Crowdsourcing research topics to raise public understanding of applied linguistics

Applied linguistics as a discipline has poor public recognition both among the general public and within universities. While there are many laudable initiatives to promote specific research projects, little attention has been paid to raising public understanding of applied linguistics as a field. Crowdsourcing in the form of an idea competition to elicit research topics in applied linguistics has potential to solve poor public understanding of the field. This paper describes an idea competition run at a Thai university eliciting 27 submissions which can act as a model for further attempts to raise public understanding of applied linguistics.