The field of applied linguistics has seen a great deal of change in the last 40 years. In the 1960s and 1970s the business of classroom language instruction was, by and large, teaching grammar. Even when focused on oral production, the emphasis was on producing complete sentences. And, the sentences that were put together in textbooks to serve as models often didn't make good pragmatic sense. I recall one audiolingual text writer stating that she was asked to write a textbook for a language she could hardly speak, Japanese, and one of the dialogues began with a Japanese person asking a Westerner, 'Do you like meat?' Needless to say, pragmatics was not yet on the radar. For foreign language learners worldwide, pragmatics was what students learned in-country if they were fortunate enough to travel or study abroad, or if they emigrated.

In my early days of teaching Japanese, I worked in a program where we used an old-fashioned audiolingual method textbook. Even at the time, in the late 1980s, the text was out of date. We tried to compensate for the poor textbook by making a lot of handouts, but these also focused on sentence-level concerns and nearly always neglected pragmatics. One of my students visited Japan, and when she returned she said 'Boy, they sure don't talk like we were taught in class'. Reflecting on my own experiences living in Japan, I realized that that was true. At the time, I felt that there was little I could do to change how Japanese was taught, but facing the gap between what I was teaching and what students needed to learn inspired me to do research in interlanguage pragmatics. That gap continues to inspire me today.

Fortunately, times have changed. These days, materials developers and textbook writers are informed by the field of interlanguage pragmatics, a subfield of applied linguistics that emerged from cross-cultural pragmatic studies.