About AAAL

Founded in 1977, the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) is a professional organization of scholars who are interested in and actively contribute to the multi-disciplinary field of applied linguistics.

AAAL members promote principled approaches to language-related concerns, including language education, acquisition and loss, bilingualism, discourse analysis, literacy, rhetoric and stylistics, language for special purposes, psycholinguistics, second and foreign language pedagogy, language assessment, and language policy and planning.

Purpose: The goal of the Fund for the Future of Applied Linguistics (FFAL) has been to create an endowment fund to support graduate student travel to attend AAAL annual conferences. In this way, the Applied Linguistics profession offers a unique growth opportunity for outstanding graduate students who will be the future of our profession.

Background: FFAL was established at the Spring 2000 meeting of the AAAL Executive Meeting in Vancouver. The goal was to begin a public fund-raising campaign in Fall 2000 and end the campaign in Spring of 2003 with the goal of raising $100,000 for the endowment fund. The goal was officially met in summer of 2003 and the initial fund-raising campaign was ended. We would like to thanks the more than 150 individual AAAL members and institutional contributors for their support during this campaign.

Successful completion of the FFAL campaign is especially indebted to two major sponsors: Multilingual Matters and Educational Testing Service for contributing major gifts that each funds a graduate student every year. This generosity is recognized by named awards:

• The Multilingual Matters Graduate Student Travel Award
• The Educational Testing Service Graduate Student travel Award

Current Donations: Although the official fund raising campaign has ended, we welcome donations to support the fund, please click here to download a contribution form, or click here to register and make an online contribution.  Membership is not required to donate to FFAL, but you are required to create an online account (name and email are required).