BAAL is also officially represented on the advisory board of the journal Applied Linguistics (Oxford University Press).
The current SIGs are: BAAL was founded in the 1960s, as interest increased in the science of linguistics and its practical applications - for example, in language teaching and learning.
BAAL's creation was the result of a proposal by Peter Strevens, recently appointed to a new chair in Applied Linguistics at the University of Essex.
At a preliminary meeting of interested parties at Birkbeck College in July 1965, a narrower remit was discussed than the wider set of issues that the Association would ultimately concern itself with.
Initially, it was suggested that it might focus on language teaching and machine translation, but the first full meeting in 1967 at the University of Reading agreed to broaden the scope.