Applied Linguistics in the Social Sciences and the Indonesian Context

Abstract The field of applied linguistics has developed out of traditional linguistics research with a unifying focus on the relationship between theory and practice. This introductory chapter discusses how the field of applied linguistics has broadened to encompass multidisciplinary research while investigating practical language issues with the goal of addressing “real-world” problems. Researchers in the field now investigate diverse, contemporary topics such as language education, corpus linguistics, second language acquisition, English as a lingua franca, and the intersection of language with culture, gender, media, and other social variables and constructs. This introductory chapter highlights recent contributions to the field by local researchers, and also presents how the sections in this volume further contribute to the body of applied linguistics knowledge, providing insights from the multilingual, multicultural context of Indonesia. The authors in these sections focus on research areas including the relationship between linguistics and education, corpus linguistics, language use in society and media, and clinical linguistics. This volume provides an opportunity to raise the awareness of non-Western perspectives and research in applied linguistics, enriches understanding in the field, and offers insight into the diverse social and linguistic contexts of Indonesia.