A Review of the Influence of the Linguistic Turn on Modern Educational Research and Practice

This paper reviews the history of the linguistic turn and explores the implications of this philosophical event for modern educational research and practice.Given the significance of signs and symbols in human communication, this paper first turns to Saussure to establish the background of semiotics, setting up a later understanding of the language.As leading figures of the linguistic turn, Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein are introduced to chart the broad lines of enquiry and the shift of the philosophical concern.The Ordinary Language Philosophy and J.L. Austin's Speech Act Theory are critical branches in the late stage of the linguistic turn, which can be combined with modern technologies and applied to new forms of educational research and practice, such as online classes and virtual embodied learning.In this trend, corpora are also emerging as a popular solution for related data-driven linguistic research.