For the past 35 years, the ROC-TEFL conference has been well-known for bringing together the best TEFL scholars and practitioners from all over the world. Yet, although the field of TEFL is a part of the larger field of Applied Linguistics, the word “Applied Linguistics” has not appeared as a conference theme for almost a decade.

We believe that since Applied Linguistics is an interdisciplinary field that deals with practical problems in language and communication, TEFL scholars and all applied linguists share many similar interests for issues in language knowledge and use. Most importantly, we believe that Applied Linguistics research makes many important contributions to language teaching. 

The 2018 ROC-TEFL Conference, therefore, aims to provide a better links between the body of knowledge accumulated in such fields as Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics, Corpus Linguistics, and Second Language Acquisition, among others, and the state of the art in TEFL. We hope that gathering of scholars from different fields in Applied Linguistics at this conference will lead to a vibrant conversation among all TEFL scholars and practitioners in Taiwan and beyond.