The Concept and the Scopes of Applied linguistics from the EFL Perspectives at Qassim University

Abstract

The study aims at summarizing the concept and the scopes of Applied Linguistics as some EFL students may not precisely distinguish them when compared to several theoretical linguistics branches. Such a lack of awareness may influence their future trajectories in deciding the area of investigations and major as post-graduate students since the connection between Applied Linguistics and Linguistics, in general, is very close and has been a debatable issue for a couple of years even among professionals. Various heated discussion has appeared in several workshops during which the participants have focused on the concept of Applied Linguistics as well as on its connection to Linguistics. Accordingly, the controversial debates on the connection between Applied Linguistics and linguistics may not stop easily due to the overlapping areas of investigation and the limitation of scopes that the current study is attempting to identify. Effectively, interview questions were designed and answered by two different groups of participants who were enrolled during the summer term of the academic year 1443 – 1444 officially known as the term (433) at Qassim University to take two different linguistic courses normally taken by graduate students during the regular terms. Therefore, the researcher argues that teaching linguistics requires more practical examples that enable EFL students to be fully aware of the scope and the precise area of investigation of each linguistics field including Applied Linguists. Such awareness is a key factor on which students’ future trajectories of post-graduate studies will be based. Although all study subjects have taken the course of applied linguistics, their responses to the interview questions show some weaknesses in identifying its scopes or exactly determining them, compared to theoretical Linguistics.