Now, having come to the end of a journey, what has changed? As I men-
tioned before, for a long time I considered myself as core AL. Now, I realize
that my view was myopic and narrow and that I have missed, or at any rate
not seen, important developments. Maybe that is not something to worry
about. Trying to keep up with all developments in AL and connected areas
is basically impossible, and having a broad knowledge of thefield requires
both time to read and a good memory, both of which were and will be
lacking. But having the overview of thefield that this study provided will
certainly help me to stay open-minded and sensitive to new developments,
both within and outside thefield.
In a recent e-mail exchange, William Grabe said the following:
The process of having everyone consider key resources that shape each
person’s thinking is still with me. I exchanged lists with Jan Hulstijn and
it’s interesting how different they were between his and mine. That is
because he truly is an SLA person with reading and vocabulary, and
now assessment, as the outlets for his organizing idea of“what is L2
proficiency?”My organizing idea is“what is L2 reading ability?”, which
led me much more outside of SLA. That was clearly reflected in our two
lists. It helps me understand better why I am an outlier to some extent.My reaction was:“My conclusion of the whole process is that we are
basically all outsiders, we have a part that overlaps with others, but probably
the larger part is different even from people we think are doing the same
things as we do.”
Afinal question remains. To what extent does AL exist as a scientific
discipline? We have seen that the answer may depend on the definition used.
As a research area that looks at various aspects of the learning and teaching
of languages, it certainly exists and this connection will be seen by most
applied linguists as the most important one. Things are less clear for the
psycholinguistic part of SLA. This seems to be running out of steam within
the AL community, while more socially oriented approaches to language
learning, based on identity, multilingualism and ecological considerations,
are likely to grow. As a discipline that seeks to deal with real world prob-
lems, AL will continue to look eagerly for individuals and groups suffering
from some language or communication related ailment waiting to be asked
to provide an answer. As for the infrastructure, AL as a discipline is clearly
doing well, despite local struggles with formal linguists. There are numerous
MA and PhD programs in various parts of the world, and enrollments are
good. There are at least two overarching organizations, AAAL and AILA,
which give structure to thefield globally. There are a number of AL journals
that are doing well. AL has clearly overcome the inferiority syndrome it was
suffering from in the past, though taking on the role of a serious re-
search oriented movement will go at the expense of dealing with real world
problems.
138 Concluding remarks