In the light of growing awareness of the roles played by language in a wide range of social contexts, Linguistics at Macquarie has a particular concern with the applications of linguistic theory to issues in social life. Linguistics at Macquarie has a strong tradition of work on the use of language in professional and academic settings, language in education, including both Teaching English to Speakers of other Languages (TESOL) and the teaching of Languages other than English (LOTE), and on the linguistics of Australian Sign Language. Research on multilingualism and intercultural communication is also a strength and translation and interpreting is a developing area. Many of our researchers draw on discourse analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics and this is reflected in descriptive work on a variety of language systems.