The Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics

Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics is the first reference of its kind, containing forty original chapters on a broad range of topics in applied linguistics by a diverse group of contributors. Its goal is to provide a comprehensive survey of the current state of the field, the many connections among its various sub-disciplines, and the likely directions of its future development. The Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics addresses a broad audience: applied linguists; educators and other scholars working in language acquisition, language learning, language planning, teaching, and testing; and linguists concerned with applications of their work. Early applied linguistics was predominantly associated with language-teaching. While this relationship continues, the field has long since diversified, becoming increasingly inter-related and multi-disciplinary. The volume addresses the diversity of questions facing applied linguists today: What is the place of applied linguistics in the architecture of the university? Where does applied linguistics fit into the sociology of knowledge? What are the questions that applied linguistics ought to be addressing? What are the dominant paradigms guiding research in the field? What kinds of problems can be solved through the mediation of applied linguistics? What aspects of linguistics can be empirically applied to language-based problems, and what spaces resist such application? What will new students of applied linguistics need to know in the coming years? Systematically encompassing the major areas of applied linguistics-and drawing from a wide range of disciplines such as education, language policy, bi- and multi-lingualism, literacy, language and gender, psycholinguistics/cognition, language and computers, discourse analysis, language and concordinances, ecology of language, pragmatics, translation, psycholinguistics and cognition, and many other fields-the editors and contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics provide a panoramic and comprehensive look at this complex and vigorous field.