Resources for Applied Linguistics in Language Education

1. What applied linguistics is

• What is applied linguistics? (2018). Useful when you need a working definition of the field (the centrality of language, relevance to the real world, empirical methods and theory), and want to know why teachers might care: because it helps them teach in a theoretically informed way, and to resist lay theories about language and learning.
• Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching: How are they different? (2020). Useful when you are unsure where applied linguistics ends and language teaching begins, and want to explore the idea that language education is a hybrid field, both inside and outside the borders of applied linguistics. A postscript (2026) asks what AI does to that border.
• What has linguistics ever done for us, really? (2024). Useful when you want a short history of how the purpose of linguistics has shifted with the concerns of each era, from the Neogrammarians to the social turn of the present.

2. Applied linguistics and the teaching profession

• Extending English Language Teaching Theory (2018). Useful when you want to think of language teaching as an interdisciplinary field, which synthesises applied linguistics, the psychology of language learning and general pedagogy, and to see four principles for theorising it.
• Language Education at an Age of Uncertainty (2019). Useful when you want to think about what happens to language education once its old certainties erode, and why this makes teachers’ decisions matter more.
• Tissue rejection in language education (2015). Useful when a method that worked well elsewhere fails in your classroom, and you want to understand why. The post revisits Adrian Holliday’s metaphor and extends it to AI, positive psychology and professional development.
• Thinking about the teaching-research gap (2023). Useful when you want to see the ‘gap’ between teaching and research as two different things: a division of labour that cannot be avoided, and a deskilling of teachers that can, and should, be challenged.
• Rebuilding ELT as a Resilient Profession (2023). Useful when you want to move from thinking of resilience as something individual teachers have, to something teachers build together.

3. Language, power and justice

• An introduction to critical linguistics (2023). Useful when you want to see why neither prescriptive nor descriptive linguistics is socially neutral, and what a critical alternative might look like. The story of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay’s dictionary runs through the post.
• Towards Critical ELF pedagogy (2026). Useful when you are asking what kind of English, and what kind of agency, your teaching gives learners. The post reads Henry Widdowson’s distinction between World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca alongside the work of Ruqaiya Hasan and Norman Fairclough.
• Liberating Language Education (2022). Useful when you are deciding whether to read the edited volume by Lytra, Ros i Solé, Anderson and Macleroy, and want a chapter-by-chapter summary and a reviewer’s verdict first.

For posts on how ideology shapes textbooks, curricula and classrooms, see Tracing ideology in language education.

Challenging Boundaries in Language Education is an edited volume that I put together, which was published by Springer in 2019. It brings together 15 chapters by 22 scholars who work in applied linguistics, teacher education and related fields, and it asks how the boundaries of language teaching and learning have been drawn, and how they might be crossed.

Several of the ideas on this page took shape in the book. Its opening chapters map out language education theory, and question the way applied linguistics came to dominate language teacher education. My own concluding chapter argues that language education draws on applied linguistics, the psychology of language learning and education theory, without being reducible to any one of them. The book also describes what I call a ‘post-certainty condition’ in language education, in which many of the assumptions that once held the profession together are being questioned.

4. Topics within applied linguistics

Applied linguistics covers far more ground than a single page can map. The posts below are a few starting points on topics that come up often in language teacher education.

Learners and languages

• Is there a talent for language learning? (2015). Useful when you want to know what language learning aptitude is, and whether some people really do have a ‘talent’ for languages.
• What Russian Speakers Find Hard About Greek (According to Their Teachers) (2026). Useful when you want an example of research that starts from what experienced teachers know about their learners’ difficulties.

English in the world

• English as a Lingua Franca: Three questions, few answers (2014). Useful when you want to work through some of the claims made about ELF, and what they mean for language educators.
• “Is English a foreign language” in Greece? (2013). Useful when you want to question whether the line between foreign and second language teaching still holds where English is part of everyday life.

Multilingual education

• CLIL and Immersion: Some differences (2018). Useful when you need to tell Content and Language Integrated Learning apart from bilingual immersion programmes.
• Raising children to speak many languages (2020). Useful when you want to read about a study of how parents in mixed-language families discuss raising their children with more than one language.

Theory

• The Intentional Dynamics of TESOL (2021). Useful when you want a short introduction to the monograph that Juup Stelma and I co-authored. For more on complexity and intentionality, see Resources for Complexity in Language Education.