Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics

This dictionary can make life a lot easier for any university student studying linguistics or (foreign) language pedagogy! In a clear pedagogical way it explains as good as every term you might come across in those fields, from more general linguistic terms such as "direct object" and "phoneme", sociolinguistic and pragmatic terms like "politeness" and "gambit", terms used in language pedagogy, for instance, "explicit learning" and "episodic memory" as well as statistical terms like "standard deviation" and "statistical significance". Especially impressive is the way it explains all terms you might encounter when reading empirical studies, terms that you obviously also need if you want to do your own empirical study for a paper or a thesis. It has been a great help to me personally. I am currently writing my M.A. thesis (within the field of foreign language pedagogy), and in this connection I have done an emperical study, which would have been much much harder for me had I not had this dictionary.