This publication consists of a collection of 18 papers in English, German, Swedish, and Finnish originally presented at a 1988 symposium of the Finnish Association of Applied Linguistics (AFinLA), which was organized jointly by the University of Vaasa and the Department of Teacher Education at Abo Akademi, Finland. Papers focus on the following topics: Second language learning and instruction; computer assisted translation and language learning; language research; instruction of Swedish as a second language in Sweden; translator training; textlinguistics; semantics; morphology; cross-cultural language styles; and languages for specific purposes in Finnish universities.