Interlanguage phonology: Phonological description of what constitute ‘foreign accents’ have been developed. Studies about the reception of such accents and why some seem to native speakers to be more intelligible than others. Attempts to explain why certain phonological features are easier to acquire than others. * Pronunciation studies have lagged behind other areas of applied linguistics to the extent that few new insights into learning pronunciation have so far become available to those struggling to teach it.

Grammars: The concept of a pedagogic grammar is controversial. (a) degrading the accuracy and coverage of a full scale description of the language to a brief and more accessible format allows questions to go unanswered and errors to creep in. (b) The concept of a pedagogic grammar implies an entity with two quite different sets of criteria: linguistic accuracy and pedagogic appropriateness. Problems: 1-what constitutes an adequate descriptive grammar?? 2-what pedagogic theory the final product adheres to? and how valid that theory may be?.

Q. what language to describe ? the advent of computers with large memories in the last 20 years of the previous century has allowed the development of large databases of actual language. Q: what are the linguistic data sources? Q: what are the advantages of stored large databases? 1-Produce grammars and dictionaries. 2-New development in what is actually being described. 3-Authentic everyday English.

*How this information might be treated in the teaching materials: Course book needs to contain enough detail to enable the learner to interact appropriately in L2 but also to acquire further native-like systems and finer differentiation of vocabulary when operating within the L2 speech community. ________________________ *Corpus linguistics extends the database of linguistic description to everyday talk and written communication in all sorts of directions, and is of course not limited to native speakers.

*Greater authenticity of the database highlights a long term problem: Prescription v. evolution. The English the learner needs to know is primarily the English that will do the jobs that he or she needs to perform in the language.

Dictionaries: Q: how do dictionaries differ in the citation forms? In the style of presentation In the form of the grammatical information. In the way meanings are actually described. In the intended readership whether native speaker or learner.

* Problems in using dictionaries: the cognitive problems in understanding the given definitions. selecting the correct sense for the word in contexts. selecting the most appropriate word for the meaning they intend in the context. * development on dictionary design words has progressed continuously. further developments extend to electronic forms in the forms of both CD ROM and miniature pocket dictionaries.

Language comparisons:  The role of comparisons between languages in the use of dictionaries.  the current trend in linguistics is to identify what is universal to all languages, the basic specification of language and to regard the description of individual languages as individual systems deriving in different ways from that basic specification.  applied linguistic task is to specify basic ways in which any language will differ from a learner’s mother tongue.

 in the audio-lingual approach, a comparative description was seen as the best source for the selection and grading of language items in the new language to teach.  Recently, there are systematic differences between language for which particular items may be a key that unlocks the system for the learner  allowing what may be seen as a major difference to be a minor learning problem because the learner can appreciate the internal logic of the new language.