King's College London

This project, facilitated by the award of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, aims to contribute to the emerging sub-field of applied linguistics that uses historiographical research to problematise contemporary debates and concerns in language education by adopting a historical, and historicising, perspective. Applied linguistic historiography, as defined by Smith (2016), is a methodological and epistemological approach that, while related to linguistic historiography, draws on historical perspectives to illuminate current questions in applied linguistics. Extending Coffey’s previous work, this project, which will result in publication of a monograph with Cambridge University Press, seeks to extend our understanding of the discursive and material structures that organise the way we frame language learning and teaching.

The project situates key concepts such as language, nation, native speaker, and gender within their historical contexts. Drawing on Foucault’s critical sociohistorical approach to discourse analysis, Coffey investigates how discursive formations are constructed, maintained, and challenged, in dynamics of power. This perspective illuminates how individuals position themselves within discourses and pedagogical frameworks that shape their experiences as subjects called learners and teachers.

Focusing on the teaching and learning of French in England, the project provides the first book-length treatment of this topic, offering a longue durée perspective on a language that has occupied a distinctive place in the British Isles for over a millennium. It traces the evolution of French as a socially, culturally, and politically charged language, examining issues of linguistic boundaries, purism, prestige, and constructions of nativeness. The work analyses how French has been alternately valued and contested, both as a symbol of distinction and otherness, and how these perceptions have structured motivations for learning and broader cultural understandings of language, identity, and knowledge. The project also investigates how language teaching scholarship has been historicised within disciplinary traditions and so aims to foster dialogue across the fields of education, history, humanities, intercultural studies, and linguistics.