The design of applied linguistic interventions to deal with large-scale language problems involves processes that are both intentional and deliberate. Though they range from the highly innovative to the conventional, applied linguistic designs are not necessarily disruptive. The design process is characterized by five phases, with possible…

The concepts of technical feeling, perception, awareness, experience, consciousness and memory play a prominent role in those analogical moments within the technical aspect deriving from the sensitive dimension of our experience. These notions involve subjective technical sensitivities and feelings, belonging to the factual side of the technical…

In this Methods Showcase Article, we illustrate mixed-effects modeling with a multinomial dependent variable as a means of explaining complexities in language. We model data on future-time reference in second language Spanish, which consists of a nominal dependent variable that has three levels, measured over 73 participants. We offer step-by-step…

Applied linguistic designs are too seldom acknowledged for being inspired by care and concern for the language needs of the vulnerable. Yet in them love and compassion, rather than self-interest and malice, are easily identifiable as motivations. Normatively, applied linguistic interventions aiming to alleviate pernicious language difficulties are…

As applied linguists and language testers, we are in the business of "doing language". For many of us, language learning is a lifelong passion, and we invest similar enthusiasm in our language assessment research and testing practices. Language is also the vehicle through which we communicate that enthusiasm to others, sharing our…

In an examination of the social anticipations within the technical, the idea of accessibility is prominent. It is itself a disclosure of the idea of technical interaction, that of technical subjects with technical objects. Accessibility opens the idea of interaction to one of freer access. Technical accessibility implies, on the factual side,…

For many researchers in the social sciences, including those in applied linguistics, the term ethics evokes the bureaucratic process of fulfilling the requirements of an ethics review board (e.g., in the US, an Institutional Review Board, or IRB) as a preliminary step in conducting human subjects research. The expansion of ethics review boards…

A process of abstraction initiates the development of a theory of applied linguistics, beginning with the distinction between technical norm and technical fact. Each applied linguistic intervention has a normative dimension and a factual interface with its users. The second step is to abstract the qualifying technical modality of these artefacts,…

Two issues pertaining to the use of metonymy that plays a central role in Slabakova et al. (2016) are mentioned in the very title of their study--novel metonymy and regular metonymy. In this article I draw attention to some problems with the identification of these as well as with the assumption that these are opposites of each other.

The initial high expectations of applied linguistic work did not endure. Applied linguistics is divided between adopting either a modernist or a postmodernist approach. Despite their relevant critique of modernism, the relativism promoted by postmodernist perspectives is an inadequate response to the challenges of the field. A non-reductionist…

When 'decoloniality' and 'decolonizing' have become words frequently used in conferences and journal publications in our field of Applied Linguistics/Language and Education, as well as on many academics' lips, we start to worry about how they too can be easily co-opted as buzz words emptied of their critical meaning and actional potential and…

Classroom research has long been recommended as a fruitful avenue for English language teaching (ELT) in applied linguistics. Yet recognition of the value of practitioners exploring their own praxis has only recently come to the fore. In this plenary, I focus on Exploratory Practice, a form of 'fully inclusive practitioner research', in which…

How we talk about bilingualism has an effect on how others think about bilingual individuals, and in turn, how "active bilingual learners/users of English" (ABLE) students are assessed and taught in schools. I use a transdisciplinary approach of bridging social semiotics, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive linguistics…

This work provides a chronological and thematic account of empirical studies and position papers on second language (L2) writing scholarship from a complex dynamic systems theory (CDST) perspective. As a theoretical framework, CDST was formally introduced into applied linguistics research by Diane Larsen-Freeman in 1994 (Larsen-Freeman, 1994).…

Analogies of the biotic modality within the technical sphere center on notions of vitality, differentiation of function, organization, adaptation and development. On the norm side, these organic analogies allow us to envision technical norms for the development of applied linguistic artefacts, which underlie the coming to fruition and maturation…