Every academic discipline must, from time to time, reflect on its origins, its history, and its conflicts in order to understand its identity and its objectives. This book was an attempt to provide such a reflection, though it was by no means the only publication undertaking to record the history and spread of applied linguistics. This synoptic history intends to present a snapshot of the history of applied linguistics as well as of applied linguistics research from a variety of approaches, and, consequently, they celebrate the diversity that is applied linguistics. But, given such diversity, applied linguistics has emerged in different geographic spaces, having evolved through diverse histories. It has been alleged that the term applied linguistics arose, in the 1940s, among a group of English composition teachers who wanted to be identified with scientific linguistic concepts rather than with less precise literary concepts.