Applied and ‘appliable’ linguistics in Australia

From the mid-1970s in Australia, there was a notable complementarity between the efforts of applied linguists and the theoretical developments emerging from the work of systemic functional linguists. This collaboration was the outcome of sharing an institution — the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA). Conferences addressed the shared, inevitable challenges that teachers of languages faced in all the subdivisions of language pedagogy — for example, ESL; TESOL; Second Language Learning; Speech Disorders; Literacy in specific contexts (from schools to workplace); and child language development (by contrast with the innatist assumptions associated with “Language Acquisition,” which carried the imprimatur of American linguistics after WWII). At well attended meetings, classroom experiences and cultural variations in migrant communities were discussed alongside, and with a mutuality between, those more narrowly focused on the problems of semantics, lexis and grammar, stylistics, and phonetics/phonology. It was a privilege to participate. The ALAA association worked keenly to make its conferences inclusive and its publications cover a broad spectrum of language research topics. Those “at the coalface” of language teaching and social practice brought their experiences to those adding to the sociosemantic foundations of the Systemic Functional model of languages. The arrival of the linguists Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan at Sydney and Macquarie universities (respectively) opened out the ways languages could be appreciated as different means of getting things done in social contexts…of language as a “resource” in lived experience; and therefore, as paradigmatic systems analogous to combinations of ‘choice’.