7.4 Conclusion
This chapter presented psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and educational
trends as mentioned by the informants. They have been organized along the
lines of psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and educational. It is difficult to
draw conclusions on such a wide range of topics. Some of the topics are
interrelated, others stand alone. The tendency seems to be to compartmen-
talize and further specialize, with less content left in the center. On the edu-
cational side there is communicative language learning and task-based
teaching, both receiving lukewarm reactions from the informants. CLIL is
seen as an important development, at least in the European context.
In the decades covered in this study, the link between psycholinguistics
and sociolinguistics has been weak, with each focusing on its own issues.
The link between educational aspects and psycholinguistics was virtually
non-existent, despite the often obligatory references to improvement of lan-
guage teaching in psycholinguistic studies. There are many sociolinguistic
studies on language classrooms and other educational settings, but even
there the relevance of thefindings for practitioners is often limited.
Note
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