Preface

Using Italo Calvino’s (1972) metaphor for exploratory voyages of discovery, this preface first recounts the author’s personal engagement with the field of language learning and teaching. It then discusses the past and present efforts of researchers in Applied Linguistics to make named and unnamed languages visible to researchers and practitioners; it traces the invisible discourses that threaten the social lives of language users and their healthy communicative exchanges. Looking into the future it focuses on the major challenge presented to language educators by Generative Artificial Intelligence that prompts researchers and practitioners to question and rethink the very foundations of their field: The nature of human language, the relation of language and thought, language and power, and the purpose of language education itself.