Abstract：Abstract: Educational linguistics is a new discipline which concerns itself with the study of the interaction between language and education. While this discipline was only in its embryonic stage in the 1960s and made its official debut in the 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed its sturdy growth. This discipline owes its emergence to the following motivating factors: 1) Dell Hymes’ proposal of communicative competence in response to Chomsky’s theoretic construct of linguistic competence; 2) Halliday’s conceptualization of educational linguistics based on systemic functional linguistics; 3) The dissatisfaction of the status quo of applied linguistics on the part of scholars such as Spolsky in the field of language in education; 4) The linguistic turn in the field of educational studies that emerged towards the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. Key words: educational linguistics; language in education；discipline
