This tenth volume of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (ARAL) concerns itself with a survey of applied linguistics broadly, as this series did in volume I and volume V. The changes which have occurred in the field generally over the past decade are impressive; indeed, a volume such as this one would have been quite impossible ten years ago. Some of the topics covered in this volume are ones to which this series has repeatedly returned—e.g., language planning, language-in-education planning, bilingualism; others are unique to this volume—e.g., language and aging, and still others represent sub-fields which have been treated previously but which have expanded significantly in the years since volume I was published—e.g., second-language acquisition, language testing.

Beginning with the framework established by Haugen (1983) as a basis for this review, corpus planning can be defined as those aspects of language planning which are primarily linguistic and hence internal to language. Some of these aspects related to language are: 1) orthographic innovation, including design, harmonization, change of script, and spelling reform; 2) pronunciation; 3) changes in language structure; 4) vocabulary expansion; 5) simplification of registers; 6) style, and 7) the preparation of language material (Bamgbose 1989). Jernudd (1988) provides a more detailed discussion of these linguistic aspects of language planning. Although the creation of these language related materials often requires intense linguistic activity, the focus of this review is not on linguistic description, but rather on historical and sociolinguistic studies which illuminate corpus planning processes. These processes can be divided into two categories: those related to the establishment of norms, and those related to the extension of the linguistic functions of language. In his revised model, Haugen labels the former category, Codification or standardization procedures, and the latter, Elaboration or the functional development of language. These categories form the two major sections for this review.

This essay covers the literature on bilingualism over the last decade with emphasis on those publications issued between 1985 and 1989. Since this essay must be very selective, it concentrates on English language publications. There has been quite a growth in the descriptive literature of different multilingual areas of the world. This literature has been published in many of the major languages. The selection of publications in English somewhat distorts the distrigution of the literature by region and language, especially the growth of multilingualism-related publications in countries like the Soviet Union and East Germany. Access to some of these works, however, can best be obtained through Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts.

Language pathology is a broad term, used to refer to the symptoms of speech and language speech and language disorders, the aetiologies of these disorders, and the methods and results of the disciplines which study them. The major disciplines involved are medicine, psychology, and linguistics (including speech science). It is neither possible nore desirable, in an inter-disciplinary field, to ignore the contribution of other sciences. Here, however, the concentration will be, so far as is feasible, on the distincitve role of linguistics in the investigation of language disorders. The term language disorder is used as a general label for any persistent non-normal linguistic behaivor in children or adults.

In the late 1970s Gillian Cohen surveyed research on the effects of aging on language and concluded that “geriatric psycholinguistics is virtually an unexplored territory” (1979:412). In the decade since she reached this conclusion, psycholinguists, sociolinguists, speech-language pathologists, and cognitive scientists have begun to explore this territory and to map a wide range of age-related changes to language.

This paper attempts to survey language-in-education planning in the 1980s drawing on both formal publications and the more “ephemeral” but often more directky influential documents of government education departments and other authorities. Two problems are immediately evident: first, the influential ephemeral documents are hard to obtain. The second problem in surveying language-in-education planning is symptomatic of language policy-making in general; it is necessary to differentiate between, on the one hand, policy which is little more than uncoordinated good or bad ideas, limited in the range of needs that it seeks to answer, or incidental to policy serving other purposee (e.g., immigration policy) and, on the other hand, systematic, formalized language-in-education planning (cf., Rist 1982). This paper also focuses on only that part of language-in-education policy concerned with second or foreign language teaching and learning; other papers in this volume deal with the areas of literacy and bilingual education.

Before discussing the nature and function of literacy, it is necessary to say something about the diverse perspectives with people view literacy practices across different cultures. This is a more vital and more complicated matter than may initially appear. Theories developed about literacy within different academic disciplines and development campaigns have been built around premises that are essentially contradictory and which conflict with each other. For example, UNESCO's campaign to wipe out world illiteracy (in place since 1965) is based on the assumption that economic progress follows upon a change in an individual from illiterate to literate. Furthermore, UNESCO projected a view that directly correlated illiteracy with poverty, disease, and backwardness (UNESCO 1982). As it considered literacy to be a critical factor in the development of man and society, it claimed literacy as a “fundamental human right” (Coulmas 1984, Bamgbose 1984).

In the past two decades bilingual education has become an educational movement and a field of academic inquiry of remarkable growth throughout the world. At first glance this appears to be the outcome of the increasingly hegemonic role of a few languages like English in the western world and countries economically affiliated to it, Russian in the multilingual republics of the Soviet Union, and Putonghua in the People's Republic of China. But a closer look at the first of these areas—the one better known to us—shows how complex the dynamics of language spread and language change are in diverse sociopolitical contexts.

As H. Douglas Brown pointed out in his review (1980), the field of second language acquisition [SLA] has emerged as its own discipline in the 1980s. A somewhat eclectic discipline, research in SLA involves methodologies drawn from linguistics, sociolinguistics, education, and psychology. Theoretical models are equally diverse (McLaughlin 1987), but in general a distinction is possible between representational and processing approaches (Carroll in press). Representational approaches focus on the nature and organization of second-language knowledge and how this information is represented in the mind of the learner. Processing approaches focus on the integration of perceptual and cognitive Processes with the learner's second-languages knowledge. This distinction is used here for purposes of exposition, although it is recognized that some approaches combine both representational and processing features, as any truly adequate model of second-language learning must.

Language syllabus or curriculum design is a constantly changing and continuously expanding sub-field of applied linguistics, as pointed out by Yalden (1987). In its historical development it has drawn, on the one hand, upon general syllabus design, and on the other hand upon relevant fields in applid linguistics such as: language teaching methodology, second language acquisition research, and language planning and policy making. The interaction with these fields of specialization has enriched the process of curriculum design and made it senstive and responsive to needs on the one hand and to research and evaluation on the other.

As literacy has emerged to become a major issue in the 1980s, and will continue to do so in the 1990s, the only sure claim to be made is that the notion of literacy is extremely complex and fraught with generally accepted “myths,” hidden assumptions, over-generalizations, and simple all-inclusive responses to the challenges presented. This scenario is no less appropriate to the second language learning context than it is to the first language learning context. Thus, any examination of second language literacy requires discussion of both first language and second perspectives. It is naive to assume that the difficulties, complexities, contradictions, and debates in first language literacy do not apply equally to the large majority of second language learning contexts. Accordingly, second language literacy will be discussed in light of first language perspectives on literacy, reading, and writing, expanding these perspectives into second language contexts. (It should be noted that two excellent reviews of reading and writing in a second language appeared in ARAL IX (Carrell 1989a, Hudelson 1989a). This review should be seen as complementary to these two earlier articles.)

The investigation of aspects of the spoken language from a pedagogical perspective in recent years has tended, with a few exceptions, to be indirect and typically subordinate to considerations of other topics such as acquisition processes, cognitive constraints on learning, cross-cultural factors, and many others. At the same time, there has been a broad movement in language teaching away from organizing courses in terms of discrete skills such as speaking or listening and towards more holistic or integrated classroom experiences for learners. There is no reason to suspect that these trends will be reversed in the early 1990s and, with the exception of those specifically involved in remediation, language teachers will be less likely to find themselves being prompted to “teach the spoken language” than to “create learner-centered, acquisition-rich environments” which will have listening and speaking activities as incidental processes rather than as objectives. While acknowledging this trend, I would like to survey, albeit selectively, some of the areas where speaking and listening activities relevant to the classroom have been the subject of recent investigation and evaluate some of the claims concerning what might be beneficial or not. In the three sections which follow, I shall review current thinking on: 1) the spoken language as a formal system, focusing on pronunciation, 2) the spoken language as a medium of information transfer (that is, in its transactional function), and 3) the spoken language as a medium of interpersonal exchange (that is, in its interactional function).

In a sad final chapter of A House at Pooh Corner, Christopher Robin has to desert his friends of the Hundred Aker Wood in order to go to school. The mysterious world of the classroom is just barely alluded to as a vaguely ominous place where it is not possible to do Nothing, the favorite activity of all healthy inhabitants of the wood.

For hundreds of years, language educators have alternated between favoring language teaching approaches which focus on language form and those which emphasize language use or which focus on the message (Celce-Murcia 1979). For the greater part of this past decade, it has been the latter which have been fashionable. As a consequence, language teachers have been discouraged from teaching grammar. In fact, during the 1980s explicit grammer instruction has even been proscribed by certain methodologists (Krashen 1982; 1985, Krashen and Terrell 1983, Prabhu 1987). Although this position has been repeatedly assailed (Higgs and Clifford 1982, Long 1983; 1988, Harley and Swain 1984, Pienemann 1984), the proscribers persist. Only as recently as June 1988, Van Patten concluded that “…research evidence to date does not suggest that a focus on form is either necessary or beneficial to early stage learners’ (1988:243). Undeniable is the fact that research has pointed to a difference in learner performance (e.g., type of errors made) depending on whether there is a focus on form or not (Pica 1983, Spada 1987); still to be resolved, and surely an issue which will motivate much research in the next decade, is the extent to which a focus on form versus on a focus on message affects the rate of target language attainment. Such research will hopefully be conducted in a way which disambiguates “focus on form” (Larsen-Freeman and Long 1988, Beretta 1989).

Any account of the lexcial description of English with reference to second language teaching over the past decade is essentially a review of developments in pedagogical lexicography over the same period. It is not simply that English monolingual dictionaries designed for foreign learners have increased astonishingly in number, variety, and authority throughout this time (McArthur 1989, Zgusta 1989); it is also the case that much recently published lexical analysis with an applied linguistic focus has either had the partial aim of improving existing dictionaries (Herbst 1984, Bolinger 1985) or been a preliminary to the compilation of new ones (Cowie 1981, Sinclair 1985).

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 1980s were dynamic years for applied linguistic researchers and practitioners involved in the integration of language and content instruction. In addition to the publication of five stimulating texts devoted to the subject (Mohan 1986, Cantoni-Harvey 1987, Crandall 1987, Enright and McCloskey 1988, and Brinton, Snow, and Wesche 1989), there was increasing attention at all school levels to curriculum development, materials development, teacher training, evaluation, and assessment, Second and foreign language educators as well educators in the fields of mathematics, science, and social science have become cognizant of the relationship between language development and the acquisition of content-specific knowledge and skills.

During the past decade, since the inception of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, work in the field has been exciting, socially relevant, and expanding. This trend will likely continue throughout the 1990s and into the 21st Century. A variety of factors—attitudinal, demographic, economic, and sociological to mention but a few—will converge and lend urgency to the need for language educators to broaden their work. From a vantage point at the Center for Applied Linguistics, I have been repeatedly amazed during the past several years at the increasing attention focused on language issues—notice, for example, the concern with the workplace literacy crisis, the under-representation of language minority individuals in science and mathematics education and in technical fields; the continuing monolinguality of the American population, and with the credibility of young children as witnesses in sexual abuse trials. A discussion of the importance of language and literacy issues may be found today in such formerly unlikely sources as the newest book by the renowned management consultant Peter Drucker (1989). Indeed, during the past 18 months five major reports have appeared—Science for All Americans (American Association for the Advancement of Science 1989), Everybody Counts (National Research Council 1989), Workforce 2000 (Johnston 1987), Jump Start (Chisman 1989), and Turning Points (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development 1989)—each of which presents and discusses in vivid detail the looming/educational/workplace crisis.