Languages at the crossroads training, accreditation and context of use

The present volume, Languages at the Crossroads: Training, Accreditation and Context of Use, results from the 35th edition of the International Conference of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics (Universidad de Jaén, 4th to 6th of May, 2017). This book reflects the strong commitment of this association with the teaching of languages, adapted to the new times, and particularly, with the teaching community. As a consequence of such commitment, AESLA has been stimulating and promoting research within the field of Applied Linguistics in all its manifestations. There is no doubt that its significant antecedents endow this book with scientific rigour, since in the light of the results obtained up to this moment, the researchers who have contributed to this volume have reflected and formulated new methodological proposals in different scientific encounters.
Its title, Languages at the Crossroads, accurately describes the present situation, which is characerized by new challenges and different
crossing commitments which, without any doubt, come together in an only common interest: the study of language with applied purposes.
The different chapters are circumscribed to different disciplines, which coincide with the sections of the volume, namely, 1) Learning and Acquisition; 2) Language Teaching and Curricular Design; 3) Language for Specific Purposes; 4) Language Psychology, Childhood Language and Psycholinguistics; 5) Sociolinguistics; 6) Discourse Analysis; 7) Corpus Linguistics, Computacional Linguistics and Linguistic Engineering; 8) Lexicology and Lexicography; and 9) Translation and Interpretation.
All in all, this volume contains 21 chapters dealing with languages such as English, Spanish, French, Romanian, or Basque as native and/or foreign languages. The topics covered range from the acquisition of pragmatic or grammatical aspects to medical or literary translation, including affective learning, or political, promotional and computer-mediated discourses, among many other research interests.
Finally, to put it in a nutshell, this book intends to offer a sample of the huge amount of work that is going on in the field of Applied Linguistics, a good example of the commitment with knowledge transfer in general. It implies, likewise, a demonstration that research continues its constant search for innovation, for new applications and orientations in different areas, namely, foreign language teaching and learning, cognitive, corpus and clinical linguistics, as well as applications to sociolinguistics, translation, and lexicography, among other