A confluence of interests

The origins of the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia

Bibliographic Data

ID21458331
AuthorsJohn West-Sooby (Adelaide University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Publication date2025-09-30
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAustralian Review of Applied Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0155-0640 • E-ISSN: 1833-7139
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/aral.25025.wes
OpenAlexW4414652031
LanguageEN
References cited15

Building on the work of McNamara and Lo Bianco ( McNamara, 2001 ; McNamara & Lo Bianco, 2001 ), this article interrogates further the institutional and intellectual factors that led to the establishment of the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA), which was officially constituted in 1976 at a conference organized at the University of Newcastle. It aims to show that, while both ALAA and the tradition of applied linguistics it fostered in Australia had certain distinctive features, the creation of the association was also reflective of a wider set of circumstances and imperatives. In order to illustrate this, the discussion looks firstly at the broader international context before considering the factors that contributed at the more local level to the formation of ALAA. In so doing, it seeks to provide an enhanced appreciation of the generic and specific influences at play in ALAA’s origin story, and of their relative importance. More generally, the study presented here contributes to the growing body of work in “Applied Linguistic Historiography,” the importance of which was advocated by Richard Smith (2016)

Applied linguistics · Confluence · Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies

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