Dick Schmidt noticed:“Loss of focus and compartmentalization into sub-
disciplines (small communities) with little communication among them, e.g.,
the generativists, the conversation analysts, etc.”Alastair Pennycook sees“the
rise of SLA theory and its subsequent separation into an almost separate area
of work”. As mentioned earlier, for some informants (Henry Widdowson,
Barbara Seidlhofer, Michael Sharwood Smith) SLA is not even part of AL.
With respect to the interaction with other disciplines, Gabriele Kasper
contends:
We don’t only take, we also give, though the uptake is not great. Raising
the awareness of the impact of multilingualism is input for otherfields,
such as sociology, psychology and education in which a monolingual
attitude is still the norm.3.4 AL and TESOL
The relationship between AL and TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers
of Other Languages) is in fact the relationship between AAAL and TESOL.
After splitting off from the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), AAAL
teamed up for a couple of years with TESOL by having their conferences
next to each other in the same city, allowing participants to take part in both
conferences. This was the case from 1991 until 2003 and in 2011 until 2014.
There are no hard data on participation that would support the idea that
many people would attend both conferences. There is a fairly clear division
of labor between the two organizations: TESOL is primarily aimed at
the teaching of English as a second or foreign language and research is not the
focus, while AAAL aims at both English and other languages and is more
research oriented. Over the years, attempts to increase the number of
research papers at TESOL conferences have largely failed and informal esti-
mates on the basis of the programs of both conferences suggest that the
group of academics partaking in both is fairly small. However, AAAL is still
predominantly about English: based on the information in the abstracts, a
count of the paper presentations at AAAL 2014 in Portland showed that out
of a total of 844 papers, 387 (46 percent) were on the learning, teaching or
use of English, 163 (19 percent) were on other languages than English, while
294 (35 percent) were not aimed at a specific language. It seems that foreign
language activity is still more the domain of the American Council on the
Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).
3.5 AL and AILA
AILA is basically an association of national associations, and has no indi-
vidual membership. The AILA congress takes place every three years and the
aim is to organize the congress in different parts of the world. Organizers pay
32 Defining AL