John Norris and Lourdes Ortega’s study, which was published inLanguage
Learningin 2000. This study is seen as one of the most important articles in
ourfield in the last decades and several informants call for more such studies,
but as Lourdes Ortega mentions, for many topics there are simply not
enough good quality studies available. In fact, the criteria for inclusion in
such meta-analyses may be guidelines for good research in AL. Rod Ellis
sees a number of problems with meta-analysis. His main problem is the
“apples and pears”problem: what exactly do you compare? Another problem
is that“most meta-analyses are not based on articles that make a direct
comparison of the contrasted approaches, but look at articles that do one or
the other without a direct comparison”. He also worries that people will only
look at effect sizes without a proper analysis of how the study was done.
A related trend that we have seen is the large number of encyclopedias
and handbooks that have come out. There areHandbooks of Applied Lin-
guistics(Davies and Elder 2004; Kaplan 2010),Second Language Acquisition
(Doughty and Long 2003),Language Teaching(Johnson and Johnson 1998)
andBilingualism and Multilingualism(Bhatia and Ritchie 2006). Though tech-
nically not meta-analyses, many of the articles in such handbooks present
overviews of studies on certain topics and in that way shape AL. The
downside is, as Alan Juffs noticed, that students, but also established
researchers, will stick with such overviews and stop reading the older, but
often more fundamental, studies in sufficient depth.
The growth of the number of handbooks and the success of theAnnual
Review of Applied Linguisticsas a reference journal reflects the enormous
growth of the number of publications in books and journals. This can also
be seen in the catalogues of the main publishers in thefield, John Benjamins,
Multilingual Matters, Oxford University Press, Pearson and Routledge. John
Benjamins is a good example. Since AILA (Association Internationale de
Linguistique Appliquée) in Sydney in 1987, which marked their entrance in
thefield of AL, their list of books and journals on AL has grown steadily, as
discussed in the previous chapter.
The need for handbooks and encyclopedias is probably a result of the
proliferation of publications in science generally. This, in turn, is the result
of the pressure to publish, which is now as common in thefield of AL as in
most otherfields. AL tends to follow developments in the social sciences
more than traditional humanities, though books still are important next to
high-ranking journals. The handbooks provide overviews of research that
otherwise would be more difficult tofind and process.
6.2.9 Other research populations
New questions have come up through the study of new, or at any rate as yet
unexplored, populations. Many informants point to Elaine Tarone’s recent
work with non-literate language learners as an important development. Some
claim that generalizing over large populations without taking into account
Main trends I 69