3Defining AL
What AL actually is, has been discussed intensively over the last decades,
and despite these attempts no consensus has been reached. 1980 marked the
start of the journalApplied Linguisticsand in thefirst issues several applied
linguists presented their views on what AL is and what, accordingly, the
journal should be focused on. Widdowson’s (1980) contribution“Models
andfictions”continues to be influential in discussions on the scope of AL,
and other publications, such as Corder (1973), Brumfit (1980), Grabe (2002),
Davies and Elder (2004) and Kaplan (2010), have dealt with this in considerable
detail. Widdowson took the issue up again in 2000, celebrating 20 years of
the journalApplied Linguisticsand in 2013 in thefirst issue of theEuropean
Journal of Applied Linguistics. In his view,“applied linguistics is concerned with
language problems as experienced in the real world”(2000: 3). But he also
mentions the question of who defines the problems. Not the applied linguist,
who can easily create and solve the problem to his own satisfaction. Widdow-
son points out that there are many signs of AL as an independent discipline
with its own institutions, conferences and journals, but he continues:
In spite of all of this, there is a persistent and pervasive uncertainty
about the name of the enquiry. Its institutional establishment as a name
does not correspond with any very stable definition of just what it is. It
is a phenomenon, one might mischievously suggest, a little like the Holy
Roman Empire: a kind of convenient nominalfiction. This may be no
bad thing, of course: indeed it is perhaps not in spite of, butbecauseof
this uncertainty that applied linguistics hasflourished.
(2000: 3)The concern with real world problems is voiced eloquently by Weideman
(1999):
Applied linguists everywhere should be able to say to the world: here is
assembled a group of dedicated experts, people informed both about the
nature of language and about the acute problems accompanying the
accessibility, acquisition, development, use and loss of language in our