when you are afraid or worried that something bad is going to happen (from Longman Dictionary). In these de?nitions, a conceptual metonymy is extensively used, that is, THE BODILY SYMPTOMS OF AN EMOTION STAND FOR THE EMOTION (part for whole). Bodily symptoms are helpful for description of the concept of an emotion since generally they are peculiar to a particular emotion.
Chapter11
Language Acquisition
1. De?ne the following terms brie?y.
(1) ?rst language acquisition: the learning and development of a person‘s native language. (2) behaviorist approach: The approach views language as behavior and believes that
language learning is simply a matter of imitation and habit formation.
(3) innateness approach: This approach holds that the ability to acquire a
human language is part of the biologically innate equipment of the human being, and that an infant is born with this ability just as it is born with two arms, two legs, and a beating heart.
(4) second language acquisition: the acquisition of another language or languages after the
?rst language is on the way or completed.
(5) contrastive analysis: a method of analyzing languages for instructional purposes
whereby a native language and target language are compared with a view to establishing points of difference likely to cause dif?culties for learners.
(6) error analysis: the study and the analysis of the errors made by second andforeign
language learners in order to identify causes of errors or common dif?culties in language learning.
(7) language aptitude: the natural ability to learn a language, not including intelligence,
motivation, interest, etc.
(8) field dependence: a learning style in which a learner tends to look at
the whole while overlooking the many parts it contains. The learner has dif?culty in studying a particular item when it is embedded within a ?eld of other items.
(9) ?eld independence: a learning style in which a learner is able to identify or
focus on particular items and is not distracted by other items in the background or context.
(10) learning strategy: It refers to the particular approaches or techniques that
learners use to try to learn a second language. 2. Omitted. 3. Omitted.
4. This is called ―overgeneralization‖ in second language learning. If second language learners
produce forms such as goed, sheeps and coulds, they may know some regular rules of English but apply them in the wrong place. Here they mistakenly copy the general rules of forming the past forms with ―ed‖, plurals with ―s‖ and third person singulars
with ―s‖. This kind of errors is caused largely due to the nonnative speaker‘s incomplete knowledge of the rules of the target language. For example, an English learner may produce sentence like *“He speaked English‖ , or use *mans instead of men for the plural of man.
5. Mandarin Chinese will interfere with our English studies in the following ways: The
commonest way is the interference of Mandarin Chinese grammar. Some English learners may produce sentence like ―He comes from China, Bejing‖ following the word order of Mandarin Chinese instead of the correct English word order ―He comes from Beijing, China‖, or produce sentence like ―Yesterday I went to town‖ instead of ―I went to town yesterday‖. The interference also shows up in pronunciation. Many speech sounds in English do not appear in Chinese, such as /!/, /8/. Thus it is dif?cult for us to pronounce them correctly. More interference can also be found in semantics and pragmatics. 6. (1) The choice of the word ―hinder‖ here is not appropriate. This kind of error
isintralingual. It originates from faulty or partial learning of the target language. In this situation we may say ―Please don‘t disturb me.‖
(2) The answer to this question is incorrect. The correct answer should be ―No, certainly not.‖
This kind of error is interlingual. It originates from the negative transfer of Chinese. (3) The correct sentence should be ―During the meeting we talk about/discuss the
research project.‖ This kind of error results from cross-association, one kind of intralingual errors. Meanings of the two words (talk and discuss) are alike, but their usage is different. Their similarity leads to confusion.
(4) The correct sentence structure should be ―She catches cold easily.‖ This kind of error is
called interlingual error which is produced according to the word order of Chinese (“他容易感冒”).
(5) The correct answer should be ―The light can impress the ?lm and in this way ?x the
image of the ?lm.‖ This kind of error is intralingual error. It originates from faulty or partial learning of the target language.
(6) The correct form should be ―The scenery is too beautiful to describe.‖ This is
intralingual error which is caused by the in?uence of one target language item upon another.
7. If some learners‘ interlanguage is said to have ―fossilized‖, they have developed a
fairly ?xed repertoire of L2 forms, containing many features which do not progress any further. Aspects of pronunciation, vocabulary usage, and grammar may become fossilized in second or foreign language learning. However, an interlanguage is not designed to fossilize. It will naturally develop and become a more effective means of communication,
given appropriate conditions.
8. It is true that some people are more likely to fossilize than others. It is
believed that certain personality traits are important predictors of success in second language learning, such as introversion versus extroversion. Extroverts are generally more sociable and gregarious. If they are learning in the L2 environment, extroverts will be more actively involved in the language than their introvert classmates. They will be more responsive to the input they get, be keener to try producing their own L2 utterances, so they have more opportunities to build up and test the language structures, making them less likely to fossilize. In language learning environments the tendency for fossilization might be reversed.
Chapter 12
Applied Linguistics
1. De?ne the following terms brie?y.
(1) applied linguistics: the study of language and linguistics in relation to practical issues,
e.g. speech therapy, language teaching, testing, and translation. More often than not nowadays, it is used in the narrow sense, and refers to language teaching in particular.
(2) grammar-translation method: a method of foreign or second language teaching
which makes use of translation and grammar study as the main teaching and learning activities.
(3) audiolingual method: the teaching of a second language through imitation,
repetition, and reinforcement. It emphasizes the teaching of speaking and listening before reading and writing and the use of mother tongue in the classroom is not allowed.
(4) communicative language teaching: an approach to foreign or second
language teaching which emphasizes that the goal of language learning is to achieve communicative competence.
(5) testing: the use of tests, or the study of the theory and practice of their use, development,
evaluation, etc.
(6) achievement test: a test which measures how much of a language someone has learned
with reference to a particular course of study or program of instruction.
(7) validity: (in testing) the degree to which a test measures what it is supposed to measure,
or can be used successfully for the purposes for which it is intended. A number of different statistical procedures can be applied to a test to estimate its validity. Such procedures generally seek to determine what the test measures, and how well it does so.
(8) reliability: (in testing) a measure of the degree to which a test gives consistent
results; a test is said to be reliable if it gives the same results when it is given on different occasions or when it is taken by different people.
(9) pro?ciency test: a test which measures how much of a language someone has learned
without considering the syllabus, duration and manner of learning.
(10) subjective test: a test which is scored according to the personal judgment of the marker,
such as essay writing or translation.
(11) objective test: a test that can be marked without the use of the examiner‘s