Research on the Trends and Hot Topics of American Applied Linguistics: Analysis of the Changes of Strands and High-Frequency Words in AAAL Annual Conferences from 1999 to 2019

Bei Jin 金蓓,Liulin Zhang 张榴琳

doi:10.5209/clac.76716

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the trends and hot topics of American applied linguistics by the content analysis of AAAL annual conferences’ handbooks. Making a diachronic research on topical strands of AAAL Conference from 1999 to 2019, the paper studies the dynamics and the trends of American applied linguistics by analyzing the changes of the strands in the conferences under study in 20 years. Based on self-built corpora of titles and abstracts of the presented papers in 2019 AAAL Annual Conference, high-frequency vocabulary and their collocations are detected by TagCrowd and AntConc in order to find the current hot topics of applied linguistics research. The conclusion is that the development of applied linguistics has speeded up in the past four years. Educational linguistics, corpus linguistics, research methodology, teacher education, lexical research, phonetics/phonology and oral communication are the new trends in this field. The hot words of applied linguistics in 2019 include academic writing, teacher education, Chinese and translanguaging. Finally, the study found that retrospective review study of international conferences could be a new research method in the field of review study, providing scholars with a comprehensive understanding of the discipline dynamics over a period of time

Highlights

IntroductionThe Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Annual Conference is known worldwide as one of the most comprehensive and professional linguistic conferences, the hot topics at each conference often become the focuses of international linguists’ interest, leading the trend of applied linguistic research in the few years
Observing the Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference papers, we find that the topics of educational linguistics involve many aspects such as second and foreign language acquisition, language teaching, sociolinguistics, language and culture, teacher education and beliefs, etc., because it is influenced by many superordinate disciplines such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, political science, and ethnology, and has transdisciplinary characteristics
The topics of JALT, TESOL and IATEFL are mainly focused on language teaching, and more related to applied linguistics in a narrow sense

Summary

Introduction

The AAAL Annual Conference is known worldwide as one of the most comprehensive and professional linguistic conferences, the hot topics at each conference often become the focuses of international linguists’ interest, leading the trend of applied linguistic research in the few years. This paper will study AAAL annual conferences diachronically and synchronically from the two major aspects: the strands in the past 20 years and the high-frequency words of the 2019 conference. Such meta-analysis about conferences is one kind of review studies that investigate existing bodies of research, looking for patterns and trends beyond a limited specific situation (Torraco, 2005). It is hoped that such a systematic review study of a typical applied linguistic conference can expand the research scope of “review study” that is usually confined to journal articles, book chapters and doctoral theses, shed light on the “trend study” from a new perspective – conference analysis, and deepen and broaden the understanding of applied linguistics

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