(2)   It includes electronic production of artificial speech and the automatic recognition of human speech.

(3)   It includes research on automatic translation between natural languages.

(4)   It also includes text processing and communication between people and computers.

10.1 Computer-assisted language learning (CALL)

       10.1.1     CAL / CAI vs. CALL

CAI (Computer-assisted instruction) means the use of a computer in a teaching program. CAL (Computer-assisted learning) refers to the use of a computer in teaching and learning and in order to help achieve educational objectives. CAI aims at seeing educational problems on the part of the teacher, whereas CAL emphasizes the use of a computer in both teaching and learning. CALL (Computer-assisted language learning) means the use of a computer in the teaching or learning of a second or foreign language. If CAI or CAL deals with teaching and learning problems in general, CALL deals with language teaching and learning in particular.

       10.1.2     Phases of CALL development (4 periods)

1.    During this period, computers were large mainframe machines kept in research institutions.

2.    Small computers appeared and cost cheaper than before, which made a generation of programs possible.

3.    The learning was not so much supplied by the language of the text itself as by the cognitive problem-solving techniques and the interaction between students in the group.

4.    Instead of writing specific programs for language teaching, word-processing has adapted to language teaching by enabling students to compose and try our their writings in a non-permanent form.

       10.1.3     Technology

                     1.    Customizing, template, and authoring programs.

                     2.    Computer networks.

                     3.    Compact disk technology

                     4.    Digitized sound.

10.2 Machine translation (MT)

       10.2.1     History of development

                     1.    The independent work by MT researchers

                     2.    Towards good quality output

                     3.    The development of translate tools

       10.2.2     Research methods

                     1.    Linguistic approach

                     2.    The practical approaches

                            (1)   The transfer approach

                            (2)   The inter-lingual approach

                            (3)   Knowledge-based approach

       10.2.3     MT Quality

       10.2.4     MT and the Internet

       10.2.5     Spoken language translation

       10.2.6     MT and human translation

At the beginning of the new century, it is apparent that MT and human translation can and will co-exist in relative harmony. Those skills which the human translators can contribute will always be in demand.

(1) When translation has to be of “publishable” quality, both human translation and MT have their roles. MT plays an important part in large scale and rapid translation of boring technical documentation, highly repetitive software localization manuals, and many other situations where the costs of human translation are much higher than the ones of MT. By contrast, the human translators are and will remain unrivalled for non-repetitive linguistically sophisticated texts (e.g. in literature and law), and even for one-off texts in specific highly-specialized technical subjects.

(2) For the translation of texts where the quality of output is much less important, MT is often an ideal solution.

(3) For the one-to-one interchange of information, there will probably always be a role for the human translators. But for the translation of personal letters, MT systems are likely to be increasingly used; and, for electronic mail and for the extraction of information from web pages and computer-based information services, MT is the only feasible solution.

(4) As for spoken translation, there must surely always be a market for the human translators. But MT systems are opening up new areas where human translation has never featured: the production of draft versions for authors writing in a foreign language, who need assistance in the translation of information from databases; and no doubt, more such new applications will appear in the future as the global communication networks expand and as the realistic usuality of MT becomes familiar to a wider public.

10.3 Corpus linguistics

       10.3.1     Definition

1.    Corpus (pl. corpora): A collection of linguistic data, either compiled as written texts or as a transcription of recorded speech. The main purpose of a corpus is to verify a hypothesis about language – for example, to determine how the usage of a particular sound, word, or syntactic construction varies.

2.    Corpus linguistics: Corpus linguistics deals with the principles and practice of using corpora in language study. A computer corpus is a large body of machine-readable texts.

       10.3.2     Criticisms and the revival of corpus linguistics

       10.3.3     Concordance

       10.3.4     Text encoding and annotation

1.    It should be possible to remove the annotation from an annotated corpus in order to revert to the raw corpus.

2.    It should be possible to extract the annotation by themselves from the text.

3.    The annotation scheme should be based on guidelines which are available to the end user.

4.    It should be made clear how and by whom the annotation was carried out.

5.    The end user should be made aware that the corpus annotation is not infallible, but simply a potentially useful tool.

6.    Annotation schemes should be based as far as possible on widely agreed and theory-neutral principles.

7.    No annotation scheme has a priori right to be considered as a standard.

       10.3.5     The roles of corpus data

                     1.    Speech research

                     2.    Lexical studies

                     3.    Semantics

                     4.    Sociolinguistics

                     5.    Psycholinguistics

10.4 Information retrieval (IR)

       10.4.1     Scope defined

Data retrieval vs. information retrieval

       10.4.2     An information retrieval system

       10.4.3     Three main areas of research

                     1.    Content analysis

                     2.    Information structure

                     3.    Evaluation

10.5 Mail and news

End of Chapter 10

Chapter 11 Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching

11.1 The relation of linguistics to foreign language teaching

1.    Both linguistics and foreign language teaching take language as their subject. Linguistics is the scientific study of language, so it is clearly related with language teaching. However, linguistics and language teaching differ in their attitudes, goals and methods towards language.

2.    Linguistics regards language as a system of forms, while the field of foreign language teaching considers it as a set of skills. Linguistics research is concerned with the establishment of theories which explain the phenomena of language use, whereas foreign language teaching aims at the learners’ mastery of language.

3.    Applied linguistics serves to reconcile and combine linguistics and foreign language teaching.

(1)   Applied linguistics extends theoretical linguistics in the direction of language learning and teaching, so that the teacher is enabled to make better decisions on the goal and content of the teaching.

(2)   Applied linguistics states the insights and implications that linguistic theories have on the language teaching methodology.

11.2 Various linguistic views and their significance in language learning and teaching

       11.2.1     Traditional grammar

Traditional grammar, as a pre-20^th century language description and a pre-linguistic product of research, was based upon earlier grammars of Latin or Greek, and laid emphasis on correctness, literary excellence, the use of Latin models, and the priority of written language. Prescription was its key tone.

       11.2.2     Structuralist linguistics

Modern linguistics, in spite of theoretical diversities, is primarily descriptive. Structuralist linguistics describes linguistics features in terms of structures and systems. It describes the current spoken language, which people use in daily communication. Its focus, however, is still on grammatical structures.

       11.2.3     Transformational-generative (TG) linguistics

TG grammar sees language as a system of innate rules. A native speaker possesses a linguistic competence, or a language acquisition device. Although Chomsky does not intend to make his model a representation of performance, i.e., the language actually used in communication, applied linguistics find TG grammar useful in certain aspects. But because it is a formal and abstract grammar, it remains limited in language teaching.

       11.2.4     Functional linguistics

Taking a semantic-sociolinguistic approach, M. A. K. Halliday’s systemic-functional linguistics sees language as an instrument used to perform various functions in social interaction. It concerns not only with the formal system of language but also the functions of language in society, and its scope is wider than that of former theories.

       11.2.5     The theory of communicative competence

The concept competence originally comes from Chomsky. It refers to the grammatical knowledge of the ideal language user and has nothing to do with the actual use of language in concrete situations. This concept of linguistic competence has been criticized for being too narrow. To expand the concept of competence, D. H. Hymes (1971) proposes communicative competence, which has four components: