An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In addition to those colleagues and students mentioned in the Acknowledgments
to the first edition, I wish to thank friends in the international language testing
community for their collegiality, colleagues at the Hong Kong Polytechnic
University where I was employed part-time over several years and those in the wider
applied linguistics community who helped shape the 
Handbook of Applied Linguistics
that Cathie Elder and I developed. I am particularly grateful to John Joseph for
sharing his vision of applied linguistics with me and to the ETAL Series authors
for expanding my understanding of applied linguistics. My thanks also to Keith
Mitchell, co-editor of the ETAL Series, and to Sarah Edwards at Edinburgh
University Press, for their constant support.
AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (FIRST EDITION)
I am grateful to those colleagues and students with whom I have worked in the
Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh since the early
1960s. For much of that period Applied Linguistics and Linguistics were together
in one department, allowing me to reflect on the relationship between the two
disciplines, an issue central to the argument of this volume. Towards the end of my
career in Edinburgh I worked for some years in the University of Melbourne, as
Director of the National Language and Literacy Institute of Australia Language
Testing Research Centre. In Melbourne I found again the excitement of the early
years in Edinburgh and I want to thank all those with whom I shared that experience.
At a recent Film Academy awards ceremony, the actor Kim Bassinger accepted her
Oscar award with a very short speech of thanks. All she said was that she wanted to
thank everyone she had ever met in her whole life. After nearly 40 years in applied
linguistics, I think I know what she meant. But I do want to express my particular
gratitude to several colleagues whose views on applied linguistics have influenced
me: Pit Corder, Ron Asher, Henry Widdowson, Chris Brumfit, John Maher, Terry
Quinn and Cathie Elder. But the views expressed in this volume are of course my
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own and for them I take full responsibility. I am grateful to my co-editor of this
Series, Keith Mitchell, for a critical read of my manuscript and I want to thank Jackie
Jones of Edinburgh University Press for her encouragement and support.
Acknowledgements xi
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Abbreviations
AAAL
American Association of Applied Linguistics
AILA
Association de Linguistique Appliquée (International Association
of Applied Linguistics)
ALAA
Applied Linguistics Association of Australia
BAAL
British Association of Applied Linguistics
CIEFL
Central Institute for English and Foreign Languages
CLA
Child Language Acquisition
EFL
English as a Foreign Language
ELF (or ELiF) English as a Lingua Franca
ELTS
English Language Testing System
ESL
English as a Second Language
ESP
English for Specific Purposes
IATEFL
International Association for the Teaching of English as a Foreign
Language
IELTS
International English Language Testing Service
LOTE
Language Other Than English
LSP
Languages for Specific Purposes
SLA(R)
Second Language Acquisition (Research)
TESOL
Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages
TOEFL
Test of English as a Foreign Language
UCH
Unitary Competence Hypothesis
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For Cathie as before
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Edinburgh Textbooks in Applied Linguistics
Titles in the series include:
Teaching Literature in a Second Language
by Brian Parkinson and Helen Reid Thomas
Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching
by Ian McGrath
The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition
by David Block
Language Assessment and Programme Evaluation
by Brian Lynch
Linguistics and the Language of Translation
by Kirsten Malmkjaer
Pragmatic Stylistics
by Elizabeth Black
Language Planning in Education
by Gibson Ferguson
Language and Politics
by John E. Joseph
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Chapter 1
History and ‘definitions’
‘In Anna Karenina and Onegin not a single problem is solved but they satisfy you
completely just because all the problems are correctly presented.’
(Anton Chekov, letter to Alexei Suvorin, 27 October 1888,
in L. Hellman (ed.), 
Selected Letters of Anton Chekov
, 1955,
translated by S. Lederer)