ABSTRACT
This first chapter is designed to provide some fixed points on our map of applied linguistics, describing points of departure, characteristic features of the terrain and ways not to go. In the chapter we do three things. First, we outline a broad perspective on human language which knits together its social and cognitive strands. The account, based on ideas from our sister discipline of general linguistics, informs all the other chapters in the book. Second, we identify ten fundamentally misguided ideas in everyday thinking about language, but argue that applied linguists need to acknowledge and respect them, because they are firmly embedded in most people’s world views and determine many of their language-related decisions and practices. In other words, they are part of the territory. Our third and last goal here is to characterize the discipline of applied linguistics as we map it in this book. We won’t try to reach Emerson’s summit of the ‘truth’, of course, because applied linguistics is a mountain range of many truths. We do, however, hope to give an initial flavour of how the discipline is united in its ‘application to affairs’ and show that we all share the ultimate destination of social justice.
