Students need to be acquainted with the definition of some key- concepts and language contact phenomena in sociolinguistics. They need to have a general background knowledge about the concern of sociolinguistics and its different fields of study such as diglossia, bilingualism and code switching in addition to some concepts like dialect, language and register.
Students need to be acquainted with the definitions of some basic concepts in order to differentiate between theoretical linguistics (micro linguistics) and applied linguistics (macro linguistics). Students also need to have a general background knowledge about the concern of applied linguistics and its different areas including multilingualism, second language acquisition, contrastive linguistics, discourse analysis and ESP.