Applied linguistics as social science underscores the essential association between language and society and attempts “to make a case for regarding the discipline of applied linguistics as a social science” (1). Although Sealey and Carter are not bringing up the issue for the first time (despite the impression that the book seems to be giving), highlighting and reiterating the social and cultural nature of language in general and applied language studies in particular could be considered the major contribution of the book.

Setting out by introducing key issues in social theory and linguistics, the authors briefly review considerations of language in sociological theory and, from a realist social theoretical standpoint, represent language as an emergent cultural property. To explore issues of social scientific applied linguistics in terms of specific research issues, Sealey and Carter turn to language education as “a research field which involves a significant proportion of the people who are identified as applied linguists” (85). They argue that mainstream variables-based research traditions ignore the social situatedness of language and learning. They contend that even more socially oriented ethnographic studies account inadequately for the complexity of the process of language learning. The authors go on to revisit social categories of age, ethnicity, and class as considered in mainstream sociolinguistics. They also deal with properties and powers of language in the world in their discussions of linguistic autonomy, literacy education, and global and threatened languages. In the concluding chapter, summarizing their social realist approach to research in applied linguistics, Sealey and Carter briefly review their key claims and present a discussion of “why applied linguistic research questions need social theory” (187). Moreover, they touch upon the limits of empirical approaches, the centrality of theory, and the need for a relational view in applied linguistics research, stating that applied linguistics researchers “may feel much better equipped to address the policy-makers' concern with ‘what works’, if the question can be reformulated as ‘what works for whom in what circumstances?’ ” (197).

The book attempts to cross disciplinary boundaries between applied linguistics and sociology. The demanding epistemological discussions presented here would require more in-depth and elaborate consideration than is possible in the limited space of this book. Many of the issues presented in this dense volume of theoretical argumentation are only touched rather than elaborated upon. The social realist view of applied linguistics depicted by the authors, therefore, seems to be far from adoptable by applied linguistics as a guiding disciplinary approach. A further concern about the book is that it almost completely ignores existing socially oriented approaches to language studies, including Critical Applied Linguistics and the relatively vast area known as Critical Discourse Analysis. Nonetheless, the very endeavor of a socially informed approach to applied linguistics is to be appreciated.