How applied linguistics help you be a better language instructor.

     "Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, linguistics, psychology, computer science, anthropology, and sociology." ("Applied Linguistics” - Wikipedia).

                Applied linguistics is essential because it drives the instructor’s mind in a different way, this article focuses on second language acquisition because teaching is not just providing information to follow a syllabus, since students not only need to “learn”, but they need to “acquire” that knowledge seeing that we learn all time new things in and out the classroom but we forget them easily.  When talking about a language the “Acquisition” must be the most important in the instructor’s goal, it means, students must have the process of gaining a skill and knowledge, they internalize such acquisition forever. Otherwise, an instructor would be wasting time teaching many topics without noticing that students acquire the knowledge, that’s why it is seen in most schools, the lack of English proficiency. I will give you an example: I teach in a 50-minute class these words among verbs, nouns, adjectives and prepositions: fetch, buy, go, love, pack, car, dog, car audio, wheel, at, from, on, in, over. For beginners is difficult to acquire in long-term memory all these words, instead they can learn them in a short-term memory but that is actually a waste of time. Therefore, if the instructor has knowledge about applied linguistics, his way of teaching would change totally, that’s is to say, he would be able to look for a manner in students to achieve that they acquire those words in long-term memory through mnemonics for instance. It is a technique that is designed to assist the memory, often referring to a word or group of words that can be associated with the information being remembered. There is an example to use it appropriately, for one class he chooses some words which are related in order to use association. He writes the word “Car” on the board, and ask students to imagine they are driving a red Ferrari and there are three beautiful women with them, they are going a hundred miles an hour through a long highway, so they need to be careful and keep the “wheel” direction straight, besides they need music, so they are going to turn on the “Car Audio” and play electronic dance music.

              In the mentioned process each word is linked to another one, we used association and visual images to retain these words in long-term memory because they were able to acquire them and wherever they need to use those words, they will be stored in their brain.