25.2250, Review: Applied Linguistics: Chapelle (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-2250. Thu May 22 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.2250, Review: Applied Linguistics:  Chapelle (2013)

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Date: Thu, 22 May 2014 08:07:53
From: Eric A. Anchimbe [anchimbe_eric at yahoo.com]
Subject: The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-430.html

EDITOR: Carol A. Chapelle
TITLE: The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, 10 Volume Set
PUBLISHER: Wiley-Blackwell
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Eric A. Anchimbe, Universität Bayreuth

INTRODUCTION

With over 1000 contributors from more than 40 countries and with 1,100 entries
covering 27 main areas of the field of applied linguistics, “The Encyclopedia
of Applied Linguistics” is certainly the most comprehensive and representative
work in the field available in the market at the moment. Carol A. Chapelle and
her topic area editors must be commended for this extraordinary compilation,
which is not static, but will be updated and reshaped, at least in its online
version, twice every year. The contributions range from 1,000-word expository
descriptions of specific topics to 2,500-word analytical investigations. From
the range of topics covered, the “Encyclopedia” is highly innovative in that
it incorporates both traditional areas of research in applied linguistics and
new areas that have emerged recently, e.g. forensic linguistics, as well as
traditional areas that have been impacted by new technologies (e.g.
cyberpragmatics), language learning and teaching, language policy and
planning, and the mobility of people across the globe which has subsequent
influences on language contact, policy, etc. For Chapelle, the “Encyclopedia”
is “a reference work encompassing the range of research on language-related
problems that arise in the real-world contexts where languages are learned and
used” (p.1xvi) taking into account challenges caused by the expansion in
“language contact, language learning, and language technologies” since “[m]ore
and more people, either by choice or by need, migrate to live in a location
where they need to be able to use an additional language” (p.1xxiv). By
including biographies of people who have shaped the field of applied
linguistics, the “Encyclopedia” also offers an additional perspective to the
history of the field and its current, though constantly expanding, scope.

SUMMARY

Writing a review of this ten-volume set of 6449 pages and 3.5 million words is
intriguing, since it is impossible to be exhaustive. In order to give the
“Encyclopedia” the best possible presentation, I look here at the 27 areas
covered, though with the risk that topics and authorities in these areas may
simply be lumped together. Although there are 27 areas, the “Encyclopedia” is
organised alphabetically -- an organisational choice that makes retrieving
contributions easy but which does not group them together in topic areas.

The first topic area, “Analysis of discourse and interaction,” edited by
Rodney H. Jones, covers both discursive and pragmatic issues in interaction
with focus on gender, identity, narrative, silence, face, politeness,
positioning, implicatures and multimodality, and how they are relevant for
applied linguistics. The topic area “Assessment and testing” edited by Carol
A. Chapelle and Lia Plakans covers topics ranging from types, methods, ethics,
and tools of language assessment to contexts of assessment. Assessment here is
not limited to the classroom but also beyond. Topics grouped under the area
“Bilingual and multilingual education,” edited by Jasone Cenoz and Durk
Gorter, describe multilingual education in various parts of the world
including Africa, the Arab World, Australia, China, Europe, India, Latin
America, and North America. Authorities in this field like Ofelia Garcia, Tove
Skutnabb-Kangas, and Viv Edwards are also profiled here.

“Bilingualism and multilingualism,” also edited by Jasone Cenoz and Durk
Gorter, places itself at the interface of sociolinguistics and applied
linguistics. The contributions seek to establish the relationship between
bilingualism and/or multilingualism and age, cognition, youth language,
language planning and policy, aphasia, language rights, media, and the
internet. The pervasiveness of bilingualism and multilingualism, which are
becoming the norm rather than the exception across the world today, and the
huge space accorded to them in this “Encyclopedia” explains how thoroughly
Chapelle follows through on her aim of opening up new areas in the expanding
field of applied linguistics.

In the topic area “Cognitive second language acquisition,” edited by Marianne
Gullberg and John Williams, theories, practice, and stages in second language
acquisition are discussed along with experts in the field like Rod and Nick
Ellis. Their contribution to this topic area is enormous and can be understood
from the number of times they are cited in this section.

With more than 35 entries, “Conversation analysis” edited by Johannes Wagner
and Kristian Mortensen, features as a major area in applied linguistic
research. Here new methods in, and analytical frameworks within,
conversational analysis are used in investigating of, for instance, cockpit
communication, emergency calls, gender and sexuality, therapy, membership
categories,  and so forth.

As a relatively fresh field with tools provided by new technologies, “Corpus
linguistics,” edited by Michael Stubbs and Dorothea Halbe, has three main
focuses: language-based corpora, types of corpora, and the application of
corpus linguistic methods to various text types and linguistic sub-fields. The
choice of experts profiled here reflects the historical and methodological
evolution of the area: from Randolph Quirk, Geoffrey Leech, Sydney Greenbaum
to Stig Johansson, Henry Kucera, and Douglas Biber.

Even though often treated as incorporating everything having to do with
discourse, the topic area of “Critical discourse analysis,” edited by Angel
Lin, contains only 12 entries, two of them on the experts Norman Fairclough
and Ruth Wodak. Interesting in the contributions here is the inclusion of CDA
of popular culture and interaction in the new media. “Culture and context,”
edited by Karen Risager, covers topics in anthropological linguistics,
sociocultural theory as well as an impressive list of authors dating back to
Edward Sapir and including contemporary authors like Alessandro Duranti, Aneta
Pavlenko, and Alastair Pennycook. Also on communication, “Discourse,” edited
by Sigrid Norris, incorporates types of discourse (e.g. immigrant, mediated,
intercultural) and contains an impressive list of authorities from different
language backgrounds.

As a recent field of investigation within applied linguistics, the “Forensic
linguistics” section edited by Krzysztof Kredens gives a history of the field
before moving on to common topics like courtroom interaction, jury
instructions, police interrogations, prison language, and linguistic human
rights.

In the topic area, “Grammar,” edited by Karin Aijmer, theories of grammar such
as functional grammar and generative grammar as well as other topics that
traditionally do not belong to grammar, for instance, speech acts, semantic
prosody, and language attrition are presented. However, in describing these
other issues from an applied linguistic perspective, the contributors situate
the place of grammar in their realisation. Additionally, various aspects of
discourse grammar, also often treated under text linguistics, take prominence
in this section.

While in “Language for specific purposes,” edited by Thomas A. Upton and Ulla
Connor, attention is paid to language for specific purposes in various parts
of the world (e.g. Asia and Eastern Europe), the bulk of the studies is on how
English is used for specific purposes, for instance, in aviation, nursing,
science and technology, business, tourism, and the maritime domain. Like in
most other topic areas, the choice of profiled authors spans the history of
the field, e.g. from Larry Selinker to Brian Paltridge.

The contributions in the section “Language ideology” edited by Patricia
Friedrich, Aya Matsuda, and Janina Brutt-Griffler, touch on issues such as
linguistic imperialism, linguistic legislation, globalisation, endangerment
and identity. Here, ideology is projected as one of the driving forces behind
standardisation, pedagogy, and translation as well as related concepts of
nativism or nativeness.

With perhaps the highest number of contributions, the topic area “Language
learning and teaching,” edited by Lourdes Ortega, addresses one of the core
topics in applied linguistics. From material design, learning and teaching
practices to non-classroom-based forms of teaching, this area covers a huge
part of applied linguists’ interests. Beyond the traditional issues, a number
of new issues are also discussed, among them, the use of the World Wide Web
for language teaching, online intercultural exchanges, and computer-assisted
language learning -- which all make use of new technologies. Equally
extensively represented in the “Encyclopedia” is the area, “Language policy
and planning,” edited by Joseph Lo Bianco, and also a core area of applied
linguistics. Besides the expected topics, we find a contribution on the
“African Union” by Nkono Kamwangamalu which deals with the Union’s
language-related policies, especially towards African indigenous languages.

The topic area “Lexis,” edited by Brent Wolter and Paul Meara, describes both
lexicological and lexicographic issues with highlights such as the COBUILD
project, lexical semantics, WorldNet and onomastics. In the section on
“Literacy” edited by Eva Lam, besides theories and approaches to literary,
focus is also on the place of literacy in multicultural education,
multilingual classrooms, and virtual environments. Again, the virtual space
continues to emerge as a new platform on which many real-world
language-related problems or issues are resolved or performed.

“Multimodal communication,” edited by Sigrid Norris, places multimodality
within film, globalisation, ritual, software, technology, culture, disability,
and of course language learning and teaching. The impression we get from this
section, as pragmatic literature from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s shows,
is that all forms of communication and interaction are multimodal in one way
or another.

In “Phonetics and phonology,” edited by John Levis and Murray J. Munro, we
find a broad range of topics including frameworks in phonetics and phonology,
the teaching of phonetics and phonology, software in the analysis of sounds,
and issues of pronunciation and accents. The mix of teaching and research in
this area is also found in the authors profiled here: Kenneth Lee Pike, M.A.K.
Halliday, Clifford Prator, Daniel Jones, and A.C. Gimson, among others.

The topics discussed in the area “Pragmatics,” edited by Marta
González-Lloret, belong to the traditional issues within the field. John L.
Austin, John R. Searle, Stephen C. Levinson, and Penelope Brown are all
profiled -- but surprisingly, not Paul Grice, Geoffrey Leech, Dan Sperber or
Deirdre Wilson, who have all made substantial contributions to pragmatics.

The next two sections, “Qualitative methods” (edited by Linda Harklau and
Meryl Siegal) and “Quantitative and mixed methods” (edited by Joan Jamieson
and Kim McDonough) cover the range from qualitative to quantitative methods in
the humanities, social sciences, and even beyond. The inclusion of mixed
methods here illustrates how separating them strictly in research practice is
often difficult.

The section “Social, dynamic, and complexity theory approaches to second
language development,” edited by Amy Snyder Ohta, returns to the acquisition
of a second language but this time focusing particularly on second language
development with topics like internalisation, agency, complexity, inner
speech, gesture and variability in second language acquisition. In “Technology
and language” edited by Thomas Cobb, contributions on computer-based and
computer-mediated language use and analysis together with the relationship
between technology and culture, literacy, translation and vocabulary learning
are investigated. Also prominent here are studies on language corpora, e.g.
spoken corpora and learner corpora. Linguistics, we are led to understand, is
increasingly relying on technology as a methodological and an analytical
companion.

“Translation and interpreting,” edited by Claudia V. Angelelli, Nadja Grbic,
and Brian Baer, presents cognitive approaches to interpreting. The breadth of
this field is once more portrayed in the topics presented here, e.g. medical
translation, Bible translation, media interpreting, official translation, and
liaison interpreting. The last area, “World Englishes,” edited by Aya Matsuda,
Patricia Friedrich, and Janina Brutt-Griffler, brings together research on
varieties of English, especially postcolonial varieties, and pidgins and
creoles. The latter is only minimally investigated with only two of the 27
contributions about pidgins and creoles. Only two authors, Braj and Yamuna
Kachru, are profiled here. The others, I presume, will be included in
subsequent updates of the “Encyclopedia”, which, as mentioned above, will be
updated and expanded upon twice yearly.

EVALUATION

The content of this “Encyclopedia” is just as huge and inexhaustible as the
field of applied linguistics itself. One thing Chapelle and her team deserve
praise for is the expansion of the applied linguistics enterprise and the
smooth accommodation of new and ‘slippery’ topics and fields under its
umbrella, both at the level of research and using research to tackle
real-world problems. That some prominent authors and topics are not included
in the “Encyclopedia” in its current form is only an ephemeral critique
because the work is on-going and will be updated and reshaped two times a
year. These missing authors and topics will eventually be included, since as
Chapelle promises: “We are dedicated to keeping the “Encyclopedia” current,
and to making it available in different formats, to meet the needs of scholars
and students in applied linguistics in addition to those who work with
language-related problems beyond applied linguistics” (p.1xxv).

The mix of biographies and research in the “Encyclopedia” provides readers a
unique chance to match developments in particular sub-topic areas with the
people who kick-started or aided the course of those developments.
Researchers, students, and experts or facilitators in real-world
language-related contexts will find this work to be both a companion and a
guide.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Eric A. Anchimbe teaches English Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth,
Germany. His current research is on offers and offer refusals in postcolonial
communities from a postcolonial pragmatics perspective, and also political
discourse from below in Africa. Among his recent publications are the
monograph 'Language Policy and Identity Construction' (Benjamins, 2013), the
special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics entitled 'Postcolonial Pragmatics'
43(6) (2011, ed. With Dick Janney), 'Language Contact in a Postcolonial
Setting' (ed., De Gruyter, 2012), and 'Postcolonial Linguistic Voices' (ed.
with S.A. Mforteh, De Gruyter, 2011).








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