One way I can answer this broad question is by
considering the Applied Linguistic issues that currently
interest me, namely how languages interact and what
differences we might expect when the languages
concerned are not related to each other. For example, the
Hong Kong language policy seeks to develop people who
are trilingual in Cantonese, Putonghua and English. What
specific linguistic difficulties will such learners face and
how can we help them overcome them? What does it
mean to be multilingual? Can we describe a multilingual
model from which we could derive useful linguistic benchmarks for the language
classroom?