AILA Review - Volume 26, Issue 1, 2013

After a very broad description of what language policy and planning is about this paper presents an overview of some of the current preoccupations of researchers focusing on language policy and planning as one of the blooming fields of applied linguistics. The current issues in language policy and planning research that are dealt with include ‘the history of the field’, ‘language practices in different domains of society’, ‘ideas and beliefs about language’, and ‘the practical side of language policy and planning’. The brief sketch of current issues in language policy and planning research is meant to serve as the background for a preliminary discussion of the impact of language policy and planning research on society. That discussion takes the different ‘roles’ of academics working at university departments and doing research on language policy and planning as a starting point.

This article reports on some of the recent projects and individual works in the field of Legal Linguistics as examples of cooperation between Applied Linguistics and law. The article starts by discussing relevant prototypical concepts of Legal Linguistics. Legal Linguistics scrutinizes interactions between human beings in the framework of legal institutions involving language as a means of communication. Focus is upon creating a mutual arena for cooperation between disciplines, including Applied Linguistics. Legal Linguistics is thus seen as an interdisciplinary approach treating problems of relevance to the law from the point of view of non-legal disciplines. Subsequently, the paper presents four domains of study in Legal Linguistics all characterised by offering opportunities for interdisciplinary cooperation: Forensic linguistic evidence analysis, Drafting and intelligibility, Legal interpretation and meaning, and Discourse studies of law.

The nature of diaspora is changing in the 21st century. Yet many of the communication issues remain the same. At the heart of it is multilingual and intercultural communication across time and space. There is much that applied linguists can contribute to the understanding of diaspora in the era of globalization. This article discusses some of the core issues of communication between the diaspora and the homeland, the past and the present, the individual and the community, and the sense of belonging and the ascribed category with a detailed analysis of empirical data collected through linguistic ethnography in the Chinese diaspora in Britain and elsewhere. It also highlights the significance of dynamic multilingualism in everyday communication.

Drawing on a case study of newswriting, this article presents media linguistics as a subdiscipline of applied linguistics (AL), dealing with a distinctive field of language use. Language in the media is characterized by specific environments, functions, and structures. Medialinguistic research, however, tends to overcome disciplinary boundaries. In multidisciplinary collaboration, it accesses a wide range of knowledge generation and transformation methods. In interdisciplinary collaboration, it contributes precise analyses of situated linguistic activity to the development of empirically-grounded communication studies. In transdisciplinary collaboration, it tests these theories against reality and solves practical problems. The article first outlines such a practical problem (Section 1). After explaining key concepts of media lingustics (2), it focuses on the linguistics of newswriting (3) and four related research methods (4). Finally, it discusses how the value media linguistics can add to both theory and practice of language use and the media (5).

Linguistics and Communication Disorders are considered two different disciplines by most students and scholars in both fields as well as by researchers working in other relevant fields such as psychology and education. However, most core disorders, disabilities and delays in communicative ability directly concern language, especially in conjunction with human development from infancy to adulthood, but also as related to the loss of communicative skills in the aging brain. Linguistics thus emerges as a major source of scientific insights and practical applications for the field of communication disorders. While it is obviously impossible to account for the diverse and sometimes contradictory views of linguistics in a single paper, we nonetheless focus on the contribution of novel linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to the current conceptualization of communication disorders from different perspectives. We first discuss the nature of evidence and research methods in the two disciplines, with the current usage-based and typological approaches to corpus linguistics as a case in point. Consequently, we discuss the interface of linguistics and communication disorders through four contexts which are considered infelicitous to language acquisition and processing. These are, as follows: (i) hearing loss, (ii) language impairment and dyslexia, (iii) growing up in a low socio-economic environment, and (iv) situations of bilingualism.