An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

Teacher’s Course (second edition). Boston, MA: Heinle/Cengage. Celce-Murcia and 
Larsen-Freeman have written their book to help prospective and practising teachers of 
English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) enhance their understanding of English 
grammar, expand their skills in linguistic analysis and develop a pedagogical approach to 
teaching English grammar. Each chapter deals with a major structure of English, analysing 
its form, meaning and use. Each chapter concludes with teaching suggestions.
DeCarrico, J. (2000) The Structure of English: Studies in Form and Function for 
Language Teaching. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. This book presents 
a descriptive overview of grammatical structures in English, but it differs from most 
grammar books in that the focus is not only on form but also on function (both sentence 
level grammatical function and discourse function). The underlying philosophy is that 
a better understanding of how grammar works and why it works that way will enable 
teachers to be more effective in teaching grammar in the classroom.
DeKeyser, R. (ed.). (2007) Practice in a Second Language. New York: Cambridge 
University Press. Seeing language as a skill to be learned raises the question of how 
declarative knowledge becomes proceduralized/automatized. The contributors to this 
volume explore a number of questions of theoretical and practical significance, including 
what kinds of practice are more effective, in what contexts, for what kinds of learners.
Doughty, C., Williams, J. (1998) Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language 
Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doughty and Williams argue for 
incorporating a focus on form into the communicative approach to language teaching. 
They believe that focusing on form respects students’ ‘internal linguistic syllabus’, drawing 
their attention to problematic linguistic features during communicative activities. This 
approach recognizes the need for accuracy and provides an alternative to methodologies 
that treat accuracy and fluency separately.
Hinkel, E., Fotos, S. (eds.). (2002) New Perspectives on Grammar Teaching in Second 
Language Classrooms. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. The chapters 
in this anthology present a variety of approaches to teaching grammar within different 
curricular and methodological frameworks. It is the editors’ intention that teachers 
develop flexible practice in teaching grammar and cultivate an eclectic view of teaching 
grammar.
Larsen-Freeman, D. (2001) Teaching grammar. In Celce-Murcia, M. (ed.), Teaching 
English as a Second or Foreign Language (third edition). Boston, MA: Heinle/Cengage. 
In this article, Larsen-Freeman makes a case for teachers systematically addressing the 
three dimensions of grammatical structures: their form, meaning and use, depending on 
which of these dimensions presents the greatest learning challenge to ESL/EFL students. 
She also suggests that the three dimensions need to be taught differently since they are 
likely learnt differently.
Larsen-Freeman, D. (2003) Teaching Language: From Grammar to Grammaring. Boston, 
MA: Heinle/Cengage. Larsen-Freeman proposes that grammar is, as with other naturally 

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Grammar
occurring systems, best conceived of as a non-linear, dynamic system. Seen in this way, 
the complexity of grammar is respected, especially as manifest at the discourse level, the 
non-linear nature of language and its learning is best understood and the organic nature 
of language/grammar is appreciated. As a consequence of this way of viewing grammar, 
Larsen-Freeman has proposed that grammar teaching be thought of as ‘grammaring’, to 
reflect the dynamic nature of grammar and its learning.
Hands-on Activity
Analyse the following interlanguage productions by ESL/EFL learners. Say what 
the problem is. Next, diagnose the error as an error of form, meaning or use in 
terms of Standard English. Finally, plan one promoting noticing and one practice 
activity for dealing with the problem as you have diagnosed it.
1 *Allyson is a 13-years-old girl.
2 *I am boring in algebra class.
3 *A goal was wanted by the other team.
4 *There are a lot of mountains in the West; on the contrary, there are few in the 
Midwest.
5 Would you hand me that book? 
*Of course, I would.
6 *Although he had few close friends, he was very lonely.
7 *I will buy for my parents a house.

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Vocabulary
Paul Nation
Victoria University of Wellington
Paul Meara
University of Wales, Swansea
What is vocabulary?
One of the most difficult questions to answer in vocabulary studies is ‘What is a 
word?’ and there are a variety of only partly satisfactory answers depending on 
the reasons for asking the question. If we want to count how long a book is, or 
how fast someone can speak or read in words per minute, then we need to count 
tokens. The sentence ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’ contains ten tokens. 
Even though the same word form be occurs twice, it is counted each time it occurs. 
When counting tokens, it is necessary to decide if we count items like I’m or we’ll 
as two tokens or one. If we are counting tokens in spoken language, do we count 
um and er as tokens, and do we count repetitions like I ... I ... I said as tokens? We 
can only answer these questions by examining our reasons for counting.
Often we are interested in how many different words someone knows or uses. 
For example, if we are interested in how much sight vocabulary a learner has 
(words that are known well enough to be quickly and accurately recognized), then 
we would count word types. The sentence ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’ 
contains eight word types. Both be and to occur twice, and so they are not counted 
after their first occurrence. Some of the problems with counting types include 
deciding what to do about capital letters (Are High and high two types or one?) 
And what to do with identical types that have different meanings (generation (of 
electricity) and (the younger) generation).
If our reason for counting is related to vocabulary learning, then we need to 
choose a unit of counting that reflects the kind of knowledge that language users 
draw on. There is evidence (Nagy, Anderson, Schommer, Scott and Stallman, 
1989) that language users see closely related word forms (mend, mends, mended, 
mending) as belonging to the same word family and it is the total frequency of 
a word family that determines the familiarity of any particular member of that 
family. In other words, the regular word building devices create items that are 
seen as being very closely related to each other. A major problem with counting 
word families is in deciding what should be counted as a member of a family. 
The most conservative way is to count lemmas. A lemma is a set of related words 
that consists of the stem form and inflected forms that are all the same part of 
speech. So, approach, approaches, approached, approaching would all be members 
of the same lemma because they all have the same stem, include only the stem 
and inflected forms, and are all verbs. Approach and approaches as nouns would 
be a different lemma. A less conservative definition of a word family would also 
include items made with derivational affixes like un- and non-, -ness and -ly. 
Bauer and Nation (1993) suggest that as learners become more proficient, the 
number of items included in their word families will also tend to increase. If we 
are counting learners’ receptive knowledge, the word family is the best unit. If 
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Vocabulary
we are counting productive knowledge as in speaking or writing, the word type 
(or perhaps the lemma) is the best unit.
There are some groups of words, like good morning and at the end of the day, which 
seem to be used like single words. Some of the groups may be items that have not 
been analysed into parts but are just learned, stored and used as complete units. 
Others may be constructed from known parts but are used so often that users 
treat them as a single unit. Pawley and Syder (1983) suggest that native speakers 
speak appropriately and fluently because they have stored a great deal of this 
formulaic language which they can draw on when engaging in communication. 
The phenomenon of formulaic language goes by several names, including:
• ‘Preformulated language’ (emphasizing how multi-word units can be stored as 
single units which are ‘ready to go’).
• ‘Formulas’ (emphasizing how multi-word units can be repeatedly used instead 
of having to generate new ways of saying things).
• ‘Lexical phrases’ (emphasizing how certain phrases are typically used to achieve