Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 14

Applied linguistics is a field of inquiry that addresses language‐related problems typically occurring in situations of language contact and technological innovation. In these settings, language problems include, for example, explaining misunderstandings in face‐to‐face oral conversation, making decisions about official languages for the government at a national or regional level, diagnosing language competencies of language learners, and building automated speech recognition systems for businesses. Language contact refers to situations in which people speaking different languages need to communicate to accomplish business, political, or personal goals. Language contact occurs where speakers of minority languages assert their collective rights to their language and culture while using the majority language to achieve some of their goals. Language contact is also a consequence of international mobility, migration, communication, business, and politics, all resulting in unprecedented language contact in face‐to‐face and online communication. Technology plays an important role in all varieties of language‐related problems and also serves applied linguists in their analysis of language itself.

Multifaceted language‐related issues are seldom the concern of applied linguistics exclusively (Davies, 2007). For example, applied linguists study the learning and teaching of languages, but language teaching is one subject area within education. The processes of acquiring an additional language, one topic in applied linguistics, may also be studied by psychologists and by researchers in other fields. Applied linguists study language for specific purposes, but this is also the topic of the field of business and technical communication. Translation and interpreting are considered one area in applied linguistics, but they also have their own professional community. The study of technology and language spans a growing number of disciplines, including applied linguistics. In short, applied linguists study a wide range of issues, each of which may be shared by another discipline.

The identity of applied linguistics is found at the nexus of language‐related, real‐world problems and the analytic approaches taken to investigate them. Whatever the contributions of other fields to language‐related issues, their blind spot is typically the nature of language as it is used in specific contexts for accomplishing particular goals. For applied linguists, the linguistic choices made to accomplish social goals is central, but how do they study such choices?

Can applied linguists simply apply the analytic approaches from linguistics to the various problems they investigate, as the name of the field applied linguistics would suggest? The earliest applied linguists acknowledged that the field drew upon analytic perspectives and knowledge from linguistics. However, unlike linguists, pioneer applied linguist Corder recognized that applied linguists see linguistics “through the eyes of the applied linguist” (1973, p. 7) because applied linguists need theory that is useful for their real‐world practice rather than analytic perspectives with the purely scientific goal of better understanding language. Corder's view of the relationship between linguistics and applied linguistics has been repeatedly affirmed by applied linguists' work over the past decades. For example, it was expanded on by Cook thirty years later:

Linguistic theory and description cannot . . . be deployed directly to solve the problems with which applied linguistics is concerned. One important reason is the nature of the problems themselves. They, too, like models of linguistics, represent certain perspectives on reality. Applied linguistics is not simply a matter of matching up findings about language with pre‐existing problems but of using findings to explore how the perception of problems might be changed. It may be that when problems are reformulated from a different point of view they become more amenable to solution. This changed perception may then, in turn, have implications for linguistics. (Cook, 2003, p. 10)

Attempts to define applied linguistics inevitably maintain a high level of abstraction in order to encompass the varied issues and methods of the field. Simpson defines it as “the academic field which connects knowledge about language to decision making in the real world” (Simpson, 2011, p. 1). Hall, Smith, and Wicaksono (2011) see applied linguistics as a mode of inquiry engaged with real people and issues arising in a political environment where academic perspectives and research alone may or may not be important in conceptualizing problems and finding solutions. They emphasize that problem solvers must genuinely engage with local knowledge and practice in seeking solutions.

More precision in the definition is best achieved by examining the types of language‐related problems that applied linguists have worked on over the past decades and how they do it, as editors of past collections on applied linguistics have noted (Davies & Elder, 2004; Kaplan, 2010). The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics invites readers to undertake such an examination by providing a collection of entries that describe the types of problems applied linguists work on and their analytic approaches. The majority of entries are focused on the problems which are presented and explained along with the relevant constellation of theory, research, and practice. Work across these areas of inquiry draws upon certain analytic approaches that applied linguists have developed, or borrowed and refined, and adapted to meet the needs posed by the problem at hand. Some of the entries emphasize the problems applied linguists investigate and others target research methods used in applied linguistics, but readers will undoubtedly note a confluence of theory, research, and practice within each of the entries. Such boundary crossing is a defining characteristic of applied linguistics.