What is applied linguistics?

Abstract

Applied linguistics in one of its manifestations can be defined as that knowledge of language that can be used to influence language performance. Yet it is an ill‐defined and underdefined discipline. Earlier definitions have been of two principal kinds: the ostensive and the expository. These are assessed here. The key to a meaningful definition lies in the dual articulation of applied linguistics: it is an interface between linguistics and practicality. While this interface has traditionally been a human expert, it is suggested here that, following other disciplines, applied linguistics might illuminatingly be viewed as an ‘expert system’where two forms of expertise, value‐free and value‐added, inter‐react in the form of a transdiscipline.

Some polemical issues in Applied Linguistics

“…Students new to AL and perhaps for those students in the Brazilian context who are in the midst of writing up their theses or dissertations for advanced degrees might be perplexed about the uncertainty of what exactly AL entails based on the writings of a number of founding fathers of the field (WIDDOWSON, 2000a;HASAN;PERRET, 1994;JAMES, 1993). But quite surprisingly, a number of younger researchers still harbor doubts about the scope of AL.…”

Book reviews

“…We see that on the one hand it involves all of the sorts of intervention that we associate with FL teaching: explanation, key sentences, dialogues, passages and teachers' demonstrations -mime and tomfoolery. The second role of DEC is as a data base, reminiscent of the knowledge store learners refer to when monitoring, or, more ambitiously, the knowledge base in an expert system (James, 1993). KJ makes passing reference to expertise.…”

Syntactical and Punctuation Errors: An Analysis of Technical Writing of University Students Science College, Taif University, KSA

“…suggested that contrastive analysis had no predictive power and all L2 errors could be predicted. This has led to some like Kellerman and Sharwood (1986) to talk of 'cross-linguistic influence, and Selinker (1983) of language transfer, and James (1990) preferred to use 'transfer analysis. However, no scholars have doubted that the mother tongue has at least some level of influence on the process of learning the target language.…”

“…The learners' prior linguistic knowledge, of one language or many languages, should have its effect on learning the target language. James (1990) explored two potential causes of errors:…”