Understanding the Scope of Applied Linguistics in Language Education and Communication

Applied Linguistics

The need for applied linguistics.

We should set out to investigate and understand the facts of language use, to organize and formalize what we know, and to subject our knowledge to rational consideration and critical analysis. This is the aim of applied linguistics, the academic discipline concerned with the relation of knowledge about language to decision making in the real world.

Examples and procedures.

Applied linguistics sets out to investigate problems in the world in which language is implicated. It is these processes of study, reflection, investigation, and action which constitute applied linguistics as an academic discipline.

The scope of applied linguistics.

There is clearly a large and disparate activities to which applied linguistics is relevant. We need to refer specific instances to more general conceptual areas of study.

• Language and education
• First-language education: a child studies their home language or languages.
• Additional-language education: divided into second-language education, studies their society’s majority or official language which is not their home language. And foreign-language education, someone studies the language of another country.
• Clinical linguistics: study and treatment of speech and communication impairments.
• Language testing: assessment and evaluation of language achievement and proficiency, general and specific purposes.

• Language, work, and law
• Workplace communication: study of how language is used in the workplace
• Language planning: the making of decisions.
• Forensic linguistics: the deployment of linguistic evidence in criminal and other legal investigations.

• Language, information, and effect.
• Literary stylistics: relationship between linguistic choices and effects in literature.
• Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA): study of the relationship between linguistic choices and effects in persuasive uses of language.
• Translation and interpretation: formulation of principles underlying the perceived equivalence between a stretch of language and its translation.
• Information design: presentation of written language, including issues relating to typography.
• Lexicography: the planning and compiling of both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries.