Editorial

Applied Linguistics and Applied Literature in the sense that we would like to use them should result in academic activities that are social in their orientation. Academics are not isolated individuals equipped with scientific tools and working within laboratory like situations. Their close encounter with the real world situations is a fundamental necessity. Reading theories and literary texts in the library is not undertaken for the sake of creating mentalities to judge what lies outside our reading and library. There should, instead, be an interactional process between what we read and what we experience in the world out there that seems to be unruly and messy in nature. This attitude seems to have consequences for us in our academic behaviour. One of them, for instance, should be our attempts to look for non-traditional forms and formations of research and practice. Employing mere quantitative research methods, what we have inherited in the name of ‘science’ from the past, we may end up in failures. ‘Science’ is no longer a sacred institution whose colossal columns are untouchable, especially for us in developing countries that seem to be lagging behind the fast moving states and institutions forming categories of insiders and outsiders for themselves, for instance. There have been so many glossy theories of language and literature that are regarded either as totally obsolete or impractical for many reasons today.