and how they do it, as editors of past collections on applied linguistics have noted (Davies & Elder, 2004; Kaplan, 2010). The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics invites readers to undertake such an examination by providing a collection of entries that describe the types of problems applied linguists work on and their analytic approaches. The majority of entries are focused on the problems which are presented and explained along with the relevant constellation of theory, research, and practice. Work across these areas of inquiry draws upon certain analytic approaches that applied linguists have developed, or borrowed and refined, and adapted to meet the needs posed by the problem at hand. Some of the entries emphasize the problems applied linguists investigate and others target research methods used in applied linguistics, but readers will undoubtedly note a confluence of theory, research, and practice within each of the entries. Such boundary crossing is a defining characteristic of applied linguistics.
Problems in Applied Linguistics
Language‐related problems typically take shape in response to language contact among individuals and societies as well as in adopting and adapting to technologies that function linguistically in society. Nine clusters of such issues are included in The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. One of these clusters presents issues of multilingualism as it is studied in applied linguistics, from personal and cognitive issues associated with speaking more than one language to issues arising in education and the physical spaces in society where language is visible. Applied linguists have put forward new concepts such as multicompetence and translanguaging to study the capabilities and performance of people who speak more than one language. They study emersion education designed to increase academic language competence in more than one language and to afford status to and maintenance of more than one language in society. They study linguistic landscapes that reveal the roles and status of certain languages as well as the degree of multilingualism in a geographical area.
Multilingualism within a region often intersects with language policy and planning whereby particular actors attempt to manage the use of certain languages for the good of society or the benefit of a particular group. Illustrations of language policy and planning through the lens of applied linguistics appear in the entries on Russification in the Soviet and Post‐Soviet era as well as on the English‐only movement in the United States. The study of policy and planning also spans national borders with issues such as the role of linguistic human rights in language policy and planning and the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie. Both implicit and explicit language policies can be factors in the demand for teaching certain languages.
Additional language learning, also called foreign language learning or second language learning, is the topic of another cluster of entries. Over the past decades issues of language learning and teaching have grown in significance and complexity as they intersect with both globalization and technology. In these entries readers will see the unique case that language teaching presents in education, where specialist methodologies such as form‐focused instruction, genre‐based language teaching, and corpus linguistics in language teaching have been developed by applied linguists to address educational needs that take into account the nature of language and language learning.
Such language teaching methodological contributions from applied linguistics come in part from applied linguists' study of second language development. Developing a second language is a multifaceted and complex process encompassing a combination of cognitive, psychological, and social factors. Accordingly, researchers investigate a variety of questions from perspectives of cognitive second language acquisition as well as social, dynamic, and complexity theory approaches to second language development. Entries in the former area, such as attention, noticing, and awareness in second language acquisition, explain researchers' investigations of how the human mind processes language during learning in order to organize and learn the new language. The latter includes research that situates human language development within a social interactive process which affects broader aspects of human cognition and personality, as described in chaos/complexity theory for second language acquisition.
In all of the areas outlined above, professionals rely on language assessment and testing to assess learners' success in learning and their ability to perform in the contexts of interest. Specifically, language tests, or assessments, are used to systematically gather language‐related behaviors to make inferences about test takers' language ability and capacity for language use on other occasions. Theory, research, and practice in this area combine relevant concepts in educational measurement with construct theories about what it means to know a language, a question of central importance in applied linguistics. The entries on this topic include assessment of writing, rating oral language, and validation of language assessments.
The profession of translation and interpreting predates applied linguistics, but, like other areas of practice, issues related to this work have been magnified in recent times because of increased language‐contact situations arising in multinational economic and political entities such as the European Union. Communication among people of diverse languages is supported technically by an infrastructure such as the Internet, but the achievement of communicative success is often the result of work by translators and interpreters. High‐quality, often nuanced, communication is expected by participants who are dealing with sophisticated topics with social consequences. Entries in this cluster including cognitive approaches to translation and cultural approaches to translation hint at the complex interface between communication needs, technologies, and translation and interpreting. They intersect with the study of language for specific purposes, which is itself an area of study in applied linguistics.
The study of language for specific purposes has grown over the history of applied linguistics as a result of practices such as language teaching and assessment as well as from investigations of language use. Applied linguists create materials to teach and assess the specific forms and functions of language that are relevant to learners for specific purposes and contexts. Such practices are described in the entry needs analysis and syllabus design for language for specific purposes. An important contribution of applied linguistics research that analyzes actual language use is its conceptualization of language as a system that is probabilistically constrained by contextual parameters such as topic and purpose. The context‐specific examination of vocabulary, lexical phrases, grammar, and discourse is evident in entries including English for business, vocabulary and language for specific purposes, and genre and discourse analysis in language for specific purposes.
Another cluster of entries illustrates applied linguists' approach to World Englishes, the varieties of English that are used internationally by people for whom English may or may not be their native language and who may not live in the traditional centers of English use. The applied linguist's study of actual English use, in contrast to the linguist's study of the idealized native speaker, makes World Englishes and their use a topic of importance. Entries such as intelligibility in World Englishes and English in Asian and European higher education describe areas of research in World Englishes.
Intertwined with nearly all language‐related issues is the intersection of technology and language. As illustrated throughout many of the entries, technology plays a vital role in increasing language contact and solidifying language communities as well as in creating new approaches for language teaching, assessment, translation, and analysis. The entries on technology and language highlight some of the areas where the interface between technology and language‐related problems creates a new layer of issues that might be conceived of as technology studies in applied linguistics. The nature of technology studies constantly evolves with new technologies, needs, uses, and participants, but the entries in this cluster, such as computer‐mediated communication and second language development, natural language processing and language learning, and multimodal discourse analysis, provide a glimpse of the many current and future areas of research.
