If The Language of Business Meetings (Cambridge Applied Linguistics) is anything to go by, the answer is “just other applied linguists”. One illustration of this is that in a book of 271 pages the chapter on Teaching and Learning Implications takes up all of 15 pages compared to, for example, 36 pages for Theory and Methodology.

Although my job is part of the world of linguistics, I have no problem with most linguistics books ignoring English teaching and being as unconnected to the real world as they like, but shouldn’t the word “applied” mean that the connection to the real world (in this case me, as a Business English teacher) should be central? Apparently not…

As in all things I’ve written, I’m hardly the first person to point this out. In fact, the book A History of ELT goes on quite a lot about how Applied Linguistics lost its influence at the same time as ELT got its own theories and theorists, it’s only now that I really understood what he was talking about… That being the present case, it is perhaps sensible of them to make their own little world that dribbles into ours only when we decide to borrow from them. As someone who is always quite happy to wait for the theories to be made digestible by someone else, though, it might be a while till I pick up another book with the words Applied Linguistics on the cover. More seriously, there is also the danger that some of this stuff could end up undigested on the pages of textbooks and self-study books, as indeed seems to have happened quite often with corpus-based materials.