ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the role of linguistic description in applied linguistics and language teaching. It looks at some specific areas of description, namely grammars, dictionaries, and contrastive descriptions, which are both intellectual exercises and products which one can see on a shelf and buy. The use of linguistic terminology in classrooms has itself been the subject of a number of pieces of research, both as a general educational issue and as a language acquisition question about explicit grammar learning. Linguistic research implications have to be filtered through language teaching pedagogical principles and translated into instructional devices, classroom processes and materials which are capable of empirical evaluation. Although it is unstable, learner development is not random; deviations follow recognizable paths, and most second language research is devoted to tracing those patterns. Consequently a major task of applied linguistic description is to capture not only particular languages on paper, but also learner dialects or inter-languages.
