Four areas: Second language acquisition Proficiency language testing The teaching of languages for specific purposes Curriculum

design

The statutes of the international Association of Applied Linguistics AILA says between other things that Applied linguistics has the law: Language learning Language teaching Language use and planning

Cook and Kasper(2005;479) caution They said that applied linguists is not a theory to everything.  Works are connected with language teaching

 Aplied linguistics and language learning/language teaching

Even when they teach, men learn (Seneca, Epistula Morales, 718)

From the forties on, people looked to linguistics to revolutionise language teaching: language classrooms would be labs with scientific data and results; the emphasis would be on speaking, speaking like natives and learning like native speakers do.

In the late 1950s, Noam Chomsky argued that children acquire language more or less automatically by the time they are five and whatever makes it happen can t be duplicated by adults it has nothing to do with situation.

Chomsky s insight did language teachers absolutely no good: they couldn t duplicate genetic processes, and they couldn t hope to reproduce childhood as a model for second-language learning.

Language teaching is badly paid, little recognised, and much maligned. It is left up to native speakers for whom it is stupidly thought to be natural, therefore too easy to be of much value. PhDs want to move on from language teaching to the teaching of literature, and theories of literature

It is not primarily a form of social work with immediate access to individuals in the happenstance of their ongoing social communication, although its findings may of course be helpful to counsellors and teachers faced with these particular problems.

Proceeding eclectically is legitimate because for the applied linguist language problems involve more than language. They involve (some or all of ) these factors :

the educational (including the psychometric or measurement) the social (and its interface with the linguistic, the sociolinguistic) the psychological (and its interface, the psycho-linguistic) the anthropological (for insights on cultural matters)

the political the religious the economic the business the planning and policy aspect and, of course, the linguistic, including the phonetic