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At the close of the 1957 Ann Arbor Conference on Linguistics and the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language, one of the participants is reported to have remarked that the most important thing about the Conference was that it had taken place. Explaining this, Archibald Hill comments: "The specific conclusions and agreements reached at a first meeting of this sort may well be less important than the fact that communication between quite various groups of people concerned with a common problem which is growing steadily more pressing was successfull established." 1 The Ann Arbor Conference, which was held under the auspices of the Linguistic Society of America and the Committee on International Exchange of Persons of the Conference Board of Associated Research Councils, with funds from the Ford Foundation, was not the first conference on the teaching of English as a foreign language which, by that time, was an established field of interest in several American universities and an area of growing involvement and concern to several United States Government agencies and foundations. It was, however, the first serious attempt to give attention to the increasingly important need to establish lines of communication in a field that was growing rapidly then, and was destined to grow at a much greater pace in the next decade. One of the direct results of the Ann Arbor Conference was the establishment of the Center for Applied Linguistics in 1959, through a grant by the Ford Foundation made to the Moder Language Association of America, of which the Center was a part until it became incorporated in 1964. The principal function of the Center was to be that of an informal, internationally oriented clearinghouse and coordinating body in the application of linguistics to practical language problems, with the teaching of English as a foreign or second language as one of its major areas of interest. The task, as the Center saw it, involved not only collecting and disseminating information on as many aspects of the field as possible, and acting as liaison among institutions, individuals, and government agencies, but, going a step further, anticipating new needs and rising demands and trying to mobilize existing resources or helping to create new machinery to meet them. To do this it was sometimes necessary for the Center to take responsibility in the initial stages of a new project or program, as for instance, its role in |
