Of these, age and motivation are mentioned most often, and there seems
to be hardly any interest in aptitude and personality traits. There is clearly
more interest in individual differences, which has had an impact on research
methodology: there is more interest in differences between learners and devia-
tions from the mean are seen as relevant rather than noise. As Fred Genesee
says:“There is a move from difference as deficit to difference as difference.”
This trend toward more individual pathways in learning has also led to a
(renewed) interest in longitudinal studies. Maybe it is not really a trend, since
longitudinal studies have been carried out regularly: from Merrill Swain’sPhD
study with the wonderful title‘Bilingualism as afirst language’in 1972, to Can-
cinoet al.(1978) to Spoelman and Verspoor (2010). The growing interest in
complexity/dynamic systems theory has stimulated the use of dense data col-
lection designs that allow for analysis at different timescales including the se-
conds and milliseconds that are analyzed in Conversational Analysis (CA). John
Schumann has a bold proposal:“Maybe we should use the tools from CA
for the analysis of dense longitudinal data without the philosophy of CA.”
The age factor is certainly one of the topics that received extensive atten-
tion in the last decades. Though the idea that post-puberty learners can
never reach a native level of proficiency is much older, the debate on what
has become known as“the age factor”has been lively, to put it mildly.
David Singleton observes:“People bow to the data. Hyltenstam no longer
believes in the strong version of the critical period hypothesis and even
Michael Long for a moment said‘I may be wrong’when confronted with
data from Sonja van Boxtel’s project.”^1 The discussion seems to have shifted
from some absolutist choice for or against the existence of a critical period
for language learning, to whether an early start with learning foreign languages
in primary education is beneficial and effective or not.
The interest in the role of motivation for language learning continued to
be substantial, starting with the early work by Gardner, to Krashen’saffec-
tivefilter and to models of motivation in educational settings. Recently it has
seen the most significant growth, mainly through the stimulating role of
Zoltán Dörnyei. Dörnyei has recently connected his work on motivation to
ideas from DST, changing motivation from a stable independent variable
into a dynamic variable that interacts with other variables over time. Con-
nected to this is a growing interest in the role of emotions or affect as a factor
in language development and use.
Research on language aptitude has been less prevalent after the heyday
when the Carroll and Sapon modern language aptitude test battery was
popular. More recently, Paul Meara and his group developed a new aptitude
test (LAT03) that has a solid theoretical basis and overlaps partly with the
Pimsleur/Carroll/Sapon tests. The test is also available for young children.
The debate about the role of intelligence separate from or as a component of
other aptitude components continues. However, the interest in aptitude-
treatment-interaction that was popular in the mid 1970s seems to have faded,
though Robert DeKeyser mentions that he continues to work on this.
76 Trends II