University of Iowa (2000)
University of Wisconsin at Madison (2002)
Indiana University (2002)
Michigan State University (2004)
University of Maryland at College Park (2008).
Programs outside the United States were not included, for lack of award-
ing a degree with the name“SLA/SLS”. Thomas writes:“The focus here is
on the institutionalization of the PhD in SLA. Due to the convergence of
whatever historical, political, intellectual and institutional factors, to the best
of my knowledge that has so far taken place in the United States”(Thomas
2013: 513).
It is no doubt true that US-style PhD programs are mainly found in the
United States, but similar programs exist in other countries. In the Nether-
lands, PhD programs are generally labeled more broadly, like“linguistics”,
but the PhD awarded is a university one, not one from the Faculty of Arts
or Social Sciences, so using the criteria Thomas applied, no such degrees are
awarded in the Dutch system. Also, the programs listed focus on SLA/SLS,
which does not coincide with programs in AL.“Certainly the long-contested
definition of‘applied linguistics’(Davies and Elder, 2004) is not equivalent to
the definition of‘SLA’, so that labeling a degree or program with one of
these terms over the other carries weight”(Thomas 2013, 513–14). For the
purposes of this book, the overlap between the two terms warrant the
reference to these programs, since these are likely to educate the next gen-
eration of SLA/AL researchers. The fact that the oldest program started only
in 1989 shows that the institutionalization of such programs is of recent date.
The fact that so many programs (and many more related ones) exist and
appear to attract significant numbers of students is a sign of thefirm position
of AL in many university settings. As several of the informants indicated,
the time that AL was secondary to theoretical linguistics and literary studies
seems to have passed, which may have to do with the demise of the Uni-
versal Grammar (UG) school and the growing awareness of the applicability
of AL research to real world problems.
The list of nine SLA programs contains only a few of the universities that
our informants received their degree from: Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
UCLA and Stanford. A quick internet search using“PhD programs in
applied linguistics”as the main search term leads to a list of programs,
including Pennsylvania State University, Iowa State, Columbia, Georgetown,
Memphis, San Francisco State, Northern Arizona State and the University
of Massachusetts to list some of the US-based ones, but also in other countries,
like Carlton (Canada), Lancaster (UK), Münster (Germany) and Groningen (the
Netherlands).
Over the last decades many programs in AL, either independent or as part
of linguistic programs, have been set up, not only in the United States but
also elsewhere. It can be concluded that over these decades, programs in AL
16 The informants