Sociolinguistics and Discourse analysis

The most important area of research for applied linguistics is the field of discourse analysis, and the contributions of discourse analysis made by sociolinguistics are central.

For the last ten years, it has been a major focus of language teaching, curriculum design, language testing, classroom centered research, and the study of language use and language problems in professional contexts.

Other direct contributions from sociolinguistics to aaplied-linguistics research include the fields of conversational analysis and conersational style.

The stress placed on discourse analysis by sociolinguistics, the emphasis given to written discourse analysis by Hallidean functional linguistics, and the emerging interest in language comprehension research in cognitive psychology have all combined to focus applied-linguistics research on problems and issues in the analysis of written discourse.