal-auditory medium. Research has been directed to the evolutionary development of language, the biological bases of language, the nature of the sound system, the rules of syntax, the nature of meaning, and the process of language acquisition.

sociolinguistics

Defined as the study of language as it affects and is affected by social relations, sociolinguistics encompasses a broad range of concerns, including bilingualism, pidgin and creole languages, and other ways that language use is influenced by contact among people of different language communities (e.g., speakers of German, French, Italian, and Romansh in Switzerland).

Sociolinguists also examine different dialects, accents, and levels of diction in light of social distinctions among people. Although accent refers strictly to pronunciation, in practice a dialect can usually be identified by the accent of its speakers as well as by distinctive words, usages, idiomatic expressions, and grammatical features. Dialects reflect and may reinforce class, ethnic, or regional differences among speakers of the same language. Individuals sometimes deliberately change their dialect as a means of improving their social status. Speakers of any dialect or any language may modulate their vocabulary and level of diction according to social context, speaking differently in church, for example, than on the playground; social activities that tend to shape the language of those engaging in it are sometimes called registers.

cognitive linguistics

In linguistics, cognitive linguistics refers to the branch of linguistics that interprets language in terms of the concepts, sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular tongue, which underlie its forms. It is thus closely associated with semantics but is distinct from psycholinguistics, which draws upon empirical findings from cognitive psychology in order to explain the mental processes that underlie the acquisition, storage, production and understanding of speech and writing.

Cognitive linguistics is characterized by adherence to three central positions. First, it denies that there is an autonomous linguistic faculty in the mind; second, it understands grammar in terms of conceptualization; and third, it claims that knowledge of language arises out of language use.^[1]

Cognitive linguists deny that the mind has any module for language-acquisition that is unique and autonomous. This stands in contrast to the stance adopted in the field of generative grammar. Although cognitive linguists do not necessarily deny that part of the human linguistic ability is innate, they deny that it is separate from the rest of cognition. They thus reject a body of opinion in cognitive science which suggests that there is evidence for the modularity of language. They argue that knowledge of linguistic phenomena — i.e., phonemes, morphemes, and syntax — is essentially conceptual in nature. However, they assert that the storage and retrieval of linguistic data is not significantly different from the storage and retrieval of other knowledge, and that use of language in understanding employs similar cognitive abilities to those used in other non-linguistic tasks.

Departing from the tradition of truth-conditional semantics, cognitive linguists view meaning in terms of conceptualization. Instead of viewing meaning in terms of models of the world, they view it in terms of mental spaces.

Finally, cognitive linguistics argues that language is both embodied and situated in a specific environment. This can be considered a moderate offshoot of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, in that language and cognition mutually influence one another, and are both embedded in the experiences and environments of its users.

Cultural Linguistics

Cultural Linguistics refers to a related branch of linguistics that explores the relationship between language, culture, and conceptualization. Cultural Linguistics draws on, but is not limited to, the theoretical notions and analytical tools of cognitive linguistics and cognitive anthropology. Central to the approach of cultural linguistics are notions of 'cultural schema' and 'cultural model'. It examines how various features of language encode cultural schemas and cultural models. In Cultural Linguistics, language is viewed as deeply entrenched in the group-level, cultural cognition of communities of speakers. Thus far, the approach of Cultural Linguistics has been adopted in several areas of applied linguistic research, including intercultural communication, second language learning, and World Englishes.

Educational psychology

As a branch of psychology concerned with the learning processes and psychological issues associated with the teaching and training of students, it studies the cognitive development of students and the various factors involved in learning, including aptitude and learning measurement, the creative process, and the motivational forces that influence student-teacher dynamics. Two early leaders in the field were G. Stanley Hall and Edward L. Thorndike.

Educational psychologists "study what people think and do as they teach and learn a particular curriculum in a particular environment where education and training are intended to take place" (Berliner, p.145). The work of educational psychologists focuses "on the rich and significant everyday problems of education" (Wittrock, pp. 132 - 133). Educational psychologists have studied cognition, instruction, learning, motivation, individual differences, and the measurement of human abilities, to name just a few areas that relate to education and schooling. Of all these, perhaps the study of learning is the most closely associated with education.

The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle discussed topics still studied by educational psychologists - the role of the teacher, the relationship between teacher and student, methods of teaching, the nature and order of learning, the role of affect in learning. In the 1600s the Czech theologian and educator Johann Amos Comenius introduced visual aids and proclaimed that understanding, not memorizing, was the goal of teaching. Writings of European philosophers and reformers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778), Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746 - 1827), stressed the value of activity, prior experience, and interest. All these ideas are consistent with current work in educational psychology.

The work of Thorndike, Alfred Binet, Jean Piaget, and Benjamin Bloom illustrate earlier connections between psychology and education.

Thorndike has the reputation for studying teaching, and transfer. He also had a lasting effect on education by demonstrating that learning Greek, Latin, and mathematics did not "exercise the mind" to improve general thinking abilities. Partly because of his research, required study of the classics decreased.

B. F. Skinner's studied operant conditioning,

Binet’s assessments of intelligence and the Stanford-Binet IQ test which was revised four times as of 2002,

Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development is based on the assumption that people try to make sense of the world and actively create their knowledge through direct experience with objects, people, and ideas. Piaget believed that young people pass through four stages in their cognitive development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete-operational, and formal-operational.

Benjamin Bloom his colleagues developed a taxonomy, or classification system, of educational objectives. Objectives were divided into three domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. Teachers, test developers, and curriculum designers use the taxonomies to develop instructional objectives and test questions. It would be difficult to find an educator trained in the past thirty years who had not heard of Bloom's taxonomy in some form. (The cognitive domain taxonomy was revised in 2001 by Lorin W. Anderson and David R. Krathwohl.)

Jerome Bruner's early research on thinking stirred his interest in education. Bruner believed that classroom learning should take place through inductive reasoning, that is, by using specific examples to formulate a general principle.

David Ausubel disagreed. He believed that people acquire knowledge primarily through reception rather than discovery; Ausubel's strategy always began with an advance organizer - a technique still popular in the twenty-first century - which is a kind of conceptual bridge between new material and students' current knowledge.