language is used and functions in all walks of professional, institutional
and personal life.”
PAUL MEARA: “Those bits of linguistics which are not directly concerned
with describing language in the abstract.”
ELIZABETH LANZA: “A very broad one. Various theoretical and practical
approaches to the study of language in use. Note that‘applied’linguistics
can also be theoretical!”
ANTONELLA SORACE: “Linguistics related to the real world.”
ANNE BURNS: “For me it’s to do with using in-depth knowledge and theories
of how language works to understand and contribute to a wide range of
cultural and social contexts and behaviours.”
3.6 Conclusion
Summarizing we can say that there are roughly three tendencies in defining
AL. One is that AL is concerned with real world problems and ways to
solve them on the basis of linguistic knowledge and tools. For the repre-
sentatives of this definition, subfields like SLA are not part of AL because
they do not primarily deal with real world problems. The second is that AL
largely overlaps with SLA. For this group of researchers, the real world
problems are not the defining component. AL is seen as a researchfield that
makes use of a variety of research techniques and tools and is primarily
empirical in nature. The third type of definition is the widest one: AL is
everything that has to do with language apart from theoretical linguistics.
My own definition comes closest to the AL = SLA one. It is a fairly lim-
iting definition that refers to a rather close-knit network of researchers that
could be said to form a community of practice: there are special books and
journals, conferences and shared views on methodology. Whether that is in
fact true remains to be proven. Many of my informants are working in the
area of SLA, so what follows is biased in that sense. Many areas that for
representatives of the other perspectives would typically be AL are not, or
are only marginally, covered.
Looking back, it might have been better to give informants my definition
up front and ask them about their views on this. I did this a couple of times
and that seemed to work well. At any rate some of the informants agreed
with me that my definition and the real world problems one are not
mutually exclusive, but rather complementary. Many applied linguists work
on real world problems that have to do with multiple languages. Several of
them mentioned the now highly relevant issue of asylum seekers in many
parts of the world. Language issues and knowledge about how languages can
vary over time and between individuals are very important, in particular
when proficiency in particular languages play a role in the decision to grant
an asylum seeker a permit to live and work in the receiving country or not.
So, though there are three ways to define AL, adhering to one does not
exclude the others. In the remaining chapters different types of data are
34 Defining AL