Carol A. Chapelle - The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

A final area of research to illustrate the typical concerns of anthropological linguists is the cultural performance of verbal art or, more specifically, culturally valued genre types. Certain social roles, typically those of higher social status, are marked by their control of particular, also highly valued, genres; think of how a priest is determined by his control of the liturgy, or the shaman by her spells, or even a successful barrister by her stirring summation oratory. The study of genres is clearly a core specialty of this subfield and belongs squarely to level three, the sociocultural matrix. Genres are prototypical cultural practices; they are historically transmitted, relatively stable frameworks for orienting the production and interpretation of discourse. In a word, they are “institutionalized.” The capacity to produce and detect genres as models for discourse comes from their “framing devices” (Bateson, 1974) or “contextualization cues” (Gumperz, 1982), such as once upon a time for a fairy tale or citations for an academic paper. Such framing devices work to the extent that genres are not so much inherent in the text forms themselves, but in the frameworks and interpretive procedures that verbal performers and their audience use to produce and understand these texts. Genre classifications are not rigidly definable in terms of formal text types, but are the result of applying (sometimes conflicting) interpretive procedures indexed by the framing devices employed.

Framing devices are features of the poetic function (Jakobson, 1960) of language, formal linguistic principles for the enaction of diverse genre types, such as line final rhyme for certain genres of English poetry, like sonnets. Various types of framing devices include special formulas or lexical items, tropes like metaphor or metonymy, paralinguistic features, like drums or singing, and, most importantly, parallelism. This last is recurring patterns in successive sections of text and can be found at all levels of the linguistic system, phonology (rhyme and rhythm), grammatical (repeated phrases or clauses), and lexical (paired words). Genres do not exist as abstract categories, but only as schemes of interpretation and construction, which are enacted in particular performances. Genres can be recontextualized from earlier contexts to new ones with a greater or lesser shift in their interpretation. This opens a gap between the actual performance and the abstract generic model we might have of it from earlier performances. This gap can be strategically manipulated by performers to convey comments about current social happenings or valuations of cultural traditions (Briggs & Bauman, 1992).

SEE ALSO:Linguaculture; Politeness

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PETER ROBINSON

Like, intelligence quotient (IQ), or working‐memory capacity, aptitude is measurable, and differs in degree between learners in any population. Unlike height, aptitude cannot be directly observed, but must be inferred from performance on psychological tests designed to measure it. Higher aptitude for second or foreign‐language learning predicts more successful adaptation to instructed or naturalistic exposure to the second language (L2), as measured by demonstrably faster progress in learning, and in higher levels of ultimate attainment in proficiency at the end of a course of instruction, or following a period of naturalistic exposure to the L2. Aptitude is therefore a theoretical construct , operationalized in the form of a test, which aims to predict phenomena that characterize second language acquisition (SLA) (such as incidental learning, metalinguistic awareness, fossilization, and others), and the extent to which successful SLA occurs as a result. Although little was known about these SLA phenomena during the period when aptitude tests were first developed (the 1930s to the 1950s), recent attempts to conceptualize and measure aptitude are addressing the extent to which tests of aptitude predict them—including, for example, the extent of successful incidental L2 learning (Robinson, 2005a), metalinguistic awareness of the L2 (Roehr, 2018), and the influence of each on levels of ultimate L2 attainment (Granena & Long, 2013). Some of these issues are described below, following a discussion of early developed conceptualizations and measurement of aptitude for language learning.