Carol A. Chapelle - The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

In all of the areas outlined above, professionals rely on language assessment and testingto assess learners' success in learning and their ability to perform in the contexts of interest. Specifically, language tests, or assessments, are used to systematically gather language‐related behaviors to make inferences about test takers' language ability and capacity for language use on other occasions. Theory, research, and practice in this area combine relevant concepts in educational measurement with construct theories about what it means to know a language, a question of central importance in applied linguistics. The entries on this topic include assessment of writing , rating oral language , and validation of language assessments .

The profession of translation and interpretingpredates applied linguistics, but, like other areas of practice, issues related to this work have been magnified in recent times because of increased language‐contact situations arising in multinational economic and political entities such as the European Union. Communication among people of diverse languages is supported technically by an infrastructure such as the Internet, but the achievement of communicative success is often the result of work by translators and interpreters. High‐quality, often nuanced, communication is expected by participants who are dealing with sophisticated topics with social consequences. Entries in this cluster including cognitive approaches to translation and cultural approaches to translation hint at the complex interface between communication needs, technologies, and translation and interpreting. They intersect with the study of language for specific purposes, which is itself an area of study in applied linguistics.

The study of language for specific purposeshas grown over the history of applied linguistics as a result of practices such as language teaching and assessment as well as from investigations of language use. Applied linguists create materials to teach and assess the specific forms and functions of language that are relevant to learners for specific purposes and contexts. Such practices are described in the entry needs analysis and syllabus design for language for specific purposes . An important contribution of applied linguistics research that analyzes actual language use is its conceptualization of language as a system that is probabilistically constrained by contextual parameters such as topic and purpose. The context‐specific examination of vocabulary, lexical phrases, grammar, and discourse is evident in entries including English for business , vocabulary and language for specific purposes , and genre and discourse analysis in language for specific purposes .

Another cluster of entries illustrates applied linguists' approach to World Englishes, the varieties of English that are used internationally by people for whom English may or may not be their native language and who may not live in the traditional centers of English use. The applied linguist's study of actual English use, in contrast to the linguist's study of the idealized native speaker, makes World Englishes and their use a topic of importance. Entries such as intelligibility in World Englishes and English in Asian and European higher education describe areas of research in World Englishes.

Intertwined with nearly all language‐related issues is the intersection of technology and language. As illustrated throughout many of the entries, technology plays a vital role in increasing language contact and solidifying language communities as well as in creating new approaches for language teaching, assessment, translation, and analysis. The entries on technology and language highlight some of the areas where the interface between technology and language‐related problems creates a new layer of issues that might be conceived of as technology studies in applied linguistics. The nature of technology studies constantly evolves with new technologies, needs, uses, and participants, but the entries in this cluster, such as computer‐mediated communication and second language development , natural language processing and language learning , and multimodal discourse analysis , provide a glimpse of the many current and future areas of research. Computer technology comes into play in many of the entries throughout the Encyclopedia , highlighting the complexity of technology issues in a new generation of applied linguistics.

Research in applied linguistics shines a spotlight on language use. In doing so, applied linguistics research contrasts with research in other fields that lacks insight into and analytic approaches for investigating language as it is used in specific contexts for accomplishing particular goals. The problem‐driven nature of how language is spotlighted serves as the point of cohesion among the diverse set of issues and research approaches in applied linguistics. Because of the theory‐research‐practice connection that forms the basis of applied linguists' work, discussion of research methodology appears throughout the Encyclopedia , but four clusters of entries enhance and highlight the theoretical, analytic, and empirical approaches that applied linguists use to study language‐related problems.

The first cluster describes linguistic analysis for applied problems. The entries illustrate how applied linguists work with pragmatics, grammar, lexis, phonetics, and phonology. These are topics that readers would expect to find in any reference work on linguistics. They have been selected for The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics in keeping with Corder's vision that applied linguists must select from topics in linguistics through applied linguists' eyes. Applied linguists require perspectives that help them to explain and analyze observed language phenomena in the real world. In dealing with pragmatics and grammar in the real world, for example, applied linguists need to distinguish grammatical theories that work in classrooms for explaining learners' language such as systemic functional linguistics , pattern grammar , and construction grammar . Entries also illustrate how applied linguists use these and other perspectives on pragmatics and grammar to describe communication in specific contexts, including grammar in academic writing and pragmatics in lingua franca communication .

Similarly, the entries on lexis reveal the interests of applied linguists in how words are processed and learned as well as the role they play in communication. These entries, such as vocabulary learning strategies , depict the applied linguistic view of vocabulary that is learned and used in particular contexts. Such contexts are needed to account for the vocabulary choices made by language users in real time. In fact, entries such as formulaic language and collocation show readers how linguistic description from an applied linguistic perspective makes it difficult to sustain a division between lexis and grammar. The phonetics and phonology entries also provide examples of areas of concern in applied linguistics such as foreign accent and pronunciation assessment .

Applied linguists are productive in creating and refining methods for analysis of language in use. Some of these are illustrated in the cluster of entries on topics in corpus linguistics, conversation analysis, and critical discourse analysis in addition to entries focusing on particular aspects of language use that are examined from a variety of analytic perspectives. Corpus linguistics is an empirical, and typically quantitative, approach to the study of the language in large collections of texts. Corpus linguists describe the linguistic choices that language users make in constructing their oral and written communication. In contrast to native‐speaker intuition or clinically elicited samples of language, the basis for linguistic generalizations made by corpus linguists is linguistic patterning found in large collections of relevant language samples. The research approach is illustrated in entries such as corpus analysis in forensic linguistics and corpus analysis of business English . These and other entries depict corpus linguistics as a combination of theoretical perspectives emphasizing analysis of language in use with the technical capabilities of storing, searching, and processing large collections of language by computer.