Some Southeast Asian priorities in applied linguistics

Abstract

Possible applications of grammatical theory to language education and language planning in Southeast Asia are found in language teaching and learning, in general education, in curriculum development, in the production of reference materials which are also useful outside the field of education, and in various specialized areas involving minority languages or smaller groups in the general population. The most important application is probably the orientation and persuasion of laymen who are policy-makers in the relevant fields. Grammatical theories of all kinds deal with the relation between sound and meaning in terms of description, history, comparison, and universal characteristics of human languages and dialects. The theories are divided into three main categories traditional, structural, and transformational-generative. Each category has applications to current Southeast Asian problems, but some theories are better equipped than others for solving certain kinds of problems. In general, basic research should receive a higher priority than curriculum development, reference materials, and teacher training, for the simple reason that for most of these other applications the data bases are still lacking. This observation does not apply to foreign languages, where the highest priority should go to curriculum development and teacher training. Manuals relating to applications of grammatical theory and most other kinds of reference materials should be produced in the national language wherever possible. Normally, the emphasis should be on those problems which affect the largest populations& in education, the average student in the lower schools; in non-educational planning, the largest ethnolinguistic groups. The priorities given in the paper are generalized for the whole southeast Asian region; it is understood that individual countries will set their own specific priorities in any case.