This bibliographic essay will only consider work published after 1986 in the belief that Volume VII of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (ARAL VII, Language in Professional Contexts, 1987) adequately covers earlier material. Professions will be understood in a non-elitist sense which includes service and other occupations )(c.f., Coleman 1989) as well as the more prototypical categories of medicine, law, etc. This essay will also cover those areas of academic discourse that can be reasonably viewed as professional; for example, the publishing of research papers (Myers 1990), the giving of research presentations (Dubois 1987), or the providing of instruction (Briggs, et al. 1990).

Some linguists may well feel that it is inappropriate to devote an entire issue of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics to a movement exclusively within language teaching. It would certainly be inaccurate to see language teaching as simply an application of linguistics, and some parts of this issue of ARAL will necessarily survey material that is not exclusively applied linguistics. Nonetheless, one particular tradition of applied linguistics has been heavily committed to the development of effective second language teaching strategies, and communicative language teaching has been responsive to changes in our approach to language study in its most central tenets and beliefs.

In his keynote address to the 1994 conference of the Southern African Association of Applied Linguistics, Adegbija (1994a) identified three problems faced by applied linguists in the African multilingual context. First, apart from the vibrant work in South Africa, there is very little focus on applied linguistic research in Africa, and what there is tends to focus on the ex-colonial languages rather than the indigenous languages. Second, applied linguists in African countries other than South Africa tend to have very limited research facilities. In some cases, teachers struggle to acquire the most basic resources such as typewriters and stationery. Third, political, social, and economic instability in many parts of Africa seriously undermines the work of applied linguists: A program of work begun in one political era can be summarily cut off in another.

On a basic level, there are two main areas of study within linguistics: language structure and language use. Language practioners as well as theoreticians must be concerned with both areas; that is, they need a full understanding of the structural resources available in a language as well as analyses of what speakers and writers actually do with those resources. Investigations of a representative text corpus—a principled collection of texts stored on computer—provide important insights into both of these domains and open new avenues of inquiry.

During the early years, children's language skills are developing rapidly. For bilingual children, the development of both languages is highly sensitive to environmental input. Thus, capturing bilingualism in the early years poses a great challenge for researchers, especially those interested in examining how bilingualism might relate to other developmental areas, such as self-regulation. Traditionally, child development researchers have operationalized bilingualism as a categorical variable, most often relying on the use of self-reported data. In the present study, we compared various ways of capturing childhood bilingualism and demonstrated how these different measures privileged divergent aspects of children's bilingual experience, as well as how they were differentially related to children's self-regulation skills.

In recent years there have been many claims made for the importance of corpus linguistics to the fields of language description and language teaching. The strong case suggests that without a corpus (or corpora) there is no meaningful work to be done. The weak case is that there are additional descriptive and pedagogic perspectives facilitated by corpus-based work which improve our knowledge of the language and our ability to use it.

This paper demonstrates that historical trauma, healing, and wellbeing require attention in Indigenous language cultivation and revitalization. While historical trauma affects Indigenous peoples across the spectrum of language knowledge and use, little is written about the ways it can be addressed in the teaching, learning, and development—the cultivation—of Indigenous languages. For Indigenous language educators, how we address historical trauma in our language cultivation may be one of the most critical factors affecting our potential to cultivate the wellness we seek, and new generations of speakers of our languages. Drawing on a Diné (Navajo) lens and voices from other Indigenous communities, this article focuses on historical trauma, healing, and wellbeing as important considerations in Indigenous language cultivation and revitalization, to which applied linguists, Indigenous peoples, and others interested in Indigenous language revitalization and Indigenous wellbeing should pay attention. It argues that many of the most appropriate approaches can and will come from within our own Indigenous ways of knowing and healing, and that sharing more work of this kind can strengthen cultivation and revitalization efforts. It provides recommendations for applied linguistics and allied fields, educational, governmental and other resource holders, and Indigenous communities, programs, language cultivators and revitalizers.

This paper attempts to survey language-in-education planning in the 1980s drawing on both formal publications and the more “ephemeral” but often more directky influential documents of government education departments and other authorities. Two problems are immediately evident: first, the influential ephemeral documents are hard to obtain. The second problem in surveying language-in-education planning is symptomatic of language policy-making in general; it is necessary to differentiate between, on the one hand, policy which is little more than uncoordinated good or bad ideas, limited in the range of needs that it seeks to answer, or incidental to policy serving other purposee (e.g., immigration policy) and, on the other hand, systematic, formalized language-in-education planning (cf., Rist 1982). This paper also focuses on only that part of language-in-education policy concerned with second or foreign language teaching and learning; other papers in this volume deal with the areas of literacy and bilingual education.

Mexico's multilingual and multicultural character predates European contact. In its long history, it has generated many communicative challenges as well as interesting language planning efforts to deal with them (Heath 1972). Most recently, official acknowledgments of Mexico's multicultural and multilingual character are raising a series of complex language planning and policy issues even as they are leading to important constitutional and material gains on the part of indigenous Mexicans.

Discourse analysis is widely recognized as one of the most far-reaching, but also one of the least well defined, areas in linguistic. One reason for this is that discourse itself has has often been defined in two different ways: as a unit of language that is larger than the sentence, and as the use of language. Whereas the former definition focuses attention mostly on the linguistic regularities characterizing texts, the latter definition focuses attention mostly on the social and cultural functions underlying ways of speaking. Despite these two different foci, many who analyze discourse combine the two concerns, analyzing how the linguistic regularities found in ways of speaking are constrained not only by the structures and patterns inherent in the language, but also by the social and cultural meanings which frame the production and interpretation of messages.

The goal of this paper is to compare and contrast some discourse features of English and Marathi. The paper is divided into four parts. The introductory sections review the main theoretical approaches for discourse analysis in general and discourse in South Asian languages in particular. Some of these insights are later used in this study. The first sections of part 2 point out the role of sociocultural differences in the discourse patterns of English and Marathi. The second section of part 2 focuses on the differences in the morphological and syntactic patterns which are used as discourse strategies in Marathi and English.

Examining Spanish as a lingua franca (LF) means exploring it within the terrain of its genetic, structural, and historic complexity. Concretely, it means relating processes and outcomes of linguistic change to specific situations of language contact and bilingualism, as well as to the role of Spanish as common vehicle of communication in economic and political contexts. This chapter focuses on recent research in Spanish as a LF, language variation, and contact linguistics. First, it considers situations where multilingual communication problems can appear: for those living in Afro-American settlements; those living in colonized and ethnically diverse territories; those living in border areas or bilingual enclaves; and those involved in transnational migration. Acquisition of Spanish by indigenous people in the context of bilingual intercultural education is also addressed here. Second, it accounts for the linguistic analysis of different forms of Spanish as a LF: spoken as a mother tongue, as a second language, or as hybridized forms. Third, the chapter considers some of the issues related to a theoretical framework for linguistic communication processes involving language contact based on a range of cases, mainly in the Americas. Other issues such as migration, urbanization, and the media are also discussed. This body of research demonstrates that approaching Spanish as a LF leads to a better understanding of the extent to which different historical and contemporary communicative circumstances produce different linguistic results with respect to development of a common medium of communication.

There is a slowly growing number of countries like Australia (Lo Bianco 1987) which have a formally developed national language policy, or like the Netherlands (van Els 1992a) which have fully articulated foreign language teaching policies. Other countries, like New Zealand (Waite 1992) and Finland (Takala 1992), are now attempting to develop such policies. In most countries, however, it is commonly the case that the foreign language policy has grown haphazardly and can be found only implicitly in a complex set of uncoordinated policies and practices. This latter description is true of Israel.

In looking back at the last review of research on the language-science connection to appear in ARAL (van Naerssen and Kaplan 1987), one is struck by the great changes in this relationship that have taken place over the past dozen or so years. On a general level, such changes are perhaps inevitable given the youthfulness of this area as a research domain, but more specifically, they can be traced in large part to two related trends: 1) a shift away from research with direct pedagogical aims and motivations, and 2) the powerful influence of the interdisciplinary field known as social studies of science. Both trends will be recurrent themes of this review.

Dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs, in which students are taught language and academic content in English and a partner language, have dramatically grown in popularity in U.S. schools. Moving beyond the teaching of Spanish and Chinese, DLBE programs are now being offered in less commonly taught languages and attracting new student populations. Based on qualitative research conducted in a New York City public middle school that recently began a Hebrew DLBE program, we found that this program, in its inception and design, challenges traditional definitions of DLBE and offers new understandings about bilingual education for the 21st century. We argue that the policies and guidelines for the provision of DLBE and the scholarship upon which they are based are rooted in notions of linguistic purism that fail to consider or meet the needs of communities enrolling in bilingual education programs today.

This chapter provides a descriptive review of research on language-ineducation policy and planning. We intend no theoretical generalizations but rather a descriptive summary of present research (1990–1993). With various interpretations of language-in-education policy available in the literature, it is first necessary to establish the perspective which guides this review. Ingram (1990), for example, confines language-in-education to second or foreign language teaching and learning although he mentions literacy and bilingual education as topics in language-in-education.

This paper concerns how speech accent accents or reinforces racism in the context of labour migration to the English-speaking Global North. It specifically outlines three functions of accent in racial capitalist systems that require the labour of migrants and their acceptance of their “linguistic deficiencies.” First, accent functions as a labour control mechanism that pushes racially minoritised migrants into low-paying work. Second, as evidenced by the language training of transnational call centre workers, accent also reinforces colonial relations between migrant workers and customers. Last, by acting as a credential that can be purchased for professional success, accent distracts from the institutional racism that truly hinders migrants’ employment opportunities. The piece concludes with some thoughts on how combatting racism in labour migration requires another type of accenting.

Language plays an important role in defining identities in older adulthood. Both self-perception and others' perceptions of older adults are reflected through language used by older and younger adults (see recent texts: de Bot & Makoni, 2005; Harwood, 2007; Hummert & Nussbaum, 2001; Nussbaum & Coupland, 2004). In this review, we outline key theoretical perspectives on the study of communication with older adults and provide evidence supporting these perspectives within the context of age stereotypes, intergenerational communication, cross-cultural communication, and health care encounters. Given that communication is an interactive process, we discuss how older adults use language and communication to respond to age stereotypes and adaptively cope with age-related losses. We also discuss communication interventions aimed at improving interactions between care providers and older adults, and opportunities that technology brings to enhance communication within and across generations.

South America, widely known as a “Spanish-speaking” part of the world, is in fact a region of great linguistic diversity and complexity (see Table 1). The history and hegemony of the colonial languages, Spanish and Portuguese; the elusiveness and elitism of immigrant languages such as German, Italian, Japanese, and English; and the variety and vitality of the indigenous languages have combined to pose continuing challenges to language planners and policy makers. For the colonial languages, which have long enjoyed official status, the pressing language planning issues are those concerning standardization vis-a-vis national and international varieties. Immigrant language concerns maintain a relatively low profile in the policy and planning arena.

Following definitions by Havelock and Huberman (1978) and Nicholls (1983), innovation can be defined as a deliberate effort, perceived as new and intended to bring about improvement. As such, innovation is distinguished from change which is any difference that occurs between Time one and Time two. What is crucial in innovation is that it is change involving human intervention.

Since human agency is involved, innovation can be viewed from many angles: individual, social, organizational, political, technological, and historical. Not surprisingly, much attention has been given to the technological aspects of innovation, among which can be included language pedagogy.