Important Notice About Degree Name Change
Our programs (majors, minors, Master’s) in Applied Language Studies will be formally renamed Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies as of July 1st, 2010. The new name is intended to better reflect our disciplinary connection to three fields of scholarship: Applied Linguistics, Discourse Studies, and Writing Studies, each of which has its own academic programs, journals, and conferences.
- Applied Linguistics emerged as a distinct discipline in the late 1970s with a concern for solving real-world problems related to language learning and teaching, language in education, language policy-making, language testing, language in society, and effective communication in the workplace.
- Discourse Studies, a field focusing on the study of text and talk, has taken much of its orientation from Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics, and has seen recent advances in areas such as multimodal and multimedia discourse analysis.
- Writing Studies, a field to which our School has contributed world-recognized published work, investigates how writing is used, learned, and taught in school and workplace settings, employing a range of research methods including case studies, ethnography, and genre analysis.
Together, our new name Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies reflects the unique combination of expertise that can be found in our School and that is typically scattered across departments of English, linguistics, communication, and education in other universities. Because Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies are both well-known labels, the new program name should also increase the recognition of your degree among employers and graduate schools after you graduate.