What is Applied Linguistics?

AUTHOR

IDEAS
AL covers a wide set of numerous areas of study connected by the focus on the language that is actually used. The emphasis in AL is on the language users and the ways in which they use languages. There are many issues investigated by applied linguists such as discourse analysis and sign language. AL was associated mainly with first, second and foreign language teaching, but nowadays it is seen as more interdisciplinary branch of science.

Kamil Wisniewski

Anne Burns

AL first emerged as an attempt to provide a theoretical basis for the activities on language teaching. AL became an umbrella term for a variety of disciplines which focus on language issues in such fields as law, speech pathology, language planning, and forensic science. In the meantime, there is a declining interest in viewing applied linguistics as having any relevance to language teaching. Many graduate programs in language teaching were labelled as programs in AL. Today they are generally called programs in TESOL.

Jack C. Richards

AL is any attempt to work with language in a critical and reflective way, with some ultimate practical goal in mind. This includes (amongst other things): deliberately trying to learn (or teach) a foreign language or to develop your ability in your native language. It also includes doing any research or developing any ideas or tools which aim to help people do these sorts of things.

Phil Durrant

AL is one of several academic disciplines focusing on how language is acquired and used in the modern world. It is a somewhat eclectic field that accommodates diverse theoretical approaches, and its interdisciplinary scope includes linguistic, psychological and educational topics. AL conferences and journals have reflected the growing influence of psychologybased approaches, which in turn is a reflection of the increasing prevalence of cognitive (neuro) science in the study of human mental functions.

Zoltn Drnyei

AL is perceived almost exclusively as research into the teaching and learning of the foreign- language, often resulting in the production of teaching materials. A broader definition sees AL as concerned with providing theoretical and empirical foundations for investigating and solving language-related problems in the real world.

Wini Davies

AL provides the theoretical and descriptive foundations for the investigation and solution of language-related problems, especially those of language education. The main distinguishing characteristic of AL is its concern with professional activities whose aim is to solve real-world language-based problems. AL is not simply the application of research done in linguistics. On the other hand, AL has to look beyond linguistics for relevant research and theory. AL research often involves the synthesis research from a variety of disciplines, including linguistics. AL has been responsible for the development of original research in a number of areas of linguistics- e.g. bilingualism, literacy, and genre.

Richard Hudson

AL is related to how languages interact and what differences we might expect when the languages concerned are not related to each other.

Juliane House

AL is the study of language in order to address real-world concerns. AL is the study of language, and language-related related topics, in specified situations. AL is practically-oriented, but it is also theory-driven and interdisciplinary.

Susan Hunston

AL is a discipline which explores the relations between theory and practice in language with particular reference to issues of language use. It embraces contexts in which people use and learn languages and is a platform for systematically address problems involving the use of language and communication in real-world situations. AL draws on a range of disciplines, including linguistics. AL has applications in several areas of language study, including language learning and teaching, the psychology of language processing, discourse analysis, stylistics, corpus analysis, literacy studies and language planning and policies.

Vivian Cook

AL draws on any subject with anything to say about language teaching or language learning. AL is applying theoretical linguistics to actual data. Hence AL, as the descriptions of social networks or of genre differences, is the construction of dictionaries or the collection of corpora of millions of words of English. AL seemed boundless, including the study of first language acquisition and computational linguistics. AL has become synonymous with SLA (though never linked to first language acquisition). SLA can be seen as providing data to test our linguistic theories rather than to increase our knowledge of SLA itself. AL means many things to many people, discovering what a book or a course in applied linguistics is about involves reading the small print to discover its orientation.

G. Richard Tucker

AL refers to a broad range of activities which involve solving some languagerelated problem or addressing some language-related concern. AL as a means to help solve specific problems in society AL focuses on the numerous and complex areas in society in which language plays a role. The most notable change AL has been its rapid growth as an interdisciplinary field.