Place of Linguistics in English Language Teaching

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to indicate place of linguistics in English language teaching. This paper investigates how knowledge of linguistics can help to English language teaching in ELT classrooms. Linguistics always plays a vital role in studying language in general and English language in particular in ELT settings. Linguistics shares with human language, even attribute to other sciences can help us to understand our language. Linguistics has been concerned with language. Linguistics can be defined as the study of language. However, linguistics and language are closely intertwined, so discussion of one necessarily involves the other. Linguists, on the other hand, have long been aware of the fact that people learn and use languages. This paper focuses specially on language teaching and discusses the relation between linguistics and English language teaching. Introduction The present paper intends to study the highlight relationship between linguistics and English language teaching. Before, inquiring the relationship between linguistics and English language teaching in this article. We discuss briefly language teaching in language classrooms. The role of language teaching in language classrooms should be used based on written and oral language for a wide range of purposes. One of this models can be used in order to help language learners to use their target language is "fluency –based model of language teaching". According to Brumfit's fluency –based model of language teaching, the goal is stated such as: to enable learners to use the target language they have acquired for any purposes they wish, and to be able to extend as far as they wish (constrained by the time limits of the course). (Brumfit, 1984; p. 123). Richards et al (1992) argue that in second or foreign language teaching, fluency describes a level of proficiency in communication, which includes: 1) the ability to produce written or spoken language with ease; 2) the ability to speak with a good but not necessarily perfect command of intonation, vocabulary, and grammar; 3) the ability to communicate ideas effectively; 4) the ability to produce continues speech without causing comprehension difficulties or a breakdown of communication. Another models of language teaching is error analysis have been appeared as hypothesis in language teaching in recent years. A number of researchers such as Adjemian 1976; Corder 1967;Nemser 1971; Selinker 1972, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, point out that the language of second language learners is systematic and that learner errors are not random mistakes but evidence of rule-governed behavior (Khansir 2012a). Corder (1967) claims that the information arrived at through error analysis could be useful to textbook writers, teachers and learners. Analysis of grammatical errors offered significant insight into the nature of difficulties in writing faced by second language learners (cited in Khansir, 2008; p.2). Khansir (2012a) argues that Learner's errors are seen as an integral part of language learning which is used in teaching grammar, linguistics, psychology etc. another model of language learning which we briefly mention is accuracy. Richards et al (1992) mention accuracy refers to the ability to produce grammatically correct sentences but may not include the ability to speak or write fluency. Last item in language teaching is communicative competence. Communicative competence is coined by Hymes (1971) as reaction to Chomsky's competence theory (1965) formed the basis of discourse analysis. It incorporates all the features like pragmatic and socio-cultural implications, speech acts and speech events, register etc. It aims at developing the communicative competence in learners along with the grammatical competence and not merely the grammatical competence (Khansir, 2012b). According to Hymes (1971) the theory of communicative competence is in terms of these four factors: 1. Whether (and to what degree) something is formally possible – this corresponds to the familiar notion of grammatically. 2. Whether (and to what degree) something is feasible – This refers to psycho-linguistic factors like memory limitation, embedding etc. 3. Whether (and to what degree) something is appropriate – this refers to the relation between language and context. 4. Whether (and to what degree) something is done. This refers to the actuality of occurrence of a linguistic utterance. In addition, communicative competence is basically having the capability to use language in a speech community. Canale and Swain (1980) classify communicative competence into grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, which they soon divided into sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence (cited in Khansir, 2012b). According to this discussion, Canale and Swain (1980) indicate strategic competence as one of the four components of communicative competence. Strategic competence is a part of linguistic competence (Bachman, 1990). However, it is used as an integral part of language