11 Concluding remarks
This project started out with the title:A Sociology of Applied Linguistics. Then
it becameA Social History of Applied Linguistics 1980– 2010 , thenA Recent
History of Applied Linguistics,andfinally it ended up asA History of Applied Lin-
guistics: From 1980 to the present. Having come to the end of the thinking and
writing process, I realize that maybe this book is not even that. It is not a history
in which the development over time of ideas is followed or in which the main
controversies are put in their historic context. Nor is it a description of how the
mainfigures in thefield formed and changed their views and how that relates
to changes in the larger societal context. Nor is it an analysis of how leading
research groups or institutions and the people associated with it developed
with details on the internal politics, who worked with whom, who hated who
and why. It is none of that. What remains is essentially the state of play of a
field; a screenshot of what may or may not be a community or a discipline.
I have come to this view based on the responses tofive questions that I
asked to discover how a selected group of applied linguists defined thefield
and its developments. Thefirst question was how thefield is defined. It
turns out that there are three perspectives: one that sees AL as a discipline
aiming at solving real world problems with linguistic means and tools, the
second that equates AL with SLD, and a third that sees AL as including
everything about language, apart from formal linguistic description. My
informants were spread over these groups, but there seemed to be a majority
that favored the pragmatic, open definition of the third group.
The second question was who are the leaders in AL. The rankings show
that there is consensus on who are the top leaders. These leaders have aca-
demic weight, are active in thefield and support the development of young
talent. In a sense, they define thefield by their work and presence. They act as
role models for younger researchers. There seems to be some convergence in
the names mentioned, though a significant portion of the informants do not
see AL as a coherent and uniformfield but rather as a set of subfields that
each have their own leaders.
Who are the prototypical applied linguists? It could be argued that our
top ten leaders qualify. What they have in common is that they publish in
the same journals, write books for the same publishers, and present at the