Applied Linguistics: A Twenty-First-Century Discipline

This article focuses on the field of applied linguistics as a twenty-first century discipline. A realistic history of the field of applied linguistics would place its origins at around the year 1948 with the publication of the first issue of the journal Language Learning: A Journal of Applied Linguistics. Although there are certainly other possible starting points, particularly from a British perspective, this dating still accords roughly with most discussions of the beginning of applied linguistics. Over the years, the term applied linguistics has been defined and interpreted in a number of different ways, and that exploration is continued in this overview. In the 1950s, the term was commonly meant to reflect the insights of structural and functional linguists that could be applied directly to second language teaching and also in some cases to first language literacy and language arts issues as well. Applied linguistics has many of the markings of an academic discipline.