pastel cashmere sweater on the back of her chair, almost falling into my
lap. Suddenly, I felt like throwing up. I felt that my academic future was
completely locked in this tiny space, the room was too full, the ceiling
too low and I was about to throw up over Jackie Schachter’s beautiful
sweater! I felt physically and intellectually trapped and tried to think of
something new in order to make it to the end of the talk. What did
people in other places and times think about learning languages? Could
we look at SLA in some other time frame? It happened then to me, a
totally different interest. I didn’t know anything about the history of
language teaching, but decided there and then that this was my future.Other people got into thefield on the basis of their personal interest.
Tove Skutnabb-Kangas recalls:
I got involved in bilingualism and bilingual education partly because of
my own bilingualism from birth (two mother tongues, Finnish and
Swedish), something that I always thought of as very positive. My
mother started teaching me Latin when I was four, and the experiences
that it gave me of metalinguistic awareness made me very interested in
languages.2.9 Influenced by...
The item in the questionnaire was:“Who were you influenced by?”Respon-
ses showed considerable overlap with the names mentioned under“leaders”,
to be discussed in Chapter 4. Occasionally informants mentioned people
who were important for them even though on an international scale these
people were not seen as leaders. An example is Terry Quinn from Mel-
bourne, whom Tim McNamara mentioned as having played an important
role to him. Though Quinn is not generally seen as a leader in the
field internationally, he clearly influenced several people in the Australian
context.
The aim of this question was to see whether there are lineages or core
persons who were central in thefield by having influenced a significant
number of informants. Mentors and supervisors are typically mentioned,
but quite often also researchers fromfields outside of AL. The data on
“influenced by”show the degree to which AL is a discipline that borders on
many other disciplines and that is inspired by developments in adjacent
fields. Names like Goffman, Cicourel, Heritage, Bourdieu, Foucault and
Schlegoffare mentioned regularly, while they certainly would not define
themselves as applied linguists or as leading thefield of AL.
Another complicating factor was that some people provided a whole list
of names, and others just a few. Andrew Cohen generously mentioned 15
people, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas some 87, while Paul Nation says:“This is not
The informants 21