We are at an interesting and promising crossroads in regards to what language teaching/learning is and will become. In the not-too-distant past, students of a foreign or second language were subjected to a curriculum that viewed language teaching/learning from a structural perspective. The present tense needed to be taught before the past tense, nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions, and the syntactic order of each needed to be understood in sequence and practiced. Although a knowledge of grammatical forms and grammar is of course critical to understanding how a language functions as a linguistic system, particularly in relation to advanced instruction, this approach does not suffice in-and-of itself, methodologically, as a means of promoting second language development.

To rectify the decontextualization of structural approaches and those that followed, which emphasized ‘brain-based learning’ through providing linguistic ‘input’ (listening and reading), and eventually taking into account ‘output’ (speaking and writing), came recognition that classroom language teaching/learning involves more than the sum of the linguistic parts of a language and the attendant cognitive processes, leading, after a number of years of confusion, to a pedagogical focus on language for communication. To implement this approach, communicative and task-based syllabi emphasized student-to-student interaction. However, as we all know, human interaction is in fact multidimensional, infused with any number of semiotic elements, and as such, not simply the passing back and forth of information, an underlying assumption of such methods. A more comprehensive, ‘integrationist’ perspective of language as situated within communication ensued in the study of applied linguistics, but at this point in time most second and foreign language classrooms have yet to take into consideration the pedagogical implications of adopting this point of view.

In addition to expanding the study of what communication entails, there is growing influence in applied linguistics for those perspectives that focus on the social and cultural forces that have shaped and continue to shape the particulars of the ‘who, what, where, when and why’ of language use.