4 The leaders
The item in the questionnaire on leaders was:“Who are the most important/
influential leaders in thefield? Why are they important?”Though the question
was formulated in the present tense, many informants referred to academics
long retired or dead. No specificdefinition of what constitutes a leader was
given, and as the responses show, there was a variety of definitions.
4.1 Criteria for leaders
As Howard Nicholas correctly observes, the assumption behind this question
is that there is“a clear sense of a singlefield”that has leaders. As we have
seen in Chapter 2, this is not the perception of all informants. So, like Susan
Gass, Paul Nation, William Grabe, Rod Ellis and Gabriele Kasper, he sees
no leaders for the wholefield, but rather for the different compartments,
which are not clearly defined themselves. Both William Grabe and Susan
Gass said:“There is no Chomsky in AL.”
In a way Patricia Duffagrees when she says:
Currently there are many (100+) leaders in thefield since it has expan-
ded in so many areas and deepened over the years. There are important
thinkers, dynamic high-visibility speakers, prolific scholars, and devoted
leaders (not all of them can do all of these things equally well, or should)
who have slogged away as journal editors and association presidents etc.,
for many years.This view is also expressed by Martin Bygate who sees this as a fairly
recent development:
Up until the second half of the 1990s, although there were distinct
strands, this [listing leaders] was relatively easy to say, though direction
and influences changed every seven years or so. Since then, thefield has
fragmented significantly, and it has become harder (for me at least) to
identify clear influential leaders. So instead the question perhaps becomes