The prevalence of pedagogy-related research in applied linguistics: extending the debate

Journal article

In this article we respond to the special issue “Definitions for Applied Linguistics”, where the past and future of applied linguistics are discussed, and the place of pedagogy in the field’s scope is debated. In the issue, Hellermann (2015) uses data from 1980-1984 and 2009-2013 to show a shift in the field towards an emerging range of language-related problems, coupled with the declining prominence of pedagogy-related research in the journal. In this paper, we extend Hellerman’s work in order to investigate whether this trend is reflective of other published work in applied linguistics. In our investigation, 336 research papers published in 2015 were analysed from 10 self-identified applied linguistics journals. Data revealed language-pedagogy related studies constituted 32 percent of all empirical research, although this representation was unevenly distributed across the journals. Findings suggest a number of practice-oriented journals now take the lion’s share of pedagogical research, allowing other key applied linguistics journals to focus on a diverse range of non-pedagogy related language problems. Nevertheless, in general, pedagogy remains a key topic in the field.

Authors: Rose, H; McKinley, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: Applied Linguistics
• Volume: 38
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 599–604
• Publication date: 2016-12-07
• Acceptance date: 2016-09-19
• DOI: 10.1093/applin/amw042
• EISSN: 1477-450X
• ISSN: 0142-6001