An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

4 RESTRICTING THE SCOPE
The Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics
(Allen and Corder 1973–5, Allen and
Davies 1977) did not have as a subtitle: ‘in language teaching’. It was taken for
granted in the 1960s and 1970s that applied linguistics was about language teaching.
That was Pit Corder’s view (Corder 1973) and at the time it mattered. It mattered
because after the Second World War the expansion of language teaching (especially
of English) revealed that many teachers and trainers and supervisors of teachers
lacked knowledge about language. That gap is what applied linguistics was set up to
fill. Over the next fifty years it became more likely that those entering teaching had
already studied aspects of linguistics. They no longer needed post-experience
knowledge of language. Linguistics had become mainstream. That was its success. At
the same time applied linguistics had also been successful. Its dedication to language
teaching had been remarked in other areas of language use, especially institutional
language use (Howatt 1984), leading to an explosion of applied linguistics training,
methodology and, perhaps above all, labelling in those other areas. Thus in the
Anniversary Issue of the ALAA Newsletter (January 2001: No. 44) we read of
developments over the past twenty years which ‘draw on a greater range of disciplines
in our research’ (Lewis 2001: 19): ‘applied linguistics is trying to resolve language-
based problems that people encounter in the real world’ (Grabe 2001: 25); ‘Applied
Linguistics … has undergone a significant broadening of its scope and now
contributes its theoretical perspectives to a range of areas’ (Baynham 2001: 26).
Of course, if the source of applied linguistics (the training, student curricula for
beginners) is generally agreed, there is no reason in principle why applied linguistics
should not take an interest in anything to do with language. That no doubt is the
position taken by a publisher such as Mouton de Gruyter by devoting a forty-five-
page brochure to its applied linguistics list. Applied linguistics, according to this
grouping, encompasses: Language Acquisition (L1 and L2), Psycho/Neuro -
linguistics, Language Teaching, Sociolinguistics, Humor Studies, Pragmatics,
Discourse Analysis/Rhetorics, Text/Processing/Translation, Computational
Linguistics – Machine Translation, Corpus Linguistics, Language Control/
Dialectology.
History and ‘definitions’ 5
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