Who this book is for
We have written this book primarily for students who have just begun, or who are just about to begin, a university programme in applied linguistics or Teaching English  as a Foreign or Second Language (TEFL/TESL).However, we also hope that it will be of interest to the curious layperson.Applied linguistics is a highly accessible field of  academic study, and its focus on practical problems, questions and issues in which language plays a central role makes it a subject with a potentially very wide  appeal.What kinds of grammar should be taught to students learning a foreign language? Should grammar be taught at all? Do journalists consciously or unconsciously  manipulate language in order to present their readers with biased or distorted views of particular news events? Is there a need for an international linguistic human rights  policy, and if so, how should such a policy be formulated and enforced? Do bilingual schoolchildren have any advantages or disadvantages compared to their  monolingual peers?If you find any of these questions interesting, then we hope you will find this book interesting too.

What this book is for
The aim of this book is to provide you with a concise and accessible introduction to contemporary applied linguistics. Although we will try to give you some sense of the  range of topics and themes covered by applied linguistics, we are primarily interested in telling you about the different kinds of activities and processes that are involved  in doing research in applied linguistics, hence the title of our book. We will use a lot of examples to illustrate what is involved in doing applied linguistics research. We will  also talk about what kinds of activities you are likely to find yourself doing as a student of applied linguistics. In other words, if we were writing about cars instead of  applied linguistics, we would want our book to feel more like a series of introductory or ‘taster’ driving lessons, rather than a detailed description of all the different car manufacturers and models currently on the road.
How to use this book
This book is designed to be read from cover to cover, but you may also find it useful to return to specific chapters or sections of the book later on in your studies, in order  to refresh your memory about a particular topic area, research method or approach to analysis.The book is divided into ten main chapters. The first four chapters provide a general introduction to the field of applied linguistics by explaining what kind of subject it is, reviewing some of the major topics that fall within its  scope, and identifying some of the ways in which applied linguistics has had a practical impact on the wider world. In the next six chapters we focus in more detail on  what is actually involved in doing applied linguistics, hence the title of our book. We begin by focusing on the analysis of qualitative data collected via questionnaires,  interviews and ethnographic observations. We then shift the focus to how applied linguists collect quantitative data for research purposes, and how they analyse these  data using descriptive and inferential statistics. In the last two chapters we look at how and why you might analyse individual texts or large computerised corpora of texts  in order to address applied linguistics research questions. By showing you examples of how people have actually ‘done’ applied linguistics (in Chapters 5–10), we  aim to give you a good idea of what applied linguistics research actually involves,so that you will be in a good position to start doing applied linguistics for yourself on  your degree programme. This will be particularly useful for those of you who are commencing programmes which feature a lot of ‘situated learning’ activities from day  one, and where assignments involve a lot of ‘hands-on’ testing of applied linguistic theories on real data, or with real students in real classrooms. The book concludes by offering some general advice on how you can take your studies further.