www.0.1A map is a representation, an abstraction, ‘a surface that can be dealt with’.
It is the product of an exacting rationality, and it furthers the conquest of system-making over the melange of the everyday.
(Ralph Cintron, Angels’ Town: Chero ways, gang life, and rhetorics of the everyday)
This book presents the complex and shifting field of applied linguistics as ‘a surface that can be dealt with’. Scholars and practitioners in the field are concerned with the language-related needs of individuals and groups in ‘the melange of the everyday’, all the way from foreign language learning to literacy skills, from translation to trademark disputes, from the protection of endangered languages to the detection of dyslexia. The map we provide here systematically plots the landscapes of applied linguistics at the opening of the second decade of the twenty-first century. It’s a time of unparalleled changes, including unprecedented flows of people, goods and services across linguistic and national boundaries, the increased interconnectedness of global capital and economic systems, and a staggering array of new and ever faster forms of digital technology. These technologies have direct relevance for identifying, and attempting to resolve, the language needs faced by language users (and applied linguists), and they feature prominently in all chapters of the book. Indeed, just as we get directions now from GPS systems and online maps, this book is part of a broader online applied linguistics project anchored in its companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/hall/.
We have written the book to be a map of current knowledge and contemporary practices in the field, as well as a guide to this dynamic world for practitioners and students – current and future applied linguists. It goes without saying that this book is not the only map. We have also tried to encourage and envision maps that our students and readers will (re)create as they read the book. Mapmakers Maribel Casas-Cortes and Sebastian Cobarrubios comment that ‘to make maps is to organize oneself, to generate new connections and to be able to transform the material and immaterial conditions in which we are immersed. It isn’t the territory but it definitely produces territory’ (Casas-Cortes and Cobarrubios, 2008, p. 62). In this sense, we regard readers as cartographers who will use the individual chapters, activities and discussions with instructors and classmates on- and offline to begin or continue, as the case may be, to create their maps of applied linguistics. Because maps are ongoing projects, we’ve provided recommendations for further readings in each area.
There are many reasons for the mapping metaphor. Here are a few of the most compelling. First, maps can be read from any starting point. Although they can be made and read using dominant orientations (North as top of the world), maps are also technologies for expressing other orientations (e.g. Figures 1.6 and 1.7 on p. 20). This map in book form assumes certain features that will be familiar to our audience of highly practised readers: the left-to-right and top-to-bottom convention for presenting written text; the distribution of knowledge in separate chapters and thematically related parts (Parts A, B and C); a glossary of specialized vocabulary; an index; etc. A common feature of textbooks is that the chapters are written to be read in a rigid sequence, from first to last. This book is like a map in that you can find your way around from whichever chapter you choose as a starting point. We do, however, recommend beginning at Chapter 1, because this is where we introduce some basic concepts and outline our vision of the scope and essential ingredients of the field, all of which inform the rest of the book. Otherwise, you can wander around between specific points of departure and arrival, depending on your own interests. This feature is further enhanced on the companion website.
Like the dictionaries we discuss in Chapter 10, textbooks and maps are often regarded as authoritative texts. Although they are perceived as ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’ and free from ideological bias, they are in fact conceived by human authors and so necessarily, although not always explicitly, convey the theoretical or ideological stances of their authors. As Baghat and Mogel (2008, p. 6) write, ‘all maps have an inherent politics that often lies hidden beneath an “objective” surface’. Karrow (2007, p. 13) adds, ‘Maps depict the physical characteristics and spatial organization of our planet. But the content of maps is also determined by, and expresses, the culture, historical circumstances, and ideas and interests of mapmakers and map users’. We try to be alert to the implicit theories, ideas and interests of the linguists and applied linguists we mention in this book, as well as to our own. We ask you to evaluate our success in this endeavour as you read.
Maps are intimately connected with the notion of guiding. Tourist guides often include maps of regions and streets, and interactive maps can guide map readers to their particular areas of interest. We have chosen the subtitle of the book, A guide for students and practitioners, because we are aware of the complexities and diversities of issues that applied linguists will face in their careers. The field has become so broad and at the same time deeply specialized, in the sense that students and professionals usually concentrate their areas of practice in a single, or no more than a few, domain(s). We argue that most language and language-related problems can benefit from the expertise of applied linguists with different disciplinary orientations, knowledge and tools. The answers to the most vexing problems will be generated, we think, through collaboration between practitioners from different sub-fields. We hope that this guide will be of service in this enterprise.
How Is The Book Organized?
The book contains twelve chapters organized into three parts, together with introductory and closing chapters at either end, to set the scene and point to the future, respectively. We introduce some of the fundamental themes, tools and participants of applied linguistics in Part A, before moving on to the different specialist areas in Parts B and C. Part A starts out with Chapter 2, ‘Language varieties’, in which we consider the fundamental but seldom fully appreciated fact that all language is fluid and dynamic, constantly morphing through time and space, across speakers and situations. Chapter 3, ‘Key populations’, presents the people behind the discourse: the centrally important ‘clients’ with whom applied linguistics engages. The next two chapters focus on language in its social contexts, with Chapter 4, ‘Discourse analysis’, discussing one of applied linguists’ major tools for understanding interactions between language uses and users, and Chapter 5, ‘Language policy and planning’, assessing our ability to shape language structures and uses through deliberate actions performed on or by their users.
Part B reflects the central role of language as a tool of learning, starting with the culture of written texts in Chapter 6, ‘Literacy’, and then turning to the more specific issue of language-mediated schooling in Chapter 7, ‘Language and education’. The next two chapters explore some of the educational problems and opportunities presented by our multilingual world, with Chapter 8, ‘Bilingual and multilingual education’ examining the practice of schooling in more than one language, and then Chapter 9, ‘Additional language education’ zeroing in on learning and teaching a second or subsequent language (the historical focus of applied linguistics). In Part C we cast our net wider and review a range of more specialized language needs, such as: communication between users of different languages in Chapter 10, ‘Translation’; dictionary-making in Chapter 11, ‘Lexicography’; language and the law in Chapter 12, ‘Forensic linguistics’; and the assessment and treatment of language disorders in Chapter 13, ‘Language pathology’.
Running through the whole book is a series of core issues which we believe are so important to applied linguistics that they can’t be dealt with in a single chapter. These strands are as follows:
Applied Linguistics as critical practice, inherently political;
language at the heart of issues of freedom and inequality;
language as a cognitive, as well as a social, phenomenon;
methodological best practice for applied linguistic research;
IT and corpus-based enquiry as forces in applied linguistics;
Englishes across the world, as resources (and threats).
Language is sometimes confused with, or used as a symbol of, many facets of the human condition, including identity, ethnicity, intelligence, development and opportunity. In fact, language, in and of itself, is none of these things. The six strands reflect our view of language as essentially a functional instrument serving varied mental and social uses for individuals and groups of people in the contemporary world, rather than as an ideal or idealized decontextualized system governed either by rigid social orthodoxies or by immutable cognitive laws. Rather unfashionably in some quarters of the field, we also stress throughout that language must be seen as residing both in communities and in brains/minds simultaneously. We don’t believe that it’s in the interests of our client populations to align ourselves exclusively with intellectual traditions which pit nature against nurture or biology against society.
Like all applied linguists, we are interested in, and excited by, variation in language structures and uses wherever such variation may occur: across and within cultures and communities, political borders, demographic groups, socioeconomic levels, ethnic identities and modalities of use. The three of us represent a mix of professional, academic and personal backgrounds. But as native English-speaking ‘Anglos’ who struggled with ‘foreign’ languages at school and inherited a great deal of cultural baggage around notions of the value of ‘good English’, we are all very driven to understand and challenge the simplistic and harmful monolingual, monolithic views of language competence we have grown up with. To our way of thinking, these views haven’t been adequately resolved in mainstream general linguistics, despite much passionate championing of linguistic equality from most linguistics scholars, whatever their intellectual persuasion.
Briefly, this is who we are and what we bring to this book. Chris is from the north of England, where he studied English language (at Newcastle University) and general linguistics (at the University of York). He did his PhD on the psychology and historical development of word parts across languages at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles), before turning to second language acquisition and applied linguistics more generally during two decades teaching and doing research in Mexico. His main interests and expertise continue to be in the psychology of language and multilingualism, especially at the lexical (word) level, but he’s recently become obsessed with how cognitive work in this area shares many ideas and goals with primarily sociologically oriented work and thinking in the ‘World Englishes’ paradigm.
Patrick hails from the northern US, growing up in Michigan and Maine. In New England he studied history (at Bowdoin College) and TESOL (at the School for International Training). Turning east and south, he then developed an interest in language and literacy in social contexts by teaching elementary school pupils in Kenya and adolescents and young adults in Mexico. He did his PhD in Language, Reading and Culture with a minor in English language and linguistics at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on literacy and biliteracy development in schools and multilingual communities in Mexico and in the US–Mexico borderlands. At the University of Texas at El Paso, he is studying the literacy practices of transnational immigrants.
Rachel is also from the north of England. She studied English Language and Literature at Oxford University, and TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) at the University of London’s Institute of Education. She has spent a lot of time in Asia, leading courses in EFL (English as a foreign language) and teacher training in India and Indonesia, and in cyberspace, including blogging for the BBC World Service on its Learning English website. Rachel runs the MA in TESOL at York St John University, where Chris is now one of her colleagues. She is especially interested in the use of English as a lingua franca in mixed language groups of university students, and in ways of sensitizing students to their own use of language and the effects this has on the achievement of mutual understanding.
We hope that readers will enjoy and learn from the international flavours that we bring to the study of applied linguistics. Chris and Patrick use examples of work they have engaged in together and with colleagues from the Spanish-speaking world, reflecting the mole sauce of rich linguistic diversity of Latin America. Rachel has added South-East Asian examples to the mixture, creating even more of a gado gado flavour for this guide. As the field of applied linguistics grows quickly beyond a traditional focus on English and predominantly English-speaking contexts, we believe knowledge of international contexts and problems is an indispensable ingredient in the successful preparation of future applied linguists. A map on the companion website will show the location of the places we mention in this book. We predict that many readers will find themselves working with learners and other clients from these and other regions, and perhaps studying or working there.
Who is this Book For?
We have written this book for students of applied linguistics and allied disciplines (like TESOL, general linguistics and education) at the advanced undergraduate or master’s degree level. Students from all over the world will be able to gain essential information and a wealth of additional insight from the material presented here, independently of their language background, cultural identities or the educational system they’ve experienced. As we mentioned in the previous section, we have a great deal of experience interacting with students from diverse backgrounds and in diverse world contexts. Applied Linguistics has developed specifically to address different individual and group identities in contact and in conflict, and its practitioners are for that reason inherently international and intercultural in outlook, especially attuned to these different needs.
Apart from students, we also think that practising language professionals will get a great deal out of the book, by appreciating how scholarship from a variety of complementary perspectives may enrich their daily practice, reaffirm their expertise and unique ‘feel’ for language, and create new spaces for professional alliance and dialogue by revealing the extent to which their work faces similar challenges in quite distinct arenas. For example, how many speech therapists have considered that foreign language testers may have struggled with some of the same assessment challenges as they do when they develop tests of productive vs receptive vocabulary knowledge? How many teachers developing activities for reading and writing in a foreign language are aware of the various competencies associated with literacy skills beyond the basic ability to read and spell? How many lexicographers, language teachers, translators, forensic linguists and language planners are aware of their overlapping and rapidly converging needs in the development of online resources such as multilingual corpus databases? These are just a few of the transdisciplinary perspectives and understandings that can be developed from a foundation in applied linguistics.
For general readers who want to learn about the field out of curiosity or because they work with applied linguists (lawyers with forensic linguists, for example), this book ought to provide some enjoyment, as well as considerable enlightenment. We don’t use technical vocabulary where we can avoid it, and when we do it’s for the sake of precision: language is so central in our lives it has its own folk terminology, which is not always appropriate or helpful when we want to make subtle, and often surprising, points about it. But the book is not for the faint-hearted either: we don’t dumb down or trivialize the complexity of language problems in the world. Indeed, we’ll probably leave you with more questions than answers, but we’ve also provided plenty of additional examples on the companion website.
How Can the Book be Used?
If, as we noted above, applied linguists can’t agree on precisely how their field is constituted, then how can we provide a book which represents their collective visions and that targets their collective students in different academic traditions around the globe? Well, the way we’ve structured the book means that, however applied linguistics is construed in your context of study, it can be used to deliver a flexible but coherent synthesis. The book is readily adaptable to most international course structures for use as a required or recommended text. Most universities and colleges operate either a ten-week academic term/quarter/trimester (give or take a couple of weeks), or a fifteen- to sixteen-week semester. The book’s twelve core topics, plus opening and closing chapters, fit comfortably into a semester, with room for other readings or activities if desired. For those on a term/quarter/trimester system, tutors and their students might want to cover most of the nine core chapters in Parts A and B, and then choose to look at only one or two of the four specialized themes of Part C as a class, or cover all the themes in smaller groups and then report to the whole class. Alternatively, for those who wish to have a broader view of applied linguistics without the educational focus (for example those studying the subject as part of a general linguistics or sociology course), Part B could be used only selectively, leaving time for fuller coverage of Part C.
The book will probably be read most profitably in sequence, given the serial nature of all linguistic expression as it streams through time. But the chapters were not originally written in the order they appear here, so they all make a lot of sense on their own, if the dipping-in reader is willing to consistently ignore (or consistently follow up) the cross-referencing to other chapters. The glossary, which is woven into the text as well as listed alphabetically at the end, can serve as a useful alternative or complement to the cross-references.
Complementing the bibliographical references to electronic and print sources that we give throughout the text, and the further reading included at the end of each chapter, we have provided an annotated selection of internet resources on the companion website. Where these are referred to in chapters, we have marked them with the 
icon and a number indicating their place in our online list. So instead of laboriously copying out URLs, you can easily locate the resource you want on our website and, if you’re interested, click the link to go straight to the resource.
Finally, we’ve provided end-of-chapter activities, which might be assigned as homework and followed up in class discussion, written up on an online class discussion board or even submitted for assessment. Some of the end-of-chapter activities may inspire you to think about doing a more structured research project, something that could turn into your final dissertation or thesis (there are more research ideas on the companion website). Alternatively, if you are reading this book as part of a course of self-study, or out of general curiosity, you might want to use the activities as a way of exploring your favourite topics in more detail. Rather than simple comprehension checks, the activities are designed to help you extend your understanding of the key points in each chapter by exploring them in real-life contexts. Some activities involve fieldwork in your own community, and others will lead you to explore new contexts of applied linguistics practice via the internet and other digital technologies. Example responses for many activities can be found (and posted) on the companion website. We hope that you will contribute your thoughts, findings and experiences to the website from wherever in the world you are reading this book; participating in the ongoing process of mapping applied linguistics.
So, whatever format you’re reading in, whatever your particular interests and whatever your current location: selamat datang, bienvenidos, welcome! We invite you to join us on this guided tour of the exciting and rapidly growing field of applied linguistics.