Applied Linguistics: A Pragmatic Discipline, a Generic Discipline?

It is some 25 years since the first issue of Applied Linguistics, and so it is perhaps timely that this issue brings together a wide-ranging set of papers, each from a quite distinct area of applied linguistics. I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to them, which I do by attempting to reflect on what the papers say to us about the nature and internal cohesion of applied linguistics today. As has often been pointed out (e.g. Davies 1999) up to the mid-1980s applied linguistics was most closely associated with its educational branch, and particularly with the researched pedagogy of language teaching. Initially more focused on developing principles and practices on the basis of informed linguistic description, in the 1970s it gradually came to include the study of second language acquisition (SLA) as a sub-activity designed to inform the development of a researched pedagogy. Yet by the early 1980s SLA fairly quickly declared itself a distinct area from language pedagogy research, with the principal aim of researching all aspects of second language acquisition as an academic discipline in its own right. For many, however, SLA is still seen as synonymous with an approach to language teaching, and for some both are still thought of as the main matter of applied linguistics. Nonetheless all three have in fact become distinct: SLA dealing with the acquisition of second and subsequent languages outside as well as inside classrooms, and with improving understanding of how learning proceeds, rather than with how pedagogies can work; the researched study of language pedagogy including first as well as second or other languages, and not exclusively concerned with studies of language learning; while the borders of applied linguistics have expanded well beyond those of language teaching or learning, to include for instance forensic linguistics, speech, and language therapy, sign languages, the study of the language of public debates, and work with health professionals on their interactions with clients. This expansion is reflected in the themes of applied linguistic conferences, in the titles of books submitted for applied linguistic book prizes, and in the pages of journals such as this one, leading us to need an account of applied linguistics which is sufficiently broad and generic to accommodate the principled study of language issues in any kind of real-world problem.