The Department of Applied Linguistics at Penn State’s University Park campus is part of the College of the Liberal Arts. In teaching, research, and service, our mission is to advance understandings of language use and language learning from a range of anthropological, sociological, and psychological perspectives.

Our outstanding faculty are committed to teaching and mentoring students. They are recognized world wide for their topically and geographically diverse research involving a broad spectrum of languages and settings. Areas of specialization include classroom discourse and learning – corpus linguistics – (critical) discourse analysis – language and cognition – language, health, and aging – language, gender, and sexuality – linguistic/semiotic landscape – second and foreign language and literacy teaching and learning – sociocultural theory – technology and language learning – teacher education and world Englishes.