APPLIED LINGUISTICS

APPLIED LINGUISTICS. The application of LINGUISTICS to the study and improvement of LANGUAGE TEACHING, LANGUAGE LEARNING, LANGUAGE PLANNING, communication between groups, speech therapy and the management of language handicap, systems of communications, translating and interpreting, and lexicography. The bulk of the work of applied linguists to date has related to language teaching and language learning and especially English as a foreign or second language. The term owes its origin to US language-teaching programmes during and after the Second World War, largely based on Leonard Bloomfield's Outline Guide for the Practical Study of Foreign Languages (1942), which was influenced by the early, mainly European, advocates of the Direct Method, in particular Henry Sweet. In 1948, Language Learning: A Quarterly Journal of Applied Linguistics was started at the U. of Michigan by Charles C. Fries, supported among others by Kenneth L. Pike and W. Freeman Twaddell, to disseminate information about work at Fries's English Language Institute (founded 1941). In Britain, a School of Applied Linguistics was established by J. C. Catford at the U. of Edinburgh in 1956, and the Center for Applied Linguistics was set up in Washington, DC, under Charles Ferguson in 1959. Similar institutes have since been set up in various parts of the world. National associations of applied linguists came together in 1964 to form the Association internationale de la linguistique appliquée (AILA), which holds a four-yearly international congress with published proceedings. See HALLIDAY.