Applied Linguistics

Applied linguistics is for many scholars a direct extension of theoretical linguistics, with its primary divisions of syntax, semantics, morphology, and phonology. For others, applied linguistics is a field drawing from multiple disciplines: computational linguistics, teacher education, psychology, sociology, and neuroscience. For still others, applied linguistics seeks to resolve issues of power and inequality centered around language. The scholar Alan Davies uses the term linguistics applied in the first case described above. For the second, he uses the term applied linguistics, and for the last, he uses the term critical applied linguistics. In all these cases, research about language, languages, and language users is being used to mediate some type of social problem. For the interculturalist, applied linguistics is a field in and of itself ...