Applied Linguistic Theory and Second/Foreign Language Education
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A P P L I E D L I N G U I S T I C T H E O RY
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APPLIED LINGUISTIC THEORY AND SECOND/FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION
Applied linguistics has been defined as “the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue” (Brumfit, 1995, p. 27)—for example, problems of miscommunication in social life, institutional discourses of courtrooms, classrooms, and hospitals, language policies and testing procedures. In addition, it has been, since its inception, the foundational field of research for second language acquisition and learning. Researchers have made recommendations for language teachers based on their findings; in turn, language educators have drawn on applied linguistic research to illuminate and solve problems they encounter in their practice. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
The name “applied linguistics” was given to the field when the first program of that name was founded at the University of Edinburgh in 1957, leading in the 1970s to the Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics (Allen and Corder, 1973–1977). According to Davies and Elder (2004), it was largely taken for granted in the 1960s and 1970s that applied linguistics was about language teaching and learning. The journal Language Learning: A Journal of Applied Linguistics, published from the University of Michigan in 1948, was the first journal in the world to carry the term “applied linguistics” in its title (Davies, 1999, p. 6). In the subsequent 50 years, the field has experienced an explosion across various disciplines, encompassing, beside language teaching, first and second language acquisition, psycho- and neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse and conversation analysis, text/ processing/translation, computational linguistics, forensic linguistics, corpus linguistics, and language policy and planning. Today, applied linguistics is well represented by its vibrant national and international professional organizations, for example, the International Association for Applied Linguistics (AILA) founded in 1964, the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) established in 1967, the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) N. Van Deusen-Scholl and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 4: Second and Foreign Language Education, 3–15. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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CLAIRE KRAMSCH
founded in 1978—and an increasing number of scholarly journals: Applied Linguistics, the Journal of Applied Linguistics, the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Modern Language Journal among many others. It has become an exciting and capacious field of inquiry that seeks to engage with and reconceptualize various problems in the practice of language acquisition and use. This engagement is somewhat more interdisciplinary than that of other, more specialized fields that also pertain to second/foreign language (SL/FL) education, for example, second language acquisition (SLA) research, educational psychology, teaching methodol
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