in services in churches in South Alabama, but what does it all mean? As
Barbara Seidlhofer puts it:“Digging deep in corpus data is easy, a BA stu-
dent can do it because corpora are very accessible, but the reflection on
those data is lacking. There needs to be a balance between description and
theorizing.”
For some informants, the main contribution of corpus linguistics is that it
made real language visible and accessible for research. The corpus data are
seen as largely incompatible with assumptions in the GG tradition that are
based on the idealized native speaker. There is now a tendency to develop
corpora for specific groups of language users, such as Grainger’s language
learners’corpora and the Vienna corpus of users of English as a lingua
franca.
6.2.3 Discourse analysis and conversational analysis
The growth of interest in discourse analysis and conversational analysis is
one of the breakthroughs in AL over this period. Mary McGroarty notices:
expanded attention to discourse analysis of all sorts, conducted in many
different contexts; some of this work uses discourse analytic techniques
in the service of analyzing, e.g. legal documents and processes (for
example, Roger Shuy’s work in the US; Diana Eades’in Australia).She interprets the growth of interest in pragmatics as a reaction to the
almost exclusively syntactic/grammatical focus of the 1960s and 1970s. Her
views are shared by Hannele Dufva who notices“a move from a very
narrow, structuralist view of language as a formal system consisting of dif-
ferent levels (syntax to phonology) towards broader views, including prag-
matics, discourse, interaction etc. and quite recently, towards understanding
the essential multimodality of language use”. Johannes Wagner mentions:
“CA for SLA, the sociologically inspired subfield which is quite different
from the research about the interaction hypothesis by Mike Long, Susan
Gass and others.”The methodology of CA is debated extensively. Its prin-
cipled stance to stick with the text and the text only makes thefindings
problematic in many informants’views. Tim McNamara sees what counts as
evidence in studies using CA as the main methodology as the main problem.
6.2.4 Critical approaches
There is a remarkable lack of references to various“critical”approaches,
such as critical discourse analysis, and even critical applied linguistics. Alan
Davies sees a“lengthyflirtation with critical approaches in AL”. Albert
Weideman remarks:“A post-modern analysis without political action is
vacuous.”Robert Phillipson concludes that:“There is a reluctance to be
multi-disciplinary and more critical.”
66 Main trends I