into play in many of the entries throughout the Encyclopedia, highlighting the complexity of technology issues in a new generation of applied linguistics.
Research in Applied Linguistics
Research in applied linguistics shines a spotlight on language use. In doing so, applied linguistics research contrasts with research in other fields that lacks insight into and analytic approaches for investigating language as it is used in specific contexts for accomplishing particular goals. The problem‐driven nature of how language is spotlighted serves as the point of cohesion among the diverse set of issues and research approaches in applied linguistics. Because of the theory‐research‐practice connection that forms the basis of applied linguists' work, discussion of research methodology appears throughout the Encyclopedia, but four clusters of entries enhance and highlight the theoretical, analytic, and empirical approaches that applied linguists use to study language‐related problems.
The first cluster describes linguistic analysis for applied problems. The entries illustrate how applied linguists work with pragmatics, grammar, lexis, phonetics, and phonology. These are topics that readers would expect to find in any reference work on linguistics. They have been selected for The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics in keeping with Corder's vision that applied linguists must select from topics in linguistics through applied linguists' eyes. Applied linguists require perspectives that help them to explain and analyze observed language phenomena in the real world. In dealing with pragmatics and grammar in the real world, for example, applied linguists need to distinguish grammatical theories that work in classrooms for explaining learners' language such as systemic functional linguistics, pattern grammar, and construction grammar. Entries also illustrate how applied linguists use these and other perspectives on pragmatics and grammar to describe communication in specific contexts, including grammar in academic writing and pragmatics in lingua franca communication.
Similarly, the entries on lexis reveal the interests of applied linguists in how words are processed and learned as well as the role they play in communication. These entries, such as vocabulary learning strategies, depict the applied linguistic view of vocabulary that is learned and used in particular contexts. Such contexts are needed to account for the vocabulary choices made by language users in real time. In fact, entries such as formulaic language and collocation show readers how linguistic description from an applied linguistic perspective makes it difficult to sustain a division between lexis and grammar. The phonetics and phonology entries also provide examples of areas of concern in applied linguistics such as foreign accent and pronunciation assessment.
Applied linguists are productive in creating and refining methods for analysis of language in use. Some of these are illustrated in the cluster of entries on topics in corpus linguistics, conversation analysis, and critical discourse analysis in addition to entries focusing on particular aspects of language use that are examined from a variety of analytic perspectives. Corpus linguistics is an empirical, and typically quantitative, approach to the study of the language in large collections of texts. Corpus linguists describe the linguistic choices that language users make in constructing their oral and written communication. In contrast to native‐speaker intuition or clinically elicited samples of language, the basis for linguistic generalizations made by corpus linguists is linguistic patterning found in large collections of relevant language samples. The research approach is illustrated in entries such as corpus analysis in forensic linguistics and corpus analysis of business English. These and other entries depict corpus linguistics as a combination of theoretical perspectives emphasizing analysis of language in use with the technical capabilities of storing, searching, and processing large collections of language by computer.
Conversation analysis is an empirical, qualitative approach to the study of language use. Conversation analysts investigate how language users organize naturally occurring social interactions in order to accomplish social actions through talk and bodily conduct. Entries including conversation analysis and classroom interaction, conversation analysis and second language acquisition, and conversation analysis of computer‐mediated interactions show how researchers provide accurate descriptions of how language is used to accomplish social action in specific contexts. Another qualitative approach is critical discourse analysis, an analytic perspective requiring selection of texts for analysis with the aim of demonstrating how the linguistic choices made by authors and speakers create, continue, or attempt to rectify social inequality. The lens for analysis of such texts therefore includes preconceptions about who holds power over whom, in addition to how power might be redistributed, as illustrated in critical analysis of political discourse. Still other qualitative approaches to discourse are illustrated in analysis of gender in interaction and multimodal interaction analysis.
A cluster of entries expands the theoretical and analytical area of interest to culture in its analysis of language use in context. In these entries, readers will see other disciplinary perspectives highlighted or interwoven into the study of language including anthropological linguistics to shed light on concepts such as ethnicity, nation, citizenship education, and intercultural competence as they pertain to language‐related issues. Problems in applied linguistics have an ideological dimension which must at least be acknowledged and at best reckoned with because language use is not neutral. Language ideology affects how researchers choose problems to work on and the perspectives they use in their analysis. As Cook put it, “Applied linguistics is not simply a matter of matching up findings about language with pre‐existing problems but of using findings to explore how the perception of problems might be changed” (Cook, 2003, p. 10). The process of formulating and changing perceptions of problems highlights ideology, as illustrated in the entry language ideology in the discourse of popular culture.
Other entries showcase some of the concepts and practices that have been recruited from social science research methods and repurposed in applied linguistics. Most advanced degree programs preparing students to study language problems in the real world expect students to be familiar with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research. These methods and their foundations as they are used in applied linguistics are illustrated by entries such as quantitative methods, epistemology and ontology, interviews in qualitative research, mixed methods, and case study. Many of the issues in applied linguistics have been explored through lines of research using more than one method.
Reading The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics
The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics was designed to offer readers a sampling of the range of topics that have been investigated within applied linguistics and the approaches used to do so. As such, it serves as a tangible definition of applied linguistics. The detailed presentation of each of the topics in The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics reveals the potential scope of applied linguistics today, which is more comprehensively captured in The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics.
Yet, even in The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, defining the boundaries of the field is a growing challenge with the expansion of language contact, language technologies, and approaches to research. More and more people, either by choice or by necessity, migrate to live in a location where they use an additional language. Such movement creates important issues such as how such transitions can be made in a manner that affords new residents and their children a genuine opportunity to succeed. Even people who remain physically within their first language context are seeing their physical linguistic landscape change as a result of the movement of others. Moreover, the Internet continues to create opportunities for connections across time and space, changing the way people communicate. The language–technology interface is an area of constant evolution as new forms of communication are taken up by individuals who invent new uses for them. Readers will find The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics a good starting point for learning about the way that applied linguists approach the study of language‐related
