Applied linguistics is a field of study that looks at how linguistics can help understand real-life problems in areas such as psychology, sociology and education. It can be compared with theoretical linguistics, which looks at areas such as morphology, phonology and lexis. Areas of applied linguistics of interest to teachers of languages include language acquisition, corpus studies and sociolinguistics.
For example
Linguistic anthropology is a field of applied linguistics that links analysis of linguistics and socio-cultural issues.
In the classroom
Studies in applied linguistics which inform the ELT classroom include bilingualism, conversation and discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, language assessment and language teaching itself.
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Applied linguistics deals with various language-related issues. It is mainly concerned with addressing problems encountered in nearly all language fields in an attempt to suggest solutions based on careful scientific research. Most of these problems are expected to occur in language teaching and language learning; particularly in ESL and EFL contexts.