The need for applied linguistics

 Throught history and across the world,people have used language to gossip and chat,flirt and seduce,play games,sing songs,tell stories,pass on information etc.  Language use, then,is in many ways a natural phenomenon beyond conscious control. Yet there are also aspects of language  Use in which we can intervene and about which,consequently there are decisions to be made

 In the contemporary world,with its rapid and radical changes,many of them take on a new significance and seem more pressing than the have in the past  Only by doing so will we be able to set out the options for action and the reasoning behind them,and to debate the alternatives openly and independently,in as ifromed and rational a manera as possible.this is the aim-and the aspiration of applied linguistics,the academic discipline concerned with the relation of knowledge about language to decision making in the real world

 On the basis of this defination,then.we can say that applied linguistics sets out to investigate problems in the world in which language is implicated  So we might give it some substance by consid ering a few concrete examples.  The head teacher of a london scholl is thinking of offterin another foreign language in addition to french

 The options are chinese/the world´s largest frist language),spanish(one of the world´s largest and most widely distributed languages)or the indian language guajarati (the largest second language in the school and local community, and one wich has approximately forty-three million speakers worldwide). Wich of these languages should be taught,and why?

 Since language is implicated in so much of our daily lives,there is clearly a large and open-ended number of quite disparate activites to which applied linguistics is relevant.  So even with these examples,the scope of applied linguistics remains rather vague.to get at a more precise definition of the field we need to be more specific, we need not just to give examples but to classify the kinds of problem we are concerned with in a systematic way, and so map out the scope of our area.

 1- language and education  frist-language education, when a child studies their home language or languages  additional-language education, often divided into second language education, when some one studies their societ´s majority or official language which is not their home language, and foreign language education,when someone stuides the language of another country  2.language,work and law  Workplace communication: the study of how language is used in the workplace,and how it contributes to the nature and power relations of different types of work

 Forensic linguistics: the deployment of linguistic evidence in criminal and other legal investigation  Language,information and effect  Llteraty stylistics:the study of the relationship between linguistic choices and effects in literature  Traslation and interpretation:the formulation of principles underlyin the percerved equivalence between a streh of langua and its translation,and practices of translating written text and interpreting spoken language.

 Linguistc theory and description cannot,then.be deployed directly to solve the problems with applied linguistic is concerned.one important reason is the nature of the problems themselves.they,too,like models of linguistics,represent certain prespectives in reality.applied linguistics is not simply a matter of matching up findings about language with pre- existing problems but of us findings to explore how the preception of problems might be changed

 The methodology of applied linguistics must therefore be complex.it must refer to the finidings and theories of linguistics.  At the same time,it must investigate and take into account the experience and needs of the people involved in the problem itself.  It estabblishes a recipocal relationship between experience and expertise,between professional concerns with language problems and linguistic.