Language Education and Beyond: A Concise History of Transdisciplinarity in Applied Linguistics

Trans- has become both a core concept and a buzzword in Applied Linguistics. How-ever, unlike recent terms such as translanguaging, transdisciplinarity has a fifty-year tradition. The article outlines the history of this research framework and its intrinsic  relation to our field. In doing so, it explains the perfect match of transdisciplinary re-search and Applied Linguistics – especially if we understand Applied Linguistics in a broad sense, as “dealing with practical problems of language and communication that can be identified, analysed or solved by applying available theories, methods and re-sults […] or by developing new theoretical and methodological frameworks” (www.aila.info, 2021-01-07).