a fee to AILA, and are responsible for thefinancial side. Any profit they
make is theirs, but losses have to be covered as well. The acceptance rate for
AILA congresses has been rather high traditionally, which may be the result
of both a sense of inclusiveness andfinancial considerations. AILA is an
official NGO having FCR (Formal Consultative Relations) with UNESCO. It
publishes a book series with John Benjamins Publishers and theAILA
Reviewwith the same publisher and until recently was associated with the
journalApplied Linguistics.
Because AILA has no individual fee-paying members and only receives a
nominal fee per participant of the world congresses, thefinancial means, and
therefore the impact on thefield, are extremely limited. Several informants
indicate that it is useful to have a world organization, but wonder what
AILA actually does. It clearly has no formative role to play in any other
international organization.
The majority of the informants in this study, as far as they ventured to
provide a definition of AL, seem to opt for a broad definition of AL that
focuses on real world problems that can be solved with linguistic means. At
the same time most of them seemed happy with the definition I used. Here is
what some of the informants mentioned:
PAUL ANGELIS: “Applied linguistics represents a constellation of theory,
research and practiceflowing from a number of social sciences which
affect and influence language in all of its manifestations.”
GUY COOK: “The boundaries of applied linguistics are very vague. For
example, people working in corpus linguistics and stylistics (two very
important areas for me) may not regard themselves as applied linguists.
Secondly, if I confine myself to‘mainstream’applied linguistics, then I
have not generally been influenced by people and publications from it
much at all! In fact, I generally have a very low opinion of it, especially
SLA which I regard as lacking rigor and depth. The biggest influences on
my work have been from outside‘mainstream’applied linguistics which
I have used to inform my own work. These include: literary theory, play
theory, media studies, semiotics, food politics, translation studies and
the philosophy of biology.”
DURK GORTER: “Applied linguistics consists of all the (sub-)fields that the
AILA conferences cover.”
BERND RÜSSCHOFF: “In AILA, we point out that applied linguistics is an
interdisciplinary field of research and practice dealing with practical
problems of language, language learning, language use and communica-
tion. It differs from linguistics in general mainly with respect to its explicit
orientation towards practical, everyday problems related to language and
communication as well as its focus on robust and informed solutions of
problems identified. To me, it is important to keep in mind that, despite
its origins in language acquisition and language teaching, AL has grown
into afield which is concerned with any aspect of language and of how
Defining AL 33