A History of Applied Linguistics - From 1980 to the present

exist, both in how linguistically diverse children at preschool are

approached and in teacher attitudes towards language models.

Also referring to the situation in Europe, Karlfried Knapp says:

I can only speak for the situation in Germany here, which is deplorable.

Apart from adopting more communicative approaches to teaching (as a

consequence of the pragmatic turn in the 1970s), a greater tolerance for

errors (as a consequence of early sequence-oriented SLA research in the

1980s) and a more recent acknowledgement of linguistic diversity in the

foreign language classroom (with little practical consequences), recent

developments in AL so far have had an impact on language education in

Germany only here and there. One main reason for this is the fact that

language teachers in Germany are educated as philologists in thefirst

place, with a strong emphasis on literature in their courses of study, and

that acquiring background knowledge relevant for the practical task of

teaching languages, such as knowledge from AL, occupies only a rather

small part of their training.

This supports Johannes Wagner’s point mentioned above.

10.5 Some impact

AL research has done better in some contexts (subdomains of AL and geo-
graphical domains) than others, according to Patricia Duff:

Educational practice is influenced by much more than theory and

research, e.g. by parental or participant demand, by language education

policies, institutional constraints, etc. I think there are more options

now for learning and for accessing different tools independently, e.g., via

the internet, distance learning, etc., than ever before. Immersion (one

way and two-way), CLIL, corpus-based/data-driven, usage-based and

multimodal approaches have definitely improved because of AL research.

Nina Spada concludes that:

AL has had an influence/impact on some aspects of language education

but it is difficult to measure the extent to which it has had any direct

improvements on language education, particularly when“improvement”

is measured in terms of language outcomes in relation to amount of

classroom instruction. In my opinion, a number of areas within AL have

impacted on language education, and this is mainly due to the fact that

applied linguists do often adopt an interdisciplinary approach. Learning

theory and cognitivism have informed and guided teaching and classroom

practice towards more process orientation and learner-centeredness, or

The impact of AL research 125