So, we have examples to illustrate the point, and experience that acknowledges history.

For me, that puts the seal on the many analyses I have undertaken over the years to show the robustness of a theory I was privileged to encounter more than five decades ago, as a first-year student, in 1967. That was not the end of it: as I point out in the Acknowledgments, I have been similarly privileged by a substantial number of postgraduate students who have taken the emergent theory further, adding to the ‘exemplifications’ in their own right. And that is a process that is still ongoing, undeterred, it seems. I am deeply grateful.

‘Application’ is quite often a design activity

Also needing to be acknowledged was an incident which occurred way back in the mid-1980’s. The late Phil Brouwer pointed out to me that many so-called ‘applications’ are nothing more than technically stamped, design activities. Recently, months before his untimely demise, we joked that we may one day be found to have been horribly wrong on this point. Nonetheless, we have consoled ourselves that being proved wrong is an inevitable part of the scholarly experience. The joke will not be on us!

This is exactly the point of the new book, which I am writing about to you today. Paradigms come and go. What is current today is, theoretically speaking, old hat tomorrow. It’s not that we are wrong, entirely; it’s that we gain in insight by looking at matters from a fresh angle.

A fresh angle: we are doing technical work

The angle from which the current book takes a fresh look at applied linguistics is that it can be viewed as a discipline of design. That is a moment of our experience that can be captured conceptually in the modality we call the ‘technical’. Applied linguistics is too often defined with vague reference to ‘language’. Even more problematically, it is naïvely associated, as its name suggests, with linguistics, as a branch or ‘subset’ of that field. It is demonstrably not. Rather, it is a distinct discipline with its own focus, not on things ‘lingual’, but on things technical, on designing language interventions.

So ‘design’ is its focus, and hence the claim: Applied linguistics is a discipline of design.

The best theory is practical: history meets analysis

Though a theoretical claim, that is a practical starting point.

Where my 2017 book with Springer, Responsible Design in Applied Linguistics …, set out the history of the field, the 2024 one, A Theory of Applied Linguistics … takes that one step further. The earlier (2017) book describes the various phases of applied linguistic work. It investigates its evolution as a multidisciplinary field, taking it once and for all outside the ambit of linguistics, and seeks to understand the various styles of working in the field. The current (2024) book asks how we generate its fundamental concepts and ideas.

These fundamentals or ‘primitives’ of applied linguistics have practical value. We ask, for example, that the designs of language interventions that we conceive of have unity, operate within a certain range and scope, are reliable, possess validity, are differentiated, have intuitive appeal, and are theoretically defensible. And then we measure the quality of the language interventions we design by these yardsticks. We check whether the foundations of our designs are up to standard.

Should we take this further, we employ a second set of criteria that disclose the meaning of our designs, in the sense that they become meaningful, implementable, appropriate and accessible to others. This second set of yardsticks also guides us, this time like lodestars, to imagine useful designs, in harmony with other interventions, which are accountable, show compassion and care, and, eventually, gain in reputation and trustworthiness.

Exemplification evaluates contestation

Of course, all the probing of these basic concepts and ideas is accompanied by a good measure of contestation. Developing a theory of applied linguistics by attending to its fundamentals gives us the opportunity to assess both the strong points of different paradigms, and to evaluate their weaknesses.

Applied linguistics is not a branch of linguistics. But it is a field that responds to human suffering by offering designed solutions to vexing and apparently intractable language problems. In that, it is operating in its own right, in service of others, and responsibly. That, I believe, is incontestable.

I thus humbly offer this new book as a justification for responsibly designing language interventions.