Introduction – Diversity in Applied Linguistics: Opportunities, Challenges and Questions

Abstract

This volume provides wide-ranging insights into the current state of applied linguistics. We focus on the existence of and need for diversity in this growing discipline, celebrating half a century since the first annual meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics in 1967. Chapters are drawn and developed from the 50th anniversary conference held at the University of Leeds in the summer of 2017 and hosted by the Centre for Language Education Research. Included within these pages are the texts from the three plenary lectures ( Widdowson; Woll; Daoud); discussions from the two invited colloquia (Fitzpatrick et al.; Bradley and Harvey); and nine chapters selected through peer review, representing the very best of the 250+ papers presented at the Leeds conference. Together, this work offers a panoramic view of research in – and commentary upon – applied linguistics five decades or more since the field was established.