But around that time several other handbooks of applied linguistics were
published (Davies and Elder 2004; Knappet al. 2007 – 16). All in all, the
temporal demarcation will be not too strict.
The third issue concerns the definition of thefield I focus on. Van Els
et al.(1977, 1984) discuss the history of the term and point out that it
probably emerged in the 1940s. Davies (2007) and Kaplan (2010) provide
extensive overviews of the development of AL in different English-speaking
countries and point out that, over the years, the scope of the term seems to
have become wider, though learning and teaching foreign languages has
continued to be a core topic. It is not my intention to solve the sometimes
hotly debated issue of what constitutes AL as discussed in Chapter 3, and I
don’t want to exclude relevant subtopics, but at the same time it is impossible
to track the development of all of these subtopics. My working definition of
AL for the present book is:
The development and use of multiple languages.“Development” encompasses acquisition and attrition, instructed and
non-instructed learning, and“use”includes storage and processing, but also
the societal role of multiple languages.“Multiple”refers to everything more
than pure monolingualism, if that even exists, so second language, third,
fourth and so on.“Languages”refers to formally distinguished languages
like German and Tagalog, but also dialects, styles and registers. Since many
informants commented on what AL is for them, Chapter 3 will present some
of these views in more detail.
There are various ways to describe the history of an academic discipline.
One can take the time line as the guiding principle, or main lines of devel-
opment, or track the leadingfigures. This is not what I chose to do. I wanted
to get the views of a large group of applied linguists who have been influential
during this period. It could be argued that this is maybe more a“state of the
art”than a history in the narrow sense. Nonetheless, in the chapters on
trends a range of issues will be discussed that in the view of my informants
changed over time.
For this project I have opted for a theme-based approach rather than a
description of the development of AL over time. A time line based approach
would have to describe the development of different aspects of AL research
and it would easily drown in detail. Here, the state of affairs is painted in
broad brushstrokes around a number of topics. The structure of this book
is largely defined by the topics in the questionnaire that I used for the
interviews and for the survey (see Appendix 1). In Chapter 2, I will present
information about the informants for my study. Since this book is mainly
built on interview data, information on how the informants were selected
and contacted is crucial. Chapter 3 is about defining AL. There is a sub-
stantial body of publications on this and though these will be touched upon,
the views of the interviewees and reactions to the questionnaire will be the
4 Introduction