This volume provides a wide-ranging overview of the diverse issues in applied linguistics today. The contributors consider the relation of their own areas of enquiry both to professional practice and to the discipline as a whole.

Controversies in Applied Linguistics presents controversies between prominent scholars over issues where they hold very different postions. Five sections contain 33 key articles (reprinted in their entirety) dealing with 9 topics. Each unit is prefaced by an introduction to the controversy in question.

The sections are headed - The Global Spread of English, Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching, Critical Discourse Analysis, Second Language Acquisition and The Nature of Apllied Linguistics.