Center for Applied Linguistics

Origins

CAL was founded in 1959—initially through a grant from the Ford Foundation to the Modern Language Association—to meet the need for a national center that could serve as a clearinghouse for research and practice related to languages and language education. Charles Ferguson, a specialist in the fields of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, was the founding director. With the advent of the cold war and the launch of the artificial satellite Sputnik by the Soviet Union, there were strong concerns that the United States was not keeping pace with other countries in language capacity (how well the nation uses and understands other languages and cultures to serve security, diplomacy, commerce, and humanitarian purposes). There was also a growing realization of the emergence of English as a global language. Addressing these language issues formed the initial agenda for CAL, which has evolved over time to meet the needs of a changing world. CAL became an independent, unaffiliated organization in 1964 and celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2009.

An Expanding Mission

Over its history, CAL's activities have extended its original mission through research, policy analysis, technical assistance, information collection and dissemination, assessment and materials development, professional development, and other services. Its role as the source of information about news, events, and research related to applied linguistics was served, among other ways, through the Linguistic Reporter newsletter, published from 1959 to 1982. More recently, information and resources have been widely disseminated through the organization's comprehensive website. At all times, CAL's agenda has remained sensitive to prominent current social issues, and questions of linguistic and cultural diversity in education have been a focal area.

During the civil rights movement of the late 1960s, CAL became a leader in research on African American (vernacular) English (AAE) and other vernacular varieties and undertook serious investigation of the significance of dialect differences in education. Although not widely acknowledged at the time, language differences, reflective of racial and social variation, can be the basis for social (and educational) discrimination, even though different varieties actually represent systematic and linguistically acceptable forms of a language, and all languages include multiple dialects. CAL conducted research that described the systematic patterns of pronunciation and grammar that characterize AAE and other varieties and published influential books in the Urban Language series by respected scholars including Ralph Fasold, William Labov, Roger Shuy, and Walt Wolfram. In addition to AAE, CAL investigated Puerto Rican English in New York City, Appalachian English, Ozark English, American Indian (Pueblo) English, and Vietnamese English and applied information from these studies to education, workforce development, and assessment.

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