ideologies that justified my Head of centre’s strategy, and so I did an
MA to try andfigure out more clearly what the problems were, and how
the ideologies could be changed.Since there were few programs specifically on AL, many of my informants
came to AL via teaching English as a foreign language, often without any
qualification other than being a native speaker. For instance Richard Young:
After I came down from Oxford with a degree in Philosophy, Politics
and Economics, thefirst job I found was as a teacher of EFL in Italy,
where I taught in private language schools and at the University of
Torino. Toward the end of my stay in Italy, I became curious about
the social dynamics driving language teaching, learning, and applied
linguistics.His case is typical for how many people found out about AL,first a
teaching experience abroad and an ensuing interest in theoretical aspects of
language learning and teaching.
Not all informants started out teaching English. Donald Freeman taught
French in secondary education, and“I found the work fascinating, and by
the end of that year I’d decided I wanted to learn more about language
teaching, which led me to the School for International Training, where I did
my MA”. Jim Lantolf taught Spanish in secondary schools and found it
frustrating and not very rewarding. Alan Juffs taught English in secondary
education, and liked it. Johannes Wagner taught German as a foreign lan-
guage to Japanese students, and I myself taught Dutch to Turkish immi-
grants. Some informants got interested in language teaching at an early age:
Annick De Houwer:“I started out as a language teacher (teaching English
and Dutch)–private, paid lessons–to peers and a six to nine-year-old
neighbor boy when I was a teenager.”
Many applied linguists entered thefield through teaching a foreign lan-
guage and realizing that they missed the theories behind it and that they
would be better teachers if they could gain a better understanding of what
learning another language entails. Thomas Ricento’s story is typical:
I was an ESL instructor, then director of a program that taught ESL to
mostly welfare recipients in Boston in the early 1970s. Later, when I was
teaching ESL in Southern California, I decided to enroll at USC to get a
better grounding in teaching. I studied mostly theoretical linguistics at
USC and found that I was more interested in studying real language in
real use, and especially the social and political aspects.Other people, like David Singleton, wanted to do something useful:“I
thought doing linguistics might be useful, which, it turned out, wasn’t the
case in Cambridge in the 1970s.”
18 The informants