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Plenary Speeches
Revised version of the Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award Lecture given at the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference, Boston, USA, 25 March 2012
Until 1989, the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) could have been viewed as an interest group of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA); AAAL met in two designated meeting rooms as a subsection of the LSA conference. In 1991, I was asked to organize the first independent meeting of AAAL in New York City, with the help of Nathalie Bailey as local chair. With the planning committee, we made several important changes that would take effect in the first independent AAAL conference: we would have many more sessions than could be accommodated in two rooms, we would invite colloquia as well as individual papers, and we would go out of our way to recruit international presenters, even though our name was the american Association for Applied Linguistics. I remember that first independent AAAL conference as a resounding success, with 400 enthusiastic participants.
We are presently participating in the twenty-second independent AAAL conference. Since I have been given a podium, I am going to take the opportunity to revisit a fundamental question that we dodged in our planning meetings for the 1991 conference, namely: How will AAAL define itself? What is applied linguistics? We dodged this question back then; we refused to define ourselves. Rather, we chose what I remember as Bernard Spolsky's solution; he said simply something like: 'applied linguistics is what we do'. We would define applied linguistics as what we did, rather than what we said. Now, 22 years later, what exactly is that? I want to frame this personally, so: what is it that I do, what have I done, as an applied linguist?
An outsider might think linguists create theory, and applied linguists apply that theory to practice. But as we know, it is not that simple. Like Spolsky, I will not address this question head on, at least at first. Rather, I would like to begin with an analogy to a related field: the field of medicine.
It is obvious that there is variety in what different kinds of doctors do. My stereotype is that doctors...