The area of bilingualism is essentially interdisciplinary; therefore, it has been studied from linguistic, educational, psychological, and sociological perspective. In defining the term various classificatory, normative, and methological criteria have been used (see, e. g., Beziers and Van Overbeke 1968:112–131; Haugen 1953; Weinerich 1953), and no one defintion of the term is generally accepted. Bloomfield (1933:56) defines bilingualism as “native–like control of two languages” ––a very high goal indeed. For Haugen (1953:6) a bilingual produces “complete and meaningful utterances in other languages.” Weinreich (1953:1) considers bilingualism “the practice of alternately using two languages.”

Pidginization is a linguistic process that occurs when people who do not speak the same language come into contact. It involves the simplification of the contacting language and the exploitation of linguistic common denominators. It is essentially an oral process and limited communication. Pidiginization seems to involve the use of base forms, a reduction in or elimination of case endings, inflections and prepositions, a simple and unified method of indicating temporal deistinctions, negation and interrogation, and the meaning of verbal communication is often reinforced by intonation, gestures and, on some occasions, mime.

The design of teaching materials for second or foreign language teaching (hereafter SFLT) should be a particularly creative and insightful activity for applied linguists to engage in, yet a search through the ever-growing literature of Applied Linguistics reveals that relatively negligible attention has been given to the study of applications of linguistics to SFLT textbooks (Gomes de Matos 1976a). A look at the Proceedings (1971, 1974, 1976) of three Congresses of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) shows that in its Stuttgart, 1975 Congress, AILA features a section devoted to Language Materail Development, but the program of its 1978 Montreal meeting reveals that the former sectin was subsumed under the section Second Language Teaching and Learning. Greater recognition of the importance of textbooks in Applied Linguistics can be seen in the inclusion in AILA's 1981 Congress in Lund, Sweden of a section on Teaching Materials, Textbooks (note the explicit mention of the latter), and Pedagogical Grammars.

There is not one notional/functional approach any more than there is one structural approach. There is simply a set of beliefs about language and language learning, some or all of which might be expected to underlie syllabi, courses, and classroom materials labeling themselves functional or notional. In this chapter, therefore, we shall be looking at the core of belief, its implications, and its potential for developemnt.

Many language teachers have had sporadic exposure to applied linguistics, limited experience with programmed learning/individualized instruction, and an incomplete understanding of ways in which educational technology can significantly augment the quality of the teaching–learning process. what is the process. what is the probability that administrators, teacher educator, materials developers, teachers, and students will appreciate and accept CAI as an approach that seeks to combine these three fields meaningfully? The propose of this discussion is to examine CAI is terms of key definitions, observations, concerns, developments, and contributions that have achieved significance during the 1979–80 academic year in the area of language teaching and learning. Implications and a challenge for future research studies will also be listed.

A major problem for linguistic theory is that of specifying how the sounds of language relate to meaning. Although this problem is an exceedingly complex one, considerable progress has been made in formalizing grammars which, while incomplete, have provided a reasonable first account of the structure of natural language. These developments in linguistic theory, and in particular generative–transformational grammars, have had a profound effect on the psychological study of language, shifting the emphasis from the behavioristic studies of words to the analysis of sentence comprehension and production. More recently, following parallel developments in lingistics, psychologists have also turned their attention to units larger than the sentence, with a particular focus on text comprehension.

The collection, classification, and analysis of errors in the written and spoken performance of second or foreign language learners has had a role in language pedagogy since at least the 1950s. However, in the late 60s, and paticularly in the 70s, the study of errors in non-native language performance, or Errors Analysis (EA), assumed a new role in applied linguistics. A more rigorous methodology for EA developed, and it was applied to new issues and questions within second language acquisition research. Yet, by 1980, EA was largely considered a transitional development in applied linguistics. This review considers the nature, development, and achievements of Error Analysis in the period from 1970 to 1980. We will consider EA from three perspectives, reviewing the use of Error Analysis: (1) to account for linguistic competence; (2) to identify learning processes and strategies, and (3) to provied input to language pedagogy.

Ten years ago, research in second language acquisition manifested an array of doubts about the potential of major disciplinary paradigms for providing a comprehensive theory of second language acquisition. Linguistic theory and psychological theory alike were viewed as only marginally useful either for stimulating fruitful research or for undergirding classroom practices in second language teaching. But the skepticism of the 70s had its virtues. We had outgrown the childishness of seeking clear-cut distinctions and final answers. Consequently, we probed deeper and wider, beyond the confines of “established” disciplinary models to seek new worlds of possibilities, yet with philosophical lifelines firmly secured in the collective expertise of centuries of the study of human behaviour.

This paper will address the following questions:

1. What is language proficiency?

2. What is the relationship between first and second language proficiency?

3. What major theories have been born or laid to rest in the last year or so?

4. Can any consensus be discerned in the various extant controversies?

Although the review will concentrate on research published or presented at professional meetings on testing in the last year, some of the themes will necessitate reference to earlier work, and much that might be considered relevant by other authors will be omitted. The objective is to set down as much as possible to identify controversial issues for what they are, and to highlight emerging trends as best I can them.

Most of what we know about sign language we have learned over the past ten years, although the phenomenon of communicating with the hands and eyes rather than with the mouth and ears has existed, no doubt, throughout history whenever and wherever there have been groups of deaf adults and/or children. The reasons why sign language has been so neglected are intimately connected with the attitudes and beliefs society has evolved about the nature of language, both in terms of what language is and what it signifies, such as the beliefs that language is the hallmark of human evolution, language is thinking, language is an auditory and oral phenomenon. Within this context, sign language is not language, and communicating with sign language rather than spoken language comes replete with a host of negative implications. It comes as no surprise, then, that the people throughout history who have been in the best position to study and describe sign language––deaf people and people whose profession is deafness––have devoted most of their time and energy to defending sign language rather than analyzing and describing it.

The major theoretical challenge for the sociology of language consists of the extent that it contributes to and, indeed, benefits from the sciences of society, on the one hand, and the sciences of language, on the other. Considering that the total enterprise only came into being in the early 70s (taking The SSRC's Summer Institute on Sociolinguistics at Indiana University, 1964, as a reasonable date of departure) some progress toward meeting this challenge is undeniable. Such progress is particularly great at the micro-level where variation theory, discourse analysis, speech act theory, pragmatics, and ethnomethodological concerns and sensitivities have pretty much become modern day orthodoxies that often neither recognize nor remember their sociolinguistic co-origins. Nevertheless, precisely here, where the links to linguistics are strongest, there is hardly any link to sociology or to sociocultural theory more generally (none at all, indeed, except for the ethnomethodological corner thereof). If we look for linkages between macro-sociolinguistic efforts and the parent disciplines, the situation is even less heartening, because not only are such links exceedingly few and far between, but nothing approaching schools of thought or elaborated points of view are discernible. That being the case the likelihood of productive theoretical linkages between micro- and macro-sociolinguistic endeavors is rather remote for the forseeable future.

Macrosociolinguistics deals with the domain of linguistic behavior in such institutions as political parties, governmental administrations, and other nationwide organizations. It has to do with the distribution of language varieties in such institutions; and it has to cope with standards of planning the language situation. It is, therefore, the area of scientific national differentiation and of the study of normative language use in large institutions.

Quite contrary to the presuppositions of the editors of this review, I approached the production of this chapter without the feeling of being au fait, having spent the past year on a small-is-beautiful campus with limited access to the literature, with this period having been preceded by three years in the Middle East, which is surely not a hotbed of applied microsociolinguistic research or dissemination. Additionally disabled with a shattered writing hand, I resorted to sending off thirty mimeographed requests for assitance in turning up seminal items for 1979 to sociolinguists the world over. This salvo netted thirteen replies (43% response-rate) with the following variation in content: one person telephoned from Washington, D.C. for clarification and then promptly mailed me some references; three others––one in Nigeria and two on opposite coasts of the USA––wrote back to ask what I meant by microsociolinguistics; three––one each from Israel, Jordan, and the USA––replied with friendly notes that neither mentioned my request nor responded to it; three others––from England, Tunisia, and the USA respectively––wrote to say that they had seen nothing that I would not have seen myself; and only three––one each from Guyana, Poland, and the southwest USA––provided references at first shy! Of the items mentioned by this last group, the Guyana reference fit the section in this volume on Pidginization and Creolization, and those from the southwest USA fit the section on Second-Language Acquisition/Learning, leaving my Polish correspondent as the sole collaborator––pending translation, his language being one of those more uncommonly taught abroad. I was clearly as handicapped as when I had begun, but was there really nothing to report about microsociolinguistics?