1 Introduction
While linguistics as a scientific discipline has a long tradition, going back to
antiquity with Babylonian, Hindu and Greek traditions, Applied Linguistics
(AL) is fairly young. When and where it started is a matter of debate (Kaplan
2010) and depends on the definition used. There is a long tradition of
research on the history of foreign language teaching (see Kelly (1969) on 25
centuries of language teaching and Howatt (1984) on the history of English
teaching), but much less on AL. It has been argued that AL resulted from
the application of behaviorist principles to language teaching, resulting in the
“army method”in thefirst half of the twentieth century in the United
States. As Thomas (1998) mentions, there is a general feeling that, in parti-
cular, research on Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has a very short his-
tory. In 1988, Rutherford wrote: “Serious research in second-language
acquisition has a relatively short history...L2 acquisition study would be
difficult to trace back more than perhaps fifteen years” (404). Similar
remarks can be found in other introductory books on SLA. Thomas (1998)
refers to this as the ahistoricity of SLA research:“Because L2 theorists con-
sistently ignore the past as discontinuous with the present, no one tries to
investigate what knowledge previous generations may have obtained about
L2 learning or what questions they may have raised”(390). She shows that
there are in fact connections to thinking about how second languages are
learnt that go back to Augustine in the fourth century. Stern (1983) points
out that there must be some relationship between teaching and some, rudi-
mentary as it may be, theory of acquisition:“It is not clear how language
instruction could take place without there existing, minimally, a rudimentary
L2 acquisition theory in this sense”(119). The present book is not going to
fill this gap completely, but it does present at least a description of thefield
at a moment in time that future historians in AL can use as a beacon. At the
same time, the description does not go back much further than the time
span Rutherford mentioned. The history of views on language and the rela-
tion between those views and how languages are learnt and taught is beyond
the scope of this study. The aim of this book is to present the present state
of thefield of AL within a historical context for the decades between 1980
and 2010.