On the one hand, it is irksome to find old ideas appearing in new
packaging without knowledge, or acknowledgement, of their origins, and
the discussion of issues in ignorance or disregard of how they have been
dealt with in the past. But on reflection, this process of rediscovery seems
entirely natural and desirable...The very fact that ideas and issues, no
matter how old their provenance, are taken up again makes them new,
gives them a recharged vitality; and every new generation needs to think
afresh for itself, appropriate the past and make it demonstrably their own.
(xi)He concludes by citing L.P. Hartley:“The past is another country; they do
things differently there.”
A similar worry is expressed by Annick De Houwer:“Unfortunately, one
trend has also been the forgetting or ignoring what has already been studied!
So a lot of re-inventing the wheel and a basic lack of historical perspective.”
6.1.6 Definition of concepts
Both Martin Bygate and Rod Ellis comment on the lack of clarity in defining
concepts. Martin Bygate:
It is quite common for concepts to be poorly defined. The cognition
hypothesis has invoked the“here & now/there & then”distinction, the
former (“here and now”) supposedly easier in tasks than the latter...Yet
even where both interlocutors can see the same data, it cannot be assumed
that the mapping of language to referent is unproblematic. Yet in spite of
this, dozens of papers continue to appear using this construct, none of them
as far as I can see concerned with questioning the tools that they are using.Rod Ellis sees as a major trend the exponential growth of labels to define
key concepts in new theories:
We are constantly introducing new terms to label concepts that may or
may not be new, but don’t spend enough time carefully defining our
constructs. There are too many vaguely defined concepts. If we want to
communicate with each other, we need carefully defined concepts.One of the examples that he mentions is the label“languaging”.6.2 Research methodology
6.2.1 Research methods
The range of research methods that is used in different types of AL research
has grown considerably in the last decades. Most of these methods were
64 Main trends I