In a retrospective survey, it is helpful to use the wisdom of hindsight to impose neat categories and descriptive labels on the movement of professional ideas. The past is thus made to make much more sense than when it was the present. In terms of language pedagogy, the years surveyed in ARAL I (the late seventies) might be characterized as the era of the functional/notional syllabus. If one is seeking a similar global label to characterize the period since then, one might well speak of the return of methodology

For much of the 20th century, language policy and planning has been essentially overlooked except as an academic enterprise, being of serious interest largely only to a small coterie of specialists scattered thinly around the world. Still, at present, only a handful of universities in the world offers anything more than a random course in language policy/planning or simply subsumes the entire field in a couple of lectures in the introductory course in sociolinguistics. In the last decade of the 20th century, real-world events have thrust language policy and planning into prominence. The collapse of the former Soviet Union and the powerful resurgence of language loyalties in various Eastern European polities, the rapid economic unification of a multilingual Europe, changing global patterns of immigration, and global economic difficulties have coalesced to create new linguistic conditions and focus attention on long existing linguistic inequities. These conditions have brought into serious question the western notion of an idealized identity between nation and national language. This volume of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics has attempted to draw together various emerging perspectives on language policy and planning and to examine emerging circumstances in a selected set of illustrative areas:

Australian federal and state government language policy and planning efforts have had a remarkable effect on Australian educational and non-educational life during the past twenty years. This effort has resulted in strong international recognition of the Australian language policy experience. For example, Romaine, in the introduction to her anthology focusing on the languages of Australia states that “the movement to set up a national language policy is so far unprecedented in the major Anglophone countries” (Romaine 1991:8).

The fields of reading comprehension per se and second language reading comprehension are vast indeed, and an attempt to survey them will, of necessity, be attenuated in a chapter of this size. As a consequence, I will limit my discussion to six areas: 1) general comments concerning areas of interest in reading research and assessment, 2) the adaptation of a suitable first-language reading comprehension model for second-language assessment, 3) the reliance on a top-down model of reading comprehension, 4) the validity of multiple-choice reading comprehension tests, 5) research on behavioral anchoring, and 6) the testing of reading comprehension in a CAT (Computer Adaptive Testing) context.

The effects of deliberately and selectively manipulating instructional conditions are at the heart of instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) research and, ideally, are designed to inform practice. Knowing how an intervention works, by what mechanisms and processes the treatment is beneficial—and for whom—are complex questions. In this piece, we problematize intervention-based research paradigms that do not account for context, individuals and their proactivity, or temporal variation. We highlight several key challenges that remain for ISLA research and propose a more reflexive approach to intervention that attends to these central considerations in implementing study designs.

As the review articles commissioned for this volume clearly indicate, the past two years (1992 and 1993) have been particularly rich ones for scholars concerned with language policy and language planning issues. As I reviewed these contributions, I was struck by the salience of five cross-cutting themes which seemed to underpin many of the articles-and indeed much of the current work by the profession. I propose to identify and comment briefly on each of these themes, and then to conclude by alluding to two relatively neglected areas of potential future concern. The five somewhat interrelated themes include: the role(s) of language policy or planning activities in foreshadowing or marking major world (political) events; the growing concern with ethnic revitalization; the correlates and consequences of continuing migration and mobility; the differential perceptions of the role of the mother tongue in primary education; and the potential contributions of language planning to educational and national development.

This paper specifies characteristics of language as a resource and demonstrates that it is possible from the perspective of economics to make a case for government involvement in foreign language learning and maintenance of skills in the U.S.A. Market solutions based on private incentives to learn and maintain language skills alone fail to provide nationally optimal solutions to international communication needs. What is required is an alternative system which combines market with non-market incentives to foreign language learning and use.

Linguistics, applied or non–, is a flourishing academic enterprise in Korea, when viewed from the quantitative perspective, especially in terms of the number of its practitioners and the scale of its actitvities in recent years. After a cursory sketch of some typological features of Korean discourse (Section 2), I will first present an overview of contrastive studies in Korean and English in recent years (1980–1982) (Section 3), and then I will discuss some aspects of written discourse in contrastive terms, making some suggestion for further research in related areas (Section 4).

Research and development in the assessment of language abilities in the past decade have been concerned both with achieving a better understanding of the nature of language abilities and other factors that affect performance on language tests and with developing methods of assessment that are consistent with the way applied linguists view language use. The way language testers conceptualize language abilities has been strongly influenced by the broadened view of language proficiency as communicative competence that has emerged in applied linguistics. And while this view of language proficiency provides a much richer conceptual basis for characterizing the language abilities to be measured, it has presented language testers with a major challenge in defining these abilities and the interactions among them with sufficient precision to permit their measurement. Language testing researchers have also been influenced by developments in second language acquisition, investigating the effects on test performance of other factors such as background knowledge, cognitive style, native language, ethnicity, and sex. Finally, language testing research and practice have been influenced by advances in psychometrics, in that more sophisticated analytic tools are being used both to unravel the tangled web of language abilities and to assure thhat the measures of these abilities are reliable, valid, efficient, and appropriate for the uses for which they are intended.

The area of bilingualism is essentially interdisciplinary; therefore, it has been studied from linguistic, educational, psychological, and sociological perspective. In defining the term various classificatory, normative, and methological criteria have been used (see, e. g., Beziers and Van Overbeke 1968:112–131; Haugen 1953; Weinerich 1953), and no one defintion of the term is generally accepted. Bloomfield (1933:56) defines bilingualism as “native–like control of two languages” ––a very high goal indeed. For Haugen (1953:6) a bilingual produces “complete and meaningful utterances in other languages.” Weinreich (1953:1) considers bilingualism “the practice of alternately using two languages.”

Contests over human rights as claims or entitlements to state assistance are how a major, if relatively recent, feature of the socio-political processes and institutions, of modern societies (Turner 1993). Within this wider debate about human rights, the subject of minority rights has long been of concern (Dinstein and Tabory 1992, Sigler 1983). A widely held, but not unanimous, view has emerged which argues that minorities have group or collective rights which cannot be reduced to their human rights as individuals. Linguistic and cultural rights are seen by many scholars as two such overlapping dimensions of collective minority rights (de Varennes 1996, Kymlicka 1995a, Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas 1995). In a world of multicultural and multilingual states, so the argument runs, these collective rights can only be guaranteed by the active involvement of states in the implementation of policies which support linguistic and cultural rights, just as in the case of more universally recognized and accepted social and economic rights (Stavenhagen 1990).

This is an exciting time to be surveying the interrelationship between language and politics, both for political and linguistic reasons. The past decade, as everyone knows, has been witness to dramatic changes in the political map of the world, reflected most noticeably in the west in the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, but also, more quietly in some cases, more violently in others, in countries physically and politically as far apart as South Africa and China. Moves toward democracy in many areas of the world coincided with or followed on the end of the Cold War. These moves came about due to a return to democracy of postcolonial states that had become totalitarian and the granting of independence to most of the few remaining colonies. Through such changes we have come to see that “the language of democracy was mobilised against regimes that, in however perverted a way, were speaking the language of Marxism and socialism” (Schwarzmantel 1998:183), colonialism, and other totalitarianisms. Between 1989 and 1994, although later in some countries, the vast majority of newly (re)democratized peoples experienced for the first time in their lives the opportunity to express freely their political voice in democratic general elections, reflecting a move from bullets to ballots that appeared to be a “virtual miracle” (Joseph 1998:3). Since 1994, in many places, the optimism has faded as the “illusory nature of [the new regimes'] democratic institutions and practices” has become evident (Joseph 1998:3). Even in the long–established democracies, a disturbing rise in hate speech leading to violence has served to emphasize that speech can, and often does, provoke action (Owen 1998), while in certain particularly troubled areas, discourse, especially media discourse, has even been linked to genocide (e.g., Lemarchand 1994).

As the previous chapters in this volume have made amply clear, the last few years have seen a considerable increase in work related to our understanding of the roles, forms, and processes of professional communication and of the complex of forces that give rise to those roles, forms, and processes. The reasons for this upsurge of interest are doubtless manifold. Some are related to administrators' felt needs to keep “channels of communication open” in the face of exponential information growth and the increasing bureaucratlzation of many professions. One consequence of this is that lines of research funding are obtainable relatively easily for communication studies in such areas as scientific research, medicine, business, law, and military affairs.

Focused as we are on uncovering how language works, many linguists are less cognizant of how the communicative strategies we employ in our knowledge-gathering activities impact the language users, identities, and communities we connect with and learn from. This autoethnographic essay, offered as a critical, introspective and analytical account by a U.S.-based, African American woman researcher, unfolds across three scenes of embedded ethnographic research in Micronesia and Tanzania—ocean-facing nations separated by a distance of more than 12,000 kilometers. Each scene's storytelling and dialogue—among users of Pohnpeian and Nukuoro in Micronesia, and users of Korean and Swahili in Tanzania—depicts how competing ideas about the value of marginalized languages surface within the talk of the research interview through allusions to socioracial power and linguistic capital. The essay concludes with a discussion of how a shift toward multilingual, multi-person interviewing can expand and deepen the insights of language-focused research.

The conflict between traditional and Western values is the key to understanding official language policies as well as popular attitudes regarding language in the Arab world. Traditional values are associated with the Arabic language and Islam, the two major pillars of Arab nationalism. Western values represent colonialism and oppression on the one hand and modernity and technology on the other. The issues dominating language policy in the period following World War II, during which most Arab countries became independent, are treated by Altoma (1970). Since many of these issues continue to be the subject of discussion, I will limit my coverage to the literature which appeared since 1970.

The scope of this paper is limited to an overview of mutilingualism in the U.S. from 1980 to the present. During this period, discussions of language diversity in the U.S. have been largely dominated by an effort to exert the hegemony of English. This effort has been brought on by changes in the demographic makeup of the U.S. population and supported by a commonly held belief that the economic strength of the U.S. in the international sphere is declining. A dramatic increase in the number of immigrants from Central and South America and the Pacific Rim, coupled with increasing economic competition from industrialized European and Asian nations, has resulted in widespread support for the exclusive use of English in the U.S. This emphasis on English is seen as a way to minimize the threat of the “foreign” influences that are believed to be undermining both the internal unity of the U.S., and its economic world dominance. Whereas nativism is nothing new in the U.S., its current intensity has been fueled by global aspects of migration and economic trade.

Over the past ten to fifteen years, the discipline of lexicography has changed almost beyond recognition. This change is due to the technological revolution which has computerized the lexicographers' working environment to a very high degree and which has permitted a veritable quantum leap in the amount and variety of resources that can be brought to bear on the lexicographical process. The most important of these resources are computerized corpora of real, mostly written, but now increasingly also spoken, running text. When the first entirely corpus-based dictionary—COBUILD1—came out in 1987, it was on the basis of a corpus of around 20 million words of connected text. Now all major British dictionary publishers use corpora of at least one hundred million words of text. Harrap/Chambers, Longman, and Oxford University Press have built the 100 million word British National Corpus (BNC), HarperCollins has the 200 million-plus word Cobuild Bank of English (BoE), and Cambridge University Press has compiled the 100 million word Cambridge Language Survey corpus (CLS).

Positionality statements have increasingly become the norm in many strands of social science research, including applied linguistics. With reference to current research, theory, and the author’s own work, this paper reviews some of the promises and perils of such statements, including their performativity and lack of reflexivity. The author concludes by arguing that positionality statements need to offer both more and less, to be better targeted, and be more effectively and widely utilized within the field of applied linguistics.