Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics

Abstract

I Applied linguistics, even in the restricted sense of linguistics applied to language teaching and learning, has become an often bewildering area of interdisciplinary research, where the novice and the not-so-novice reader are often confronted with a vast array of professional literature that uses technical terms from linguistics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, education, statistics, computer science, and so on. The publication reviewed here was meant to be a compass for traveling through this terminological jungle and, according to the authors, is primarily intended for language teachers and for those taking courses preparing for or related to the language teaching profession. With this audience in mind, I drew up a list of 100-odd technical terms that I regularly encounter in the applied linguistics literature, about half of them directly related to language learning and teaching, the other half being directly relevant and frequently used concepts from theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, educational research, psychological test theory, statistics, and so on.