Applied Linguistic in Arabian Heritage: Al-Jahiz as a Model

Abstract

Applied linguistics is concerned with learning and teaching languages, and how to get benefit from educational theories in language teaching. Applied linguistics deals with many topics such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, translation, teaching languages, contrastive analysis and error analysis, common words, educational grammar, language testing, discourse analysis, lexicography, language policy, language planning and others. Al-Jahiz had discussed most of these topics precisely. He discussed about psycholinguistics and dealt with many issues such as; language acquisition, sign language, animal language, and speech diseases its reasons and remedy. He also discussed the topic of silence which is one of the sociolinguistics issues. He explained that translation is a difficult and impossible task especially with respect to the Quran and poetry. Teaching languages to Arabs and non-Arabs was one of the topics he dealt with. Hypothesis of contrastive analysis was explained carefully by him as well, such as: language interference, prediction and using aid to reduce language interference. He also spoke on error analysis, such as: kind of errors, its causes (social, psychological and organical) and pedagogy. Common words were of his interest, he discussed them widely and mentioned their causes and conditions to be widely common and useable. Finally; he explained the very important topics which is the grammar, and how to make it easier to learners and simplification it to learners.