- Applied linguistics is the
field that looks at language
and how it affects education.
And specifically how languages themselves
are learned and taught.
One of the things we do
in applied linguistics
is something called conversation analysis.
Languages can differ in
terms of how much time
usually passes after the
teacher asks a question,
before students feel
comfortable raising their hand.
It affects how much
overlap there is between
two people talking in
a conversation before
it is considered rude.
It affects the ways in
which a teacher can select
students to speak or students uh,
select themselves to speak.
We also look at,
in conversation analysis
are some things as mundane
as a telephone conversation.
There's a class I took here at uh,
Teacher's College with Dr. Waring, um,
who's written a great
textbook about the use
of conversation analysis
and its applications
to Second Language Pedagogy.
One of the chapters in that book
was about telephone conversations.
I took a language that no
one has ever studied before,
using conversation analysis
or really any sort of field
of applied linguistics.
The language is called Rushani.
Way up here on the border with Afghanistan
and Tajikistan is a small
strip that is a little
valley there where a
language called Rushani
is spoken.
Uh, it is a unwritten
language it has about twenty
thousand speakers.
My wife is actually a native
speaker of this language.
I could listen to phone calls
between native speakers of Rushani,
and I looked for the
same sequences of calls
that have been identified
in other languages.
So this relates back to a debate,
within conversation analysis,
between Universalism and
Particularistic positions.
My data in favor of a
Universalist position
Yes there are cultural
differences but in terms
of the function of the terms,
they are fundamentally the same.
We have all of this literature
on classroom discourse
done in other languages
especially in English.
If our telephone calls
are kind of the same
maybe we can use this
as a fairly realistic
starting point for looking
at classroom discourse
in some of these other languages.
One of the speakers in
my conversation here
is in New York using a US
cellphone using Latin letters
and she's texting someone
in Tajikistan who has
a Russian cellphone and is
texting in Cyrillic letters.
Neither one of these
people was ever taught
this alphabet but it's something
that sort of developed organically.
If we could do something
like that and work towards
orthographic standardization,
the next thing you can do is
take early literacy books,
primary education books and perhaps
even translate them into Rushani,
so native Rushani speakers could learn
to read and write and have basic education
in their own mother tongue.
