ABSTRACT
Most of the literature discussed in chapters 3 to 6 was written by people working in applied linguistics or sociolinguistics despite the fact that many researchers in both those disciplines have real reservations about the limitations of their fields of inquiry for doing present-day studies of language diversity in education. The reasons for this ambivalence are evident in the short histories of both these disciplines, when those histories are set alongside the review of social science theory presented in chapter 1. In spite of their quite recent introduction, neither applied linguistics nor sociolinguistics has been much affected by contemporary developments in the philosophy of social research, especially by the critical realism that lies behind the above quote from Roy Bhaskar.
