An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

1 History and ‘definitions’
1
2 Doing being applied linguists: the importance of experience
13
3 Language and language practices
41
4 Applied linguistics and language learning/teaching
63
5 Applied linguistics and language use
92
6 The professionalising of applied linguists
115
7 Applied linguistics: no ‘bookish theoric’
133
8 The applied linguistics challenge
149
Glossary
160
Exercises
169
References
180
Index
194
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Series Editors’ Preface
This series of single-author volumes published by Edinburgh University Press takes
a contemporary view of applied linguistics. The intention is to make provision for
the wide range of interests in contemporary applied linguistics which are pro vided
for at the Master’s level.
The expansion of Master’s postgraduate courses in recent years has had two effects:
1. What began almost half a century ago as a wholly cross-disciplinary subject has
found a measure of coherence so that now most training courses in Applied
Linguistics have similar core content.
2. At the same time the range of specialisms has grown, as in any developing
discipline. Training courses (and professional needs) vary in the extent to
which these specialisms are included and taught.
Some volumes in the series will address the first development noted above, while
the others will explore the second. It is hoped that the series as a whole will provide
students beginning postgraduate courses in Applied Linguistics, as well as language
teachers and other professionals wishing to become acquainted with the subject,
with a sufficient introduction for them to develop their own thinking in applied
linguistics and to build further into specialist areas of their own choosing.
The view taken of applied linguistics in the Edinburgh Textbooks in Applied
Linguistics Series is that of a theorising approach to practical experience in the
language professions, notably, but not exclusively, those concerned with language
learning and teaching. It is concerned with the problems, the processes, the mech -
anisms and the purposes of language in use.
Like any other applied discipline, applied linguistics draws on theories from
related disciplines with which it explores the professional experience of its
practitioners and which in turn are themselves illuminated by that experience. This
two-way relationship between theory and practice is what we mean by a theorising
discipline.
The volumes in the series are all premised on this view of Applied Linguistics as
a theorising discipline which is developing its own coherence. At the same time, in
order to present as complete a contemporary view of applied linguistics as possible
other approaches will occasionally be expressed.
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Some twelve years from its first planning meeting, the Edinburgh Textbooks in
Applied Linguistics (ETAL) Series reaches double figures with the publication of this
volume by Alan Davies: 
An Introduction to Applied Linguistics: from practice to theory
.
It is hoped that the range of topics dealt with in these ten volumes (all listed on the
inside cover) offers a helpful idea of the variety of contemporary applied linguistics
concerns both in teaching and in research. The fact that Davies’s volume is a second
edition of the book that introduced the series in 1999 does not deny our claim for
range and variety. Davies’s volume has been brought up to date eight years on and
contains two wholly new chapters (1 and 8). Furthermore, the need for a second
edition attests to the continuing interest in the scholarly pursuit of applied linguistics
and in the ETAL Series.
Alan Davies
W. Keith Mitchell
viii
Series Editors’ Preface
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Preface
A generous review of the First Edition (Davies: 1999) of this book suggested that
I had taken on ‘an impossible task, that of simultaneously addressing both the
concerns of disciplinary theorists and those of students. It would have been best to
limit the audience to those “interested in reviewing arguments about the relationship
between linguistics and applied linguistics. [That being so, the review continues] It
is those with considerable professional and professionalizing experience … who can
best appreciate and critically evaluate this very theory-driven exposition.”’
I am persuaded by this argument and accept that the audience I had – and now
have – in mind is my professional colleagues and graduate students. Indeed, it is that
group we have continued to target in the eight volumes that followed in the Series
after ETAL 1. I list them later in this chapter but point out here that the construct
of each volume was never how to do applied linguistics but rather what it means to
do it. In other words, I took for granted that, 
pace
Alastair Pennycook (2004), serious
applied linguistics is always critical, and therefore whether the area under discussion
is literature, materials, politics, language planning etc., what applied linguistics must
do is to take a critical approach to it, problematise it and in so doing abjure easy
solutions and packaged remedies.
Since 1999 when the first edition of this book was published as the Introduction
to the Series: Edinburgh Textbooks in Applied Linguistics Series, eight further
volumes have appeared. Their publication means that we now have a broader
definition of applied linguistics than was available ten years ago and their influence
can be observed in the revisions to this volume. In particular I have accepted that the
strong distinction I argued for in the first edition, between linguistics-applied and
applied-linguistics, is not as necessary as it may once have been, and in this second
edition I return to the more traditional distinction between (theoretical or general)
linguistics and applied linguistics.
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Acknowledgements