Pedagogical Linguistics - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2020

Linguistics comes in many flavors. Applied, cognitive, descriptive, educational, formal, functional, generative, and many more can be compounded onto linguistics to characterize specific frameworks and approaches. In this brief editorial, we outline the rationale for the notion and the corresponding journal of Pedagogical Linguistics, defining how we see the term in comparison to closely related, and more familiar notions.

Pedagogical linguistics is a two-way bridge between linguistics and education, carrying information not only from linguistics to education, but also in the other direction, where linguistics needs to explore the impact of education on language. The paper reviews the history of this bridge, and especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, arguing that the bridge worked well in the 19th but that it disintegrated in the 20th with the rise of linguistics and education as distinct research fields. The challenge for the 21st century is to rebuild it in a sustainable way.

Linguistics has always been taken as the authoritative frame of reference for how language is represented as a pedagogic subject, and as approaches to linguistic description have changed so accordingly have approaches to language teaching. But the purposes that determine what aspects of language are to be abstracted as relevant for linguistic description do not correspond with those of language pedagogy. What linguistics provides are ways of specifying what is to be taught as the eventual learning objective in relative disregard of the learning process, a process that it is the essential purpose of pedagogy to promote. An alternative to this customary objective driven approach, would be to focus not on acquiring competence in a particular and separate L2 but on extending the general capability for using language as a communicative resource that learners have already acquired in their L1. Such an approach effectively makes the primary objective of pedagogy the development of the learning process itself.

The positive effects of instruction on the acquisition of second-language pragmatics has been well documented by numerous recent published studies (81 in the 10 years between Rose, 2005, and Bardovi-Harlig, 2015), but we have yet to see a corresponding increase in the teaching of pragmatics in second and foreign language classrooms or language textbooks. This article explores some of the potential causes for the lack of implementation of pragmatics instruction in second and foreign language classrooms (Skyes, 2013) and suggests means of overcoming such challenges. Pedagogical linguistics, in the form of pedagogical pragmatics, offers insight into meeting the challenges of limited theoretical support for curricular development, lack of authentic input in teaching materials, lack of instructor knowledge, and lack of reference books and pedagogical resources for teachers. The final challenge for pedagogical linguistics and pragmatics researchers is conveying relevant research findings to teachers; means for accomplishing this are discussed in the final section of the article.

This study investigates the acquisition of aspectual contrasts in the English present tense by French and Chinese learners of English at upper-intermediate to advanced proficiency levels. An oral production task and an interpretation task show that the expression of the aspectual present tense does not always have to constitute an insurmountable barrier to learners of English, at least for the upper-intermediate and advanced proficiency levels tested in this study. This successful acquisition is in spite of the differences in L1/L2 feature expressions and the unexpected variability in the input. Our research highlights that teachers must be aware of the one-sided variability of the native speaker usage (i.e. that the present simple form can express multiple meanings, while the present progressive is associated with one meaning only) if they want to improve performance and comprehension at lower proficiency levels.