Revolution in linguistics

Traditionally the aim of linguistics had been to describe the rules of English usage, that is, the grammar. However the new studies shifted attention away from defining the formal features of language usage to discovering the ways in which language is actually used in real communication (Widdowson, 1978). One finding of this research was that the language we speak and write, from one context to another. In English language teaching this gave rise to the view that there are important differences between, say, the English of commerce and that of engineering. Swales (1985) presents an article by C L. Barber on the nature of Scientific English which was published as early as 1962. But it Was the late 1960.1 and early i970s which saw the greatest expansion of research into the nature of particular...

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The demands of a Bravo New World

We will now discus in little more detail the struggle or existence (Charles Darwin)The end of the Second Word War in 1945 heralded an age of enormous and unprecedented expansion in scientific, technical and economic activity on an international scale. This expansion created a world unified and dominated by two forces - technology and commerce - which in their relentless progress soon generated a demand for an international language. For various reasons, most notably the economic power of the United States in the post-war world, tins role fell to English.The effect was to create a whole new mass of people wanting to learn English, not for the pleasure or prestige of knowing the language, but because English was the, key to the international currencies of technology and commerce previously the...

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