Since the beginning of 2024, foreign language education has been officially established as a new discipline in China. Still at its infant stage, this new discipline needs to learn from relevant mature disciplines to consolidate its foundation. Educational linguistics, focusing on the interaction between language and education, is one of the mature disciplines that can provide useful insights and inspirations for the development of foreign language education. From the perspective of educational linguistics, foreign language education can be interpreted as a discipline focusing on the interaction between foreign language and education. It has two main tasks: the study on the role of foreign language in education (and in society) and the study on the education of and through foreign language. The role of foreign language in educational and other social activities in China is the start point, which determines the objective and scope of the theory of the discipline, and also conditions the principle and methodology of its practice. In summary, foreign language education should integrate the education of language skills, language knowledge and disciplinary knowledge, so as to simultaneously fulfil its instrumental and humanistic functions, bring foreign language into full use in educational and social activities, and thus ultimately enable the harmonious development of individual learners, social communities and the country as a whole.