MORE ABOUT THE BOOK
The editors, Susan Hunston and David Oakey, write:
Why did we want to write this book? We wanted to provide something useful for people who are planning to do a postgraduate programme in TEFL or Applied Linguistics, or indeed people who have recently started a course like that. We asked ourselves what people in this situation need, and then we chose authors we thought would meet those needs. First, there are some ideas that are very important to students on these courses, so we asked authors to write about those ideas. We tried to keep those ideas ‘small’. For example, psycholinguistics is a very important topic, but it is also a very large one and difficult to write about in a short chapter, so instead Zoltán Dörnyei chose to present just one idea from it — motivation. Inter-cultural communication is another huge topic, but Adrian Holliday writes about one aspect of it — the question of stereotyping.
We chose our topics carefully. We wanted to cover the kind of areas that most TEFL or Applied Linguistics programmes include. We had some ‘teacher based’ ones, on language learning, methodology, and so on. We included some ‘language description’ ones, focusing on grammar and vocabulary. We knew that not all our readers would want to think only about teaching, so we added chapters on translation, and ideology, and forensic linguistics. And because nearly all our readers will eventually do some research themselves we included chapters on methods of research.
Also, we wanted chapters that would show students what it is like to read ‘real’ Applied Linguistics. We didn't ask authors to write as though for a textbook, but to present their research to a professional audience. We asked them to keep it simple where possible, but essentially to write as researchers. This means that our readers get experience of the kind of writing they will need to read (and indeed write themselves) when they are students. We also asked authors to be themselves when they wrote. We didn't want a book where every chapter is similar to every other one. Our authors are writing about their own ideas and their own research. Sometimes they disagree with each other. (Sometimes we disagree with them!) Each author writes in his or her own style. So our readers will get experience of different ways of writing. They will see opinions as well as facts, and they'll get used to working out what a chapter means and how much they agree with it.
Then, we wanted to give readers some help as they tackled each chapter. So we wrote introductions that give a very simple guide to the key ideas and help readers too to think about the way the chapter has been written.
Finally, we knew that most of our readers would appreciate a little help in reading and writing in Applied Linguistics, so we put ‘skills’ as well as ‘concepts’ in the title of the book. We added some chapters that focus exclusively on study skills — how to make sense of what you are reading, how to organise an essay, and how to edit what you have written. We could not cover a whole Study Skills course in a few chapters but we have tried to focus on things we think are particularly important. A unique feature of this part of the book is that it is based on the earlier chapters. All the examples used come from the chapters our authors have written.