An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

Part 3: How I Handle Possibilities
If you are a random-intuitive, you are more future-oriented, prefer what can be 
over what is, like to speculate about possibilities, enjoy abstract thinking and 
avoid step-by-step instruction. If your preference is concrete-sequential, you are 
present-oriented, prefer one-step-at-a-time activities, and want to know where 
you are going in your learning at every moment.
Part 4: How I Approach Tasks
If you are more closure-oriented, you focus carefully on all learning tasks, meet 
deadlines, plan ahead for assignments and want explicit directions. If you are 
more open in your orientation, you enjoy discovery learning (in which you pick 
up information naturally) and prefer to relax and enjoy your learning without 
concern for deadlines or rules.
Part 5: How I Deal with Ideas
If you are a synthesizing person, you can summarize material well, enjoy guessing 
meanings and predicting outcomes, and notice similarities quickly. If you are 
analytic, you can pull ideas apart, do well on logical analysis and contrast tasks, 
and tend to focus on grammar rules.
Part 6: How I Deal with Input
If you are a global person, you enjoy getting the main idea and are comfortable 
communicating even if you don’t know all the words or concepts. If you are a 

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Suggested Solutions
particular person, you focus more on details, and remember specific information 
about a topic well.
Chapter 11, 
Listening
Question 1: Listening Sub-skills
Examples of cases where the learner found it difficult to discriminate between the 
sounds include: conversing/convergent, context/contact and doubts/done. Examples 
of misperceived word boundaries are: on seventy (for uncertainty) and everywhere 
(for every word). As far as tackling unfamiliar words is concerned, he produced 
a plausible alternative, decide, for the unusual word decipher, but was totally 
confused by catch the words, which he interpreted as catch the dog.
Question 2: Overall Comprehension
One way of assessing what the listener made of the text as a whole is to focus on 
the right-hand version and treat it as a text in its own right. What does it seem 
to be about? When you do that, it is hard to see any overall coherence. Although 
some of his versions of sentences (2, 9 and perhaps 10) are relatively accurate, 
they all have some detail missing. Others (for example, 3, 5 and certainly 7) make 
no obvious sense to the reader. Although the class was told in advance that the 
topic of the text was the problems of talking to native speakers, it seems clear that 
the Japanese learner either did not understand that or did not hear it, because it is 
only in the final two sentences that he seems to have been writing about language.
The learner was an undergraduate in economics. There is some lexical evidence 
of that in his version: convergent (sentence 1) and consumption (sentence 6), and 
also perhaps in his hearing the nouns demand and benefit (sentence 10) instead of 
their respective adjectives.
Question 3: Intercultural Misunderstanding
Although the language of this extract was simple, it still provided the opportunity 
for conflicting interpretations. The reporter said the food was hot, (meaning too 
spicy for his taste), which the interviewee changed to tasty (spicy enough) and 
justified (you want plenty of spice when you are celebrating). The reporter then 
picked up the word tasty, but with a slight pause and a glance at the camera, 
suggesting that he felt the need to be polite. His next sentence is the most 
interesting, for our purposes: ‘I don’t suppose you have a carry-out do you?’ The 
reporter seemed to be looking for a polite excuse not to eat any more of the food: 
his ‘I don’t suppose you have a carry-out?’ implied that he was asking for a portion 
to take away with him to eat later. But the interviewee seems to have interpreted 
what he said as ‘I don’t suppose you have a take-away restaurant?’ and so replied that 
he was a doctor, and not a restaurateur.
This could be seen as a simple lexical misinterpretation. On the other hand, 
Pakistani immigrants in the UK may be so used to being stereotyped as working 
in certain occupations, such as catering, that the doctor here assumes that the 
reporter assumes just that. This extract seems to carry echoes of many other 
conversations the doctor has had with British people! Real-life misunderstandings 
like this can provide valuable material for discussion with L2 listeners, especially 

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278 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
when the examples come from interaction between competent users of a language, 
as was the case here. Adult L2 learners, in particular, can gain confidence (perhaps 
paradoxically) from analysing the problems that arise in listening, even in their 
own L1.
Chapter 12, 
Speaking and Pronunciation
Question 1
The first part of the interaction (B1–B4) is mediated by the fact that this is a 
pedagogical task requiring description of a picture. The text unfolds as:
Description (B1)^(Clarification)(A1)^Description (B2)^(Reaction) 
(A2-B3)^Task closure (A3)
Clarification and Reaction can be regarded as Optional stages. The second part 
(A4–A6) is a kind of Coda, a commentary on the overall interaction, which clears 
up the central misunderstanding.
Question 2
Many of the lexico-grammatical choices in the Description stage reflect the goal 
of the task – describing and identifying a picture. The major human and material